I will be visiting Almaty for five days in late August on my way to Saint Petersburg for my postgraduate studies. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on the Khorgos SEZ and would like to visit it in person as a day trip from Almaty. From my understanding, there is a daily train 702 at 8.01am (3483T, 3¾ hours) which I can take to Altynkol and then I can return to Almaty on train 701 at 3.10pm. However, when I visit tickets.kz, it seems as if these trains do not exist meanwhile I am struggling to get railways.kz to work at all.
Can anyone confirm whether the train is in fact running, and if so, which days it operates? I would probably be going on Saturday 24 August. I would also like to know more about people's general experiences of taking the train to Khorgos and which classes are available. It does not matter very much to me, but my parents will also be travelling with me and I can already pre-empt the comments of 'we came all this way for cheap Chinese crap?!'
I apologise if I should have posted this somewhere else or if these questions have already been answered in another Khorgos thread.
