"I ask all the people visiting us from other regions if they had been to the lakes of Shalkar or Imantau. 90% of them said no. Because there is no advert. We must conduct active work in the internet. The officials must visit them, walk there. If I interrogate the present people here most likely there are some who have never been to our lakes," said Kumar Aksakalov, akim of the North Kazakhstan region.
According to Dauren Zhandarbek, deputy akim of the region, now tourism is developing in fast pace.
"Looking at the statistics, the number of tourists increased by 56% to 63 316 people in the North Kazakhstan region who arrived for tourism in 2017. The majority of tourists came from Russia, Uzbekistan, China, Kyrgyzstan, Turkey, Ukraine and Germany," he said.
The authorities of the North Kazakhstan region plan to increase the tourists' inflow through development of Imantau-Shalkar resort zone in 2018.
Photo source: picture from an open source