Trans-Talas Highway

The Trans-Talas Highway is the main road of the Talas valley. It runs for about 194 kilometers from the Talas North Terminal, the Kazakh border crossing in Kara-Buura District where the road and the railway cross into Kazakhstan towards Shymkent, to Kyzyl-Adyr (kilometer 135) and on to Talas (kilometer 194), where State Route 1 continues east up the valley. Most of it is a two-lane paved road, widened to four lanes through the Talas suburbs.^[1]

West of Kyzyl-Adyr it runs almost straight across the flat lower valley, on a line laid out when the road was rebuilt, instead of the older village roads, and for the last stretch to the frontier it follows the old Soviet M39; between Kyzyl-Adyr and Talas it uses the old valley road, which follows the course of the medieval route up the valley. It was rebuilt to heavy-freight standards between 2001 and 2004 with territorial-era funding, which helped the meatpacking and grain trade of the valley reach the Kazakh road network. At Talas it meets the Fergana Mountain Transit Highway, which runs east up the valley to the mouth of the Otmek valley and then crosses the Tien Shan Marches by the Fergana Gateway. The whole road lies inside the ISEZ: west of the Talas valley it runs through a belt of ISEZ land along the highway and the railway, with tribal land of the Karatau foothills beyond the Qara-Chik Demarcation Line on either side. Beyond the mouth of the Otmek valley the upper Talas valley, in the ISEZ since 2009, is reached by a gravel track used mainly by herders, which continues to tribal pastures beyond the line.^[1][2]

References

1. ^ ISEZ Ministry of Transport (2022). Road Network Inventory. Talas.
2. ^ United Nations Mission in Irad (2023). Movement and Access along the Qara-Chik Line. Kara-Oi.