Sunrise over the western lobe of the Aral Sea —a and the yurt camp that enables visitors to see this otherwise remote part of Uzbekistan, about 100km from the Kazakh border.
The sea changes colour with the light: pink at dawn, then silver white, then a blue that disappears into the sky entirely such that the very horizon vanishes. One evening only it sank into a deep, super-saturated Persian blue, the colour of lapis and tiles.
The sea changes colour with the light: pink at dawn, then silver white, then a blue that disappears into the sky entirely such that the very horizon vanishes. One evening only it sank into a deep, super-saturated Persian blue, the colour of lapis and tiles.
The Aral Sea smells like something sick. It’s catastrophically saline but there’s none of that briney ozone freshness you instinctively associate with the ocean. Instead, down by the water, the air is heavy and smells like food, something nearly sweet, like MSG-laced noodles left too long in the sun. The depths are contaminated with hydrogen sulphide: rotten eggs.
The sea is an endorheic basin, always has been: water (once) flowed in, but nothing flows out, it just stews.
My guide Sarsenbay tried to persuade me to swim: “It’s like the Dead Sea: you float. The mud is good for the skin, it’s medicinal” — perhaps that’s a government tourism promo line? Yet, despite my desire for sensation and new experience, I felt strongly and instinctively that I did not want to. Not even thinking rationally about pesticide loads and so on (but also that). Just bodily knowledge: no. This place isn’t right.
I didn’t even much want to go near it — given the chance to head down the next morning, I declined. I came to Uzbekistan to understand what was once a sea, but found that I’d rather watch from a remove, a kilometre or so’s distance, up on the scarp, where I could look out on to the horizon that disappeared into the sky, and think nothing in particular.
The sediment on the shore is ultra-fine and smooth and sticky, and as you walk into the water you sink up to your calves in mud.
The sea is an endorheic basin, always has been: water (once) flowed in, but nothing flows out, it just stews.
My guide Sarsenbay tried to persuade me to swim: “It’s like the Dead Sea: you float. The mud is good for the skin, it’s medicinal” — perhaps that’s a government tourism promo line? Yet, despite my desire for sensation and new experience, I felt strongly and instinctively that I did not want to. Not even thinking rationally about pesticide loads and so on (but also that). Just bodily knowledge: no. This place isn’t right.
I didn’t even much want to go near it — given the chance to head down the next morning, I declined. I came to Uzbekistan to understand what was once a sea, but found that I’d rather watch from a remove, a kilometre or so’s distance, up on the scarp, where I could look out on to the horizon that disappeared into the sky, and think nothing in particular.
The sediment on the shore is ultra-fine and smooth and sticky, and as you walk into the water you sink up to your calves in mud.
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Hitched a ride up the beach on this guy’s sidecar, toes hooked under the rope in front, grinning widely.
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At its edge, the Ustyurt Plateau just collapses — whole chunks of land falling away, a hundred metres and more, into what would once have been the shores of the Aral Sea.
It’s the strangest landscape: it all feels so sudden. Like the land was ripped and rent apart perhaps twenty years ago, and the wounds are still raw. There is no rain here to weather them, only wind, heat and frost. But it is alive. This, the “eastern chink”, creates a strange chalky-limestone canyonland, where dragonflies hum and gerbils and jerboas munch on dry grasses and tough, xerophytic shrubs. Eagles circle, riding the thermals, waiting. |
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