‘Most staggering disaster of the 20th century’ now offers Instagrammable photo ops for curious Aral Sea tourists
- The slow destruction of Central Asia’s Aral Sea, a result of Soviet planners’ focus on cotton production, had terrible consequences for local communities
- Uzbekistan’s former fishing town of Moynaq, now 150km from the sea, is full of grimly photogenic evidence that the tide has long gone out for the area
On the western outskirts of the regional capital of Nukus, an unlovely Soviet-era creation in the far west of Central Asia’s Uzbekistan, the road out of town crosses a long bridge over what appears to be a sandy wasteland in which low shrubs struggle to survive.
But after some distance, this turns out to be the bed of the formerly mighty Amu Darya, or Oxus, one of Asia’s longest rivers, now reduced to a relative trickle. Its headstream rises 2,500km (1,550 miles) to the southeast, on the border of Afghanistan and Tajikistan.
The river once emptied into the vast but shallow inland Aral Sea, a haven of life on the largely arid Central Asian steppe, straddling the border of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.
Limited local rainfall was insufficient to replace volume lost to evaporation, and the Amu Darya, along with the Syr Darya, or Jaxartes, swelled the Aral and kept it alive.
But Soviet planners decided that cotton would be the economic salvation of Uzbekistan, and vast volumes of water from both rivers were diverted to irrigation channels to turn areas of the surrounding Kyzylkum and Karakum deserts to cotton production.
A sign at the bridge indicates that the fishing town of Moynaq is a 198km drive away, to the northwest. But as neither river now reaches the Aral, the edge of the sea - formerly the planet’s fourth-largest inland body of fresh water - is now 150km beyond what was once landlocked Uzbekistan’s only port.
The destruction of the Aral Sea was called “the most staggering disaster of the 20th century” by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
‘We kept it natural’: Indonesia’s Sumbawa is an unspoilt paradise, for now
This will be no ordinary trip to the seaside.
The morality of disaster tourism is the subject of much debate (although trips like visiting the ghost town of Pripyat, near the site of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, tend to attract criticism in a way that visiting the buried remains of ancient Pompeii do not, despite the latter’s plentiful remaining evidence of violent death).
The preferred justification of disaster tourism is usually that such trips are educational, although in reality it is Moynaq’s Instagrammability that leads still-rare foreign visitors to spend nearly three hours on the road each way.
Once the dachas – seasonal or second homes – of Nukus’ suburbs peter out, many of them incomplete and apparently abandoned, the route northwest is mostly of two tree-lined lanes, sometimes poorly surfaced.
Traffic is thin but the driving is polite. Although my driver hurtles along, he moves aside to let others rush past more quickly still, and he always comes to a complete halt at a stop sign.
This happens even before barrier-free railway crossings, where the uniform flatness of the largely featureless desert scenery means any train would be visible 10 minutes before its arrival. But then the background to the ride is the frequent chirping of his radar detector, scanning for police speed traps he can see are not there.
There’s little sign of economic activity, although cows occasionally cross in front of us, and one fenced-off area has great mounds of cotton under tarpaulins. This is the “white gold” that has impoverished both Moynaq and the Aral Sea.
Cotton was always part of Soviet planning, but during Nikita Khrushchev’s period as premier, from 1958 to 1964, a new diversion of river waters to create irrigated farmland meant that the 68,000 square-kilometre (26,300-square-mile) sea began to shrink rapidly. The rivers no longer had the strength to reach it, and the rate of evaporation rapidly overtook that of replenishment.
By the late 1980s, the sea had broken into two parts, both with triple the previous salinity. By the early 90s, these together amounted to less than half of the sea’s former size, the surface level now 15 metres (50 feet) lower than before.
Istanbul, Turkish city that bridges Asia and Europe, is a trove of history
After further fragmentation, the remaining parts, incapable of supporting once ample stocks of sturgeon, roach, carp, barbel and other fish whose collection and processing formerly supported Moynaq, are now only a fifth of the size of the original, and shrinking still.
Winds sometimes blow a mixture of sand and salt from the dried-up sea’s bed, along with toxic fertiliser and defoliant residues, to plague local communities.
Despite the destruction of Moynaq’s fishing industry and the town’s subsequent depopulation, it proves surprisingly shiny when reached, at least along its single main street, where there’s been much gimcrack building.
But from what was the edge of the sea and is now the edge of a cliff, the horizon, where grey sky meets khaki ground, is even flatter than seen so far. It’s as if the waters withdrew in preparation for return in a titanic tsunami, but then time stopped.
Below a modern monument - with an inappropriately aspirational air that points upwards and outwards in the direction of where the waters would have been, and bears a map of the Aral as it was in 1960 - sits a neatly arranged row of 10 or so rusting hulls.
It’s an apparently random collection of fishing vessels and what looks like a primitive car ferry, all fittings of any value long removed, and covered in graffiti that perhaps expresses despair.
If the idea of a row of beached vessels, hundreds of kilometres from the nearest water, has a certain romance to it, the reality is rather grimmer, if photogenically so.
It’s a short, steep drop down to walk among the elements of this monument to man’s environmental incompetence. Those who take it can marvel at how different ships appear without water to hide much of their hulls, and how, despite their drunken tilt, they tower overhead.
The site is certainly educational, but only for those willing to read its message rather than see the ships as merely props for self-promotion.
5 of Hong Kong’s weirdest attractions, from Noah’s Ark to a sewage works
Entrances to the ships cut at ground level sometimes provide options for those essential “look at me” poses inseparable from much modern tourism.
Look at me inside the means of catching species that have been killed off. Look at me next to a symbol of lost livelihoods. Look at me parading in front of something that might be seen as a warning of a worse and more widespread doom to come.
A few more vessels a short walk away along the sea floor have a slightly more natural look to their abandonment, but the site is man-made in more than one sense.
The ships have been dragged here to make a display, the town eking out the last drop of a living from what was once a sea of bounty, although opportunities for visitors to spend money are few.
A nearby museum screens footage of the town in its prime: vessels loaded down with their catches, people in processing factories wielding knives with brisk precision, great batches of fish hung up to dry on frames.
Glass-fronted cases offer examples of once plentiful wildlife, such as foxes, wild cats, swans and sparrowhawks, which sit stuffed and rigid, now the only examples of their kind to be found in the area. Cans of locally produced tinned fish with colourful labels sit gathering dust.
The town’s new buildings seem like a pointless investment, but the newly revealed floor of the Aral basin is starting to yield supplements to Uzbekistan’s existing reserves of oil and gas, suggesting a new shape for the local economy.
Yet it still seems that for Moynaq, the tide has gone out. And it is never coming back.
