Approved the plan in which we’ll create watering channels in the rivers Amy Darya and Syr Darya. The channels will water new cotton plantations providing all the Soviet Union. As a side effect the Aral Sea will dry in five years.”

The Aral Sea was the fourth biggest lake on earth. Since 1960 it’s size has decreased from 62,1 to 12,1 square meters. The most terryfing of it’s history is that drying it was done on purpose. A plan that we’d call now “unsustainable”  was approved and all the people living from it would be forced to change their lives. The unknown was awaiting them, nobody told them, nobody gave them an alternative. The experts said that it was unavoidable, a lake destined to disappear by evaporation in the middle of the desert.

We’ve been driving  over an hour by land that one day was the bottom of the sea.

In the distance, in the horizon we see where the water reached, the water level was the same as the mountain.

We realize that our driver starts crying. He’s been quite a while receiving calls non stop and with the sun glasses we didn’t k notice. We ask him what’s going on. His wife needs to go to hospital. He cries disconsolately, a hand on the wheel and the other drying his cheeks. We tell him to turn back, it’s important, we have time, we can go tomorrow with another driver. He says no. We insist but answers that without the trip he doesn’t get paid and without pay there’s no hospital. We shut up, we respect his decision  and we look to the subaquatic infinite with a knot in our thoughts.

He plays a song on the cell phone It’s “their” song, the one that reminds him of her, he plays it several times and tries to explain to us what it says with his little English. It’s about an impossible love. Each time the song finishes he shows us pictures of his wife and son. He rises his hands from bottom to top indicating that he knows his wife since they were kids and they’ve grown together. They’ve been together all their lives.

He dims the tension of the situation telling us things about her while keeping driving. I turn to the side looking into the car and I turn to the side looking out.

Water used to reach to the top of the slope on the left.

The plan was to grow rice, melons, cereals, and cotton. Lenin said that “Irrigation will do more than anything else to revive the area and regenerate it, bury the past and make the transition to socialism more certain”. Cotton was the white gold and still today Uzbekistan is one of the greatest world producers. In Turkmenistan I saw hundreds of kilometres of plantations on the way from Ashgabat to Merv.

Water salinity has got multiplied by ten killing nearly all the flora and fauna.

He get’s another phone call. It’s his mother, I don’t know what she’s told him but he smiles. Seems he’s got more relaxed. Pile and I get a bit more relaxed as well. The 4WD keeps lifting up dust as we go as if nothing happens.

The drying of the Aral Sea has produced a climate change in the area making hotter and drier summers and colder winters. This united with the pollution makes it nearly impossible to grow anything around it. Not only the ecosystem of the lake has been destroyed, the ecosystems of the Amy Darya river and Sry Darya river deltas have disappeared due to lack of water.

One of the root causes is that the water channels lost between 30% and 75% of the water due to deficient construction. This is water that doesn’t come to the Aral Sea. Only 12% of the water channels in Uzbekistan are sealed.

One of the proposed alternatives apart of improving the channels is to grow cotton in a more intelligent way with more productive varieties and less pesticides.

Lunch stop is next to this lighthouse. Men of the village went fishing and at sunset the women would light a fire on the lighthouse so they’d know how to come back to the village at night.

Enormous landscapes. Nothing full of nothing. On the picture you can see Pili, my travelling companion for these days. We talk about the Aral sea and about the whole world and life, we´ve become friends.

We reach the water, there is little of the lake but still the proportions are spectacular.

The Aral Sea got divided when reducing the size. Now there are two independent parts; one in Kazakstan and other in Uzbekistan.

Kazakhstan has created a dam on the sea to recover part of it. It has been able to elevate the water level 15 meters since 2005. The salinity there has decreased and the fauna being repopulated in a way that fishing has been allowed again. Unfortunately Uzbekistan does not have the money (Kazakstan has a huge amount of petrol) to undertake a similar plan.

In the lake there was an island called Vorzrozhdeniva. In 1948 the Russians created a top secret centre for research of bio weapons. It’s not known yet what happened there but one day mysteriously 400.000 animals died in four hours on the north shore of the lake. The area was cleaned up and nobody talked about it again. In 1992 the island was abandoned when the Soviet Union fell. In 2002 an international initiative went to the island to clean it and nine anthrax focuses were found. There is a very interesting story of this island from Nick Middelton in his book “Extremes along the silk road” in which he goes to visit the base.

Going down the dirt track, our driver records the way down with his cell phone so he can show it to his wife.

The Aral Sea is the saltiest water body in the world, this is why  the blue has some metallic colour, it reminds me of the Dead Sea.

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(Map taken from Wikipedia) It’s volume has decreased from 1046 cubic kilometres in 1961 to 100 cubic kilometres now. The first picture is from when the lake had already lost a big part of it’s volume and the second one is two years old also.

Walking by the current beach we find hundreds of shells reminding us the old richness of it’s waters.

The water is highly polluted from the fertilizer and pesticides and the rest of Vozrozhdeniva.

A foldable platform abandoned by a gas company.

It’s sunset and the moon comes.

We have dinner and go to bed, we are tired, to come here we’ve been in the car five hours and tomorrow we have another while. The driver is sitting on a rock looking at pictures in his cell phone and listening to his song.

Sunsets in this immensity.

These mountains were underwater.

We leave, we drive hours under what should be water, underwater roads that should not exist. The driver tells us more abut his wife and son. He wants more kids when his wife becomes healthy again. I don’t know when was the last time I heard someone talking with such devotion about his family.

We are getting closer to civilization, we have signal again and the driver talks with his family. His wife is at home, she was in hospital yesterday. He tells us that the family and friends have put money because doctors here don’t give treatment unless they get some “extra” money. Their way of surviving as the salaries are not enough. One of those things you read about in guide books but you not always can corroborate.

We arrive to Moynaq, what was one of the biggest ports in the Aral sea. Now the coast is over 150 kilometres away.We see the boat cemetery.

The fish canning factory of Moynaq produced 20.000 cans a year, a sixth of the need of the Soviet Union. It had to close down in 1979 and 10.000 people were unemployed.

Light started been very bad as mist covered the sky giving a horrible light, when we arrived to the cemetery the sun opened and got some great clouds to give depth to some pictures.

The landscape is devastating. I feel angry and sad.

Over the mountain, on the old shore, a monument explaining what has happend.

In the aral sea this boats collected 25.000 tons of fish a year.

I imagine a fisherman that one day got surprised because his boat was touching the bottom of the lake and it had not touched it in 40 years for bring tied up in the same place. Next year pushing the boat a few meters may have been the normal and a few years later the idea of getting to the water was unthinkable. What do you do with your life? How do you feed your family? What do you do with your sailor’s hat?

Fortunately the Russian calculations were not very good and the lake did not dry up in five years. One of the reasons for this failure was that there are internal sources that come from the Pamir and Tien Shan mountains.

I wanted to see the canning plant but it’s not possible.

For a little more they are worth it.

The boats are in the same place where they used to be, on the Moynaq port.

There are boats in which you can still see net pieces. Here in the interior of a hold with silver remains of the covering.

This time it’s been impossible to choose less pictures and I’ve got over the max limit I like for the post.

General view of the cemetery. Don’t try, the water can’t be seen from here.

We leave Moynaq. It’s lunch time so we stop to eat a soup with vegetables, meat and noodles in square shapes. We eat it in a moment and leave to Nukus so that our driver can meet his family soon.

After the tasteless people of Turkmenistan being with people here is like being in a party. People smile, they answer you, they look at you and ask things. So next post I’ll put you some pictures of smily people to counteract the dramatic post of today.

Pili and I split. She goes to Samarkand and I go back to Khiva, I feel like seeing another sunset there.

Soon more.
Fernando