Kazakhstan's Caspian Port — the lunar landscapes of Mangyshlak Peninsula, underground mosques carved from chalk, Soviet-era city blocks on the Caspian Sea, and the gateway to the wildest terrain in Central Asia
Aktau is Kazakhstan's only major port on the Caspian Sea — a Soviet-planned city built from scratch in the 1960s to service the oil and uranium industries of the Mangystau region, with a grid of numbered microrayon (residential blocks) rather than street names. It is the departure point for the Caspian ferry to Baku (Azerbaijan), one of the most adventurous overland travel connections in Central Asia. The surrounding Mangyshlak Peninsula offers some of the most surreal landscapes in the world: the Charyn Canyon's 'Castle of Trolls' (eroded sandstone spires), the underground 14th-century Shakp…
The Mangyshlak Peninsula has been inhabited since the Stone Age — the peninsula's underground mosque complexes (Shakpak-Ata, Shopan-Ata, and several others) date to the 8th–14th centuries CE when this was an important Islamic pilgrimage and caravan route, and the stone necropolises of the Adai tribe scatter across the steppe. The Soviet city of Aktau — originally named Shevchenko after the Ukrainian poet — was founded in 1961 to service the uranium mine at Caspianets and the Mangyshlak oil fields. The city was built on a waterless, treeless limestone plateau: fresh water was produced by a spe…