Originally Posted by swingaling

Ah, you mean Nur-Sultan. Fun fact: Kazakhstan just renamed their capital city in honor of their first president, a change expected to cost $125M.

Yes, I did consider it, but it would have likely required stops in Almaty regardless. Almaty has far better connectivity within the region, so I would have had to connect there anyway. I could have done a day trip to Astana for my day in Kazakhstan, which would have meant a 6AM or 7AM flight on ALA-TSE, then an afternoon return to ALA followed by a 3-4hr drive to Bishkek. There's no TSE-FRU flight on Tuesdays. Given the amount of extra time I would've had to spend flying/driving, it didn't seem like a worthwhile tradeoff.

I went through dozens of permutations of this itinerary to get a workable schedule with minimal backtracking, which was fairly challenging due to the fact that many of these countries (Turkmen, Tajik and Kyrgyz) have fairly minimal/infrequent air links with one other. Further complicating matters is the fact that I don't have a Russian visa, so I couldn't transit Russia en route to/from Kazakh or Kyrgyz.

I even looked at doing some sectors overland. For instance, flying Bishkek to Osh, then overland to Khujand. Overnight Khujand and onward to Tashkent, skipping Dushanbe altogether. Or Dushanbe to Samarkand overland via Panjakent by 4x4, a potentially risky route during the spring thaw (rockfalls, flooding, washed out roads, etc), though certainly more scenic than flying.