From the people who brought you Chernobyl... (Aral Sea)
I flew from Istanbul to Samarkand, whose name is so associated with the Silk Road that I can scarcely believe it’s a real place that exists in the twenty-first century. But the plan wasn’t to linger there. Instead, I wanted to shoot out as far west as I could and then work my way back east toward Samarkand. It seemed more fitting to have it as a culmination of my journey through Silk Road Uzbekistan than as the start. But it also has an airport with direct connections to Istanbul.
On my flight from Istanbul to Samarkand, I was seated next to Murad, who was heading home to Uzbekistan after a year of working in Istanbul. He spoke good Turkish and Russian but no English and the conversation confirmed for me that my Russian, while poor, is still much better than my Turkish. He was interested to learn that I was Canadian and when he asked how a person might get a visa to work in Canada, I noticed a number of heads turn in the rows in front of me. “How do I move to Canada?” is one common theme in conversations I’ve had in my first week in Uzbekistan (answer: I’m not sure but I guess try to find an employer who would invite you out?). Another is how much money I earn. A third is asking whether I have a wife and kids and then asking me why not when I say that I don’t. By Uzbek standards, I’m a great success financially and a great failure familially.
It doesn’t take great financial success to be a millionaire in Uzbekistan, though. One US dollar buys you about 12,500 Uzbek som, so I’ve been regularly withdrawing one million som from cash machines (Uzbekistan is almost entirely a cash economy), which amounts to a little under $100 USD.
A quiet visit to Samarkand
I had some catching up to do with various life things—the last week in Georgia hadn’t left much time for email or other things like that, and I still had to post my last Georgia blog post—so I planned to spend a quiet day and a half in Samarkand before catching a night train out west.
I arrived at my hotel around 9pm where the only person to greet me was a girl of maybe thirteen or fourteen who welcomed me with great courtesy and provided me with tea and snacks. The next morning, I registered my passport with her brother, who was maybe a couple years older. He served me breakfast and, when he thought no one was watching, would practice shadow boxing. I was the only guest in the hotel during my visit and I didn’t spot the owners/parents until the end of my first full day.
I spent some of the morning of my first day going for a long dérive, getting a feel for the layout of the city and what’s where and what it all looks like. Samarkand was hot, with midday temperatures getting as high as 40°C (that’s a touch over 100°F for the Americans in the audience). You can’t safely drink the tap water in Uzbekistan, so I was pounding single-use plastic water bottles to keep hydrated and feeling the wrath of the environmental gods glaring down at me. The heat wasn’t pleasant but it wasn’t as oppressive as the humid heat that’s more familiar to me. Humid heat feels oppressive in its etymological sense—the air feels like it’s pressing in on me—whereas this dry heat felt like it was sucking me dry. I wasn’t dripping with sweat but I could feel my mouth drying out between chugs of water.
Samarkand is a fairly big city, with a metro area of over a million people so I was surprised by how quiet it was. For obvious heat-related reasons, summer is a low season for tourism, but the Samarkandis themselves didn’t seem to be moving about with much urgency either. Between major thoroughfares, most of the centre of the city is a warren of narrow backstreets lined with beige buildings whose doors open discreetly onto shady courtyards. I could catch glimpses of people reclining on raised platforms and playing backgammon.
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| On the backstreets of Samarkand |
Although my Russian is more useful than my Turkish in conversation, my limited Turkish has allowed for some pleasing moments of familiarity. Uzbek is a Turkic language and I can often decipher the meaning of written signs. For example, “open” in Turkish is açık whereas in Uzbek it’s ochiq. I imagine it’s how it might feel if I’d spent a year learning French and then went on a holiday to Italy.
After a mostly quiet first day in Samarkand, in which I managed to get caught up with various things, I figured I should do at least a little sightseeing before I left Samarkand. So on Friday morning I set out to visit the Ulugbek Observatory and Afrasiab Museum, which lie a bit outside the traditional city centre.
Ulugbek was the grandson of Timur and ruled from Samarkand in the first half of the fifteenth century. Unlike his murderous grandfather, Ulugbek was a man of some refinement and was an accomplished mathematician and astronomer. His most lasting achievement was to build a massive observatory that compiled a catalogue of over a thousand stars and made the most accurate estimate to that date of the length of the year. Reactionaries assassinated Ulugbek and demolished his observatory but the underground portion was rediscovered by a Russian archaeologist in the early twentieth century and it gives some sense of the scale of the structure. Its centrepiece was a sextant with a radius of 40m—the largest in the world at the time—by which the scholars he’d attracted to his court could make their precise measurements.
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| The surviving base of Ulug Beg's sextant |
The attached museum displays various instruments and manuscripts from the period as well as giving an overview of the Timurid dynasty that treats Timur in roughly the same way that the Stalin Museum in Gori treats Stalin. Lots about Timur’s impressive conquests, less about the butchery and destruction he wrought.
Afrasiab is the site of pre-Mongol Samarkand. Very little in Central Asia is more than six hundred years old because Genghis Kahn or Timur or both destroyed pretty much everything that had been around before their time. The site itself is a mostly featureless stretch of open land but the attached museum has the fragmentary remains of a magnificent set of seventh century Sogdian murals that once adorned the palace of King Varkhuman. The murals depict dignitaries coming from as far as China to pay tribute or exchange goods.
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| One of the Afrasiab murals |
Journey to Nukus
After those visits, I headed out to the Samarkand train station for a twelve-hour journey to Nukus. Nukus is the main city of Karakalpakstan, the vast autonomous republic that makes up the northwest of Uzbekistan. The region is home to about 5% of Uzbekistan’s population but constitutes about 40% of its area. The Karakalpaks are ethnically and linguistically distinct from Uzbeks, and their language is closer to Kazakh than to Uzbek. There are tensions between Karakalpakstan and the central government in the east. The area has borne the brunt of the draining of the Aral Sea—more on which soon—and its gas resources are exploited for the benefit of Tashkent with locals feeling they don’t see their fair share of the profits.
I’m finding a lot of train schedules in Uzbekistan don’t conform ideally to my own sense of convenience. My train for Nukus was scheduled to arrive at 5:18 in the morning. For most of the ride, I shared a compartment with Serdar (he got off sometime in the middle of the night before we reached Nukus) who’s from Karakalpakstan but works in Tashkent for a Turkish company—yet another instance where I found my bad Russian and his bad Russian were a better conversational match than my even worse Turkish and his good Turkish. Ethnically, he’s Turkmen, and peacefully reclined across from me watching videos on his phone while I read Peter Hopkirk in The Great Game write about the “hostile and lawless Turcoman tribes” that made this part of the world a dangerous place to travel a couple centuries earlier.
Unsurprisingly, the Uzbek trains are very reminiscent to the ones I took on the Trans-Siberian railroad a quarter of a century ago, both in terms of their layout and what you can expect. When I wandered over to the dining car and asked if there were any meatless dishes, I was offered chicken.
The train arrived in Nukus on time to the minute. Getting off, I noticed a French couple with a toddler in diapers. I told them I was impressed that they were travelling with such a young child and they explained they’d been on the road for a year. They didn’t see why having a child should hinder them and they sold all their stuff and left Paris when little Aaron was fifteen months old. He’s now two-and-a-half and impressively cheerful and friendly. I suppose he’s got openness to adventure in the genes.
As I wandered bleary-eyed into the Nukus dawn, I was surprised and pleased to see a guy holding up a sign with my name on it. This was Rustam, who was the driver for my trip out to the Aral Sea. There’s a fairly standard overnight tour package that you can book and I’d coordinated through a travel forum with an Australian couple to share the cost of the trip. Rustam took me back to the hotel organizing the trip where I had a few hours to kill while we waited for David and Sam’s flight to arrive from Tashkent.
A little background
A little over half a century ago, the Aral Sea was the third largest lake in the world, after the Caspian Sea and Lake Superior. It had a thriving fishing industry and its waters and surrounding wetlands were home to dozens of endemic fish, bird, and mammal species. The sea was fed by the two main rivers that flow across Central Asia: the Amu-Darya (or the Oxus as it was known to the Greeks and Romans) and the Syr-Darya. Starting in the 1960s, Soviet engineers—the people who brought you Chernobyl—started diverting water from the rivers to feed irrigation projects. This was part of the so-called Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature, and the only thing great about it was the scale of the catastrophe.
The irrigation channels were poorly built, leading to lots of unnecessary waste. The plan to turn Uzbekistan into a major cotton exporter was successful but cotton is a thirsty plant and large stretches of Uzbekistan are desert or semidesert. Uzbekistan’s economy remains tied to cotton to this day and they can’t stop soaking up the Amu-Darya to feed the crops. They also seem to grow a lot of melon and watermelon, which is delicious but also probably not ideal crops for an arid climate.
Inexorably, the Aral Sea dried out. It’s now down to less than 10% of its original size and the world has a new desert, the Aralkum (“Aral sand”), where once there was water. The remaining sea has become exceptionally salty and almost all the native fish have died off. The Aral Sea has become a byword for ecosystem collapse.
Aside from gas extraction, the main economic activity in the area around the Aral Sea nowadays is disaster tourism. The trip was fascinating and depressing and I’m very glad I went.
Heading out to the Aral Sea
The first stop on our itinerary was Moynaq, whose ship graveyard is the most eerie emblem of the disaster that befell the Aral Sea. Moynaq was once a fishing town on the edge of the sea and the “Welcome to Moynaq” sign has a fishy theme, with a silver fish above rows of spangles shimmering like fish scales in the wind.
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| At the welcome to Moynaq sign |
At what was once the waterfront, you can wander among rusted old boats, abandoned to the desert. An adjacent museum shows photos and paintings of Aral Sea life in the twentieth century, with fishing boats and fish processing plants, as well as taxidermied animals that once populated the area. It’s one thing to contemplate the enormity of simply removing an inland sea from the world map. It’s another to see evidence of entire ways of life and species of animals that have been erased along with it.
Rustam spoke almost no English but had good Russian so I often played the role of interpreter. My Russian could only get us so far, though, and sometimes Rustam would speak into his phone’s translation app (I don’t think it was Google translate) to try to convey more complex messages. Rustam wanted to explain something to us at a fisherman’s graveyard we visited, a lonely bunch of tombstones standing on a desert ridge a long way from any fishable water. He muttered into his phone and then passed it to us to read. I’m not sure what he meant to say, but the app translated it as “I’ve been waiting for your funeral for ages.” This shattered the solemnity of the moment and we all fell about laughing—including Rustam, who could see that the app had mistranscribed what he’d spoken into his phone—at the apt creepiness of such a message in such a forlorn spot.
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| Fishermen's tombstones in the desert |
Rustam hadn’t slept much—remember, he met me at the train station at 5:18 that morning—and had stopped at one point to get an energy drink to perk him up, but he had an uncanny sense of direction. The roads diverged at various points but Rustam must have had some sort of internal compass because he only twice lost the route, and in both cases only by a little.
More worrisome was that the SUV broke down in the middle of the desert. As far as I could understand, there was trouble with the tube feeding diesel into the engine, most likely a result of sand blocking the tube. There were points on the road where it felt like we were going through a car wash of sand: the side and rear windows were obscured by waves of sand kicked up by the SUV. It wasn’t panic stations—we had plenty of water and Rustam had phone reception so he would have been able to call for help—but it was a sharp reminder just how far we were from anything resembling civilization. The journey from Nukus to our destination was about 450km. Poor Rustam’s reward for clearing the blockage by sucking on the tube was a mouthful of diesel. And then we carried on to what remains of the Aral Sea.
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| Rustam working on the engine |
A night by the sea
Our destination was a yurt camp by the western sliver of water that’s one of the remaining bits of the sea. We arrived in the early evening and, after settling in, we headed down to the sea for a dip. The shore itself is mostly a salty sludge that wouldn’t be much fun to wade out into but a short pier allows visitors to get out to the water more easily.
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| On the pier over the Aral Sea, or what's left of it |
The Australians, David and Sam, were a married couple in their mid-thirties who had met in their early twenties through the Melbourne swimming community—as a teenager, David had been on Australia’s junior Olympic team—so they were keen to go for a swim. None of us had brought swimsuits but we stripped down to our underwear to go in the water.
Before heading off to the pier, Rustam twice warned us not to get any water in our eyes. Putting just a tiny bit of water in my mouth helped me understand why. It’s almost as salty as the Dead Sea and the water burned my mouth. I haven’t been to the Dead Sea but I got the Aral Sea equivalent by stretching out on my back and floating effortlessly. The water was tepid after a day in the desert sun and the experience was quite pleasant. Getting out and getting dry, I could feel a thin film of salt clinging to my body like a layer of dust. Happily, this was a classy yurt camp that had shower stalls. Our visit coincided with a visit from the water truck that transports fresh water out to this arid, salty spot.
After that, dinner and bed. The yurt camp seemed to be run by an enterprising family—I didn’t get a chance to chat with them so I’m not sure the story exactly. But it was all very well run and organized and was clearly set up to cater to adventurous travellers who are used to less rustic digs.
The journey back
For a second night in a row, I set my alarm for 5am. One of the advertised highlights of the trip was sunrise over the Aral Sea. Poor Rustam, definitely looking worse for wear at this point, drove us out to a rocky promontory rising up above the sea basin. Behind and above us was a plateau that was the original shore of the sea. Looking out at the sea in the distance, I could also imagine myself standing on the sea floor, twenty metres under the original sea level, and the undulating rocks around me would have been so many depth soundings for a marine surveying vessel a century earlier. I could imagine fish swimming above my head as the orange sun kissed the red rocks around me.
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| Casting a small shadow on red hills that were once underwater |
Back to the yurt camp for breakfast and then off on our way. The itinerary for the return journey took in probably more stops than any of us really wanted, although all of them interesting in their ways. The remains of an old caravanserai, which must have been a great relief to traders arriving across the vast desert to the west. A weird little village in the middle of nowhere with a derelict airstrip that once supplied Aralsk-7, a top secret facility on an Aral Sea island where the Soviets developed and tested biological weapons—I was told that this is where Novichok was developed. A view out over some uncharacteristically lush wetlands where we could see flocks of flamingoes wading through the water. A cemetery of Ural Cossacks who had been exiled to this forsaken spot when they refused to join the tsar’s campaign against the Khiva in the 1870s. And old fish cannery that had been abandoned in the 1960s. The remains of a leper colony that had once been an island in the sea. The remains of a pre-Islamic fortress. Along the drive, we passed by hills shimmering in the summer sun due to all the mineral salts embedded in the sandy earth.
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| The old fish cannery at Urga |
Our journey back shadowed the French family I’d encountered on the train the previous morning, who’d booked the same trip. I also ran into them on the streets of Khiva, which will be the topic of a separate blog post (Khiva, not bumping into the French couple again). A lot of us are on similar trajectories. I ended up spending another day and a half with David and Sam beyond our Aral Sea trip but again, I’ll write more about that, and them, in a subsequent blog post.
And finally, close to 8pm, we made it back to Nukus. We tipped Rustam generously and I hope he got a good long sleep that night. I had dinner and wandered about for half an hour before returning to my hotel.
My one regret from this trip was not spending any real time in Nukus itself. Notably, I missed out on the Savitsky Museum, which is one of the great treasures of Karakalpakstan. Founded by an artist and ethnographer named Igor Savitsky, it houses an impressive collection of avant garde Russian art that Savitsky rescued from Soviet authorities by spiriting it away to the desert. The museum places the likes of Kandinsky and Malevich alongside local Uzbek artists and apparently it’s really good. But unfortunately our trip began on Saturday before the museum opened and ended on Sunday after it closed and the museum was closed on Mondays. I would have liked to see it but not so much that I thought it was worth waiting until Tuesday. But I did enjoy my brief wander through Nukus. It felt almost like a town out of a bizarro version of the American fifties, with stylishly but modestly dressed young men and women enjoying wholesome entertainments along neatly maintained streets.
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