For example, near the village of Maykain Bayanaul district, you will see a quarry with beautiful, bright orange sand, a clearing with snow-white quartz and crystal shimmering in the sun, a deposit of sky-blue turquoise. Closer to the city of Ekibastuz there is a cluster of minerals such as berberites, opals and malachites, as well as... a simple ditch with limestone layers in which sea lilies crinoidea, brachiopods, trilobites that grew and lived in the ocean that once covered all these vast spaces.
On the road from Pavlodar to the village of Maykain, right in the middle of the steppe, there is a sand quarry. The sand that is under your feet is amazing in its color and quality. This is an exceptionally bright, beautiful mass, saturated with iron oxides. That is why such sand is very valued in construction.
If you drive even closer to Maikain, then to the right, 500-800 meters from the highway, you will meet glades with crystal-beautiful translucent pencils. This is not crystal tableware, but real domestic crystal. And then there are beautiful white piec es of mineral called quartz.
Turning aside, we find ourselves in the tract of Zhylandy. This is the name of a small mountain and a turquoise deposit located right on its slope. This is a bright blue mineral that is used as an ornamental stone. The field itself, according to experts, has already been developed by almost 70 percent. And yet small crystals of this stone can still be found here, though in clay.
About the his Majesty the city of Ekibastuz. In these places, in the ground, there is a long "thread" of minerals - a deposit that geologists called the Angrensor Nickel-bearing massif. There are rare minerals here, with very interesting names. Listen to this! O-PAL. Ber-be-RIT. Chalcedony!!! Berberit, by the way, brown smooth rock, much easier to find than the other two. But they are all unique in their own way.
Now we are on the edge of the city – on the side, where the railway station is located. Someone here has dug long trenches a meter and a half deep for some purpose: their walls are covered with ancient limestone. Pick up a piece and you will see the imprint of an ancient flower or sea animal shell on it. You can find here a fossilized brachiopod that lived in the ocean, or a trilobite - a daring marine extinct arthropod. All of them lived more than 200 million years ago, when these vast expanses were covered by the Tethys Ocean, which is sometimes called Paratethys.
All these beauties are waiting for their audience, waiting for their tourists. But only for aesthetic pleasure, so that travelers can watch all this. Not for the stealing stones and fossils by visitors. It should not be taken away from here. Let the rare stones to be kind of paintings of museum: we arrived, admired, drank tea from thermos flasks with sandwiches and went home!
Anton Sergeev
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