(Source: http://www.panoramio.com/photo/17322695)

Sibay quarry belongs to private secure facilities, so it is impossible to easily approach it. You need to drive up to the entrance and ask the guards about a place with a better view of the mine - they tell you which bank to climb.

In order to enter the official viewing platform, you will need a special permit. Individual tourists will not be granted it, but you can address the single local travel agency that collaborates with the complex. They will arrange a pass and a conductor.

Contacts: “Buranbai” Travel Agency. Address: 2nd floor, 1 Ostrovskogo Street, Sibai. Tel.: 8 (34775) 3-07-96.

Sibai quarry ranks second in the world by its depth after Chile’s Chuquicamata. Its depth is more than 500 m, its diameter amounts to two kilometers. Six kinds of ores containing 15 components are produced here: gold, silver, copper, iron, sulfur. Severe black and red slopes are surrounded by a road, leading right to the bottom. Earlier Belaz trucks – the quarry’s dump trucks several meters high - permanently shuttled there.  The way took two and a half hours earlier, and the people at the top saw toy cars no bigger than a nail. We say earlier, because now open works in Sibai quarry are suspended. It happened not because there is nothing to produce, but because there is a real danger that the walls would collapse. Now there are only mining works.