Uzbekistan

(rest of photos to be uploaded soon)

The destruction of the Aral Sea is a manmade natural disaster of continental proportions. The sea, which straddles Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, has shrunk to a third of its size in the past 30 years. The two great rivers that used to supply it - the Amu Darya and the Amu Syr - no longer reach it after the Soviet planned economy declared the water was to be siphoned off for irrigating thirsty cotton plants.

Now the Uzbek town of Muynaq, which in the 1960s was on the coast, is 200 kilometers from the shore. There's still a fish on the painted sign at the entrance to the town, on a stretch of land called the Tiger's Spit, which formerly curved out into the sea. A dusty fishing trawler sits on a plinth by the town hall, and a rusty sign on an abandoned cinema creaks in the wind. Locals chased the retreating ocean with canals, but gave up as the sea's evaporation accelerated. The town fish cannery was supplied with catch from the distant Caspian until the 1990s, when economic forces finally dictated it close. There are 2,000 inhabitants left, subject to the climate extremes that emerged since the sea stopped modulating the weather: 50 degrees Celsius in the summer, minus 30 in the winter. Sea salt blown from the former sea bed has made the land barren, and agriculture is failing. Cancers proliferate, and the region has the highest rate of anaemia of anywhere in the world.

One of the worst things is, they knew it was happening. Commissions were set up. Expeditions filed reports. Locals recall vacationing at a holiday camp by the sea - except one year water lapped the huts, and a few years later it was already a few hundred meters away. But people profited from the cotton, indeed their livelihood depended on it, so the farming continued. Now it's though that even if the rivers did reach the sea, the destruction is irreversible. They've managed to stabilized the top quarter, in Kazakhstan, by building a dam, but the Uzbekistan portion is doomed. And as an added bonus, the shrinkage has connected a Soviet chemical and biological weapons plant built on an island to the mainland.

Today, you can stand on Muynaq's clifftop war memorial, and where once an azure sea would have been spread out before, you stare out at mile upon mile of sandy, scrubby desert. A scorching wind howls off the dunes. In the distance glimmers a small lake, part of an effort to restore the area's microclimate. And before it, their prows jutting out of the sand as if they were cresting a wave, lie fishing trawlers and barges that locals finally abandoned. You can climb all over them, into their stripped-down bridges and under their rudders, stare through their portholes and into the shadowy holds for storing fish, and open and close the heavy, rusting doors. A time, only 30 years ago, when they plowed across a wind-frothed sea seems impossibly distant.



Muynaq's airport closed as people left, and we reached it from Nukus, a few hundred kilometers south. Our guidebook calls it "a grim, spiritless city of bitter pleasures whose gridded avenues of socialism support a centerless town, only to peter out around fading fringes into an endless wasteland of cotton fields." It wasn't quite this bad, but not a particularly affluent place, either. It's the capital of a forgotten region called Karakalpakstan - Karakalpak means "Black-Hat People," although they've had to set up a research group to find out just what the black hat was (80 years of communism will do that to an ethnic minority).

We ventured on to Khiva, Bukhara and Samarkand, and then back to Tashkent. I'm struck more now by the tragedy in the western half of the country than by beauties of the east. But of course, they were beautiful...