Through the desert - musings on the fate of the Aral Sea

The Aussie and I left Khiva to take a shared taxi for the 5 hour trip across the desert to Bukhara. Our first mission was to catch a minibus from Khiva to Urgench which we managed – and at the locals’ price too! This caused rather strong discontent amongst the other minibus drivers and our driver had to rev up and head off before he got dragged out of the vehicle! Obviously setting a bad precedent. The other passengers didn’t seem to mind though – despite finding themselves buried by our rucksacks – from the amused looks we were getting I don’t we were their usual travelling companions.

Having found a taxi to hire to Bukhara, we shared the journey with our new Russian/American friend Sergei (a Russian speaker is handy for haggling) and a random Uzbek teenager - rather a squish in a hatchback. The desert is a total wasteland and very, very flat. The road runs along the boarder with Turkmenistan which meant plenty of border posts to check we weren't smugglers - luckily we passed those easily - although The Aussie did gain a 21 year old customs official as an admirer. I offered to leave her with him in the middle of the desert but strangely she seemed none too keen, even though she’d have had some very friendly looking goats for company. It was a slightly odd journey belting down the road (driving on which ever side of the road had the least potholes) with the windows wide open as it was boiling and so getting covered in red dust. We suspected that some form of smuggling was going on. Our car was stopped several times in the middle of nowhere by other cars for “things” to be handed across to the diver….anything from empty water bottles (?) to passports with cash inside. We decided that it is easier to ask no questions – not that we’d understand the answer in any case.

We were rather hoping that the road would take us into Turkmenistan for a quick look as it rates very highly on the weirdness scale – even with such tough local competition in Central Asia. The President is a chap called Saparmurat Niyazov – who has declared himself President for Life. He styles himself Turkmenbashi, or Father of the Turkmen and has taken the rather unprecedented step of renaming days of the week after his friends and family and ensuring that his face appears not only on stamps and bank notes – but also on the dials of all clocks and watches. He is slightly suspicious of foreigners and regularly has them followed around the country by secret service men complete with dark suits and dark classes driving unmarked Ladas – makes me think of the Pink Panther in terms of professionalism.

The cult of personality is evident everywhere – including a giant 50 foot tall gold statue of the man himself in the capital that rotates to face the sun. Original. Turkmens are expected to take spiritual guidance from his book, Rhuknama, a collection of thoughts on Turkmen culture and history published in lurid pink and lime green, and are also told that anyone who reads it thrice will "become more intelligent, will recognise the divine being and will go straight to heaven" – you certainly don’t get that sort of claim from the Labour party manifesto! You would be forbidden for thinking that he has a touch of a sense of humour though as he has built the oil and gas ministry in the shape of a cigarette lighter and insists on learner drivers being tested on his own thoughts and philosophies rather than their ability to drive a car. Basically, this man has brought about a whole new level of weirdness – and aspiring despots have some way to go before they can challenge him!

We stopped for tea half way through the day and a trip to possibly the worst loo I've ever had the misfortune of seeing. I don't mind long drop loos - but prefer it when they haven't been filled to the brim already and aren't gently steaming in the sun. We acquainted ourselves with the desert instead. Although hungry, there was no way we were eating at this truck stop. It was a tiny chai house in the middle of nowhere with a raised platform outside to sit on and swarms of black flies all over the food we could see. A motley collection of drivers and randoms was lounging around suspiciously appraising our arrival; slurping tea, scoffing greasy kebabs and stopping only to belch or scratch. It seemed to be a family run concern with a young girl doing most of the work trying simultaneously to mind a small baby who was crawling through the refuse and gut a large fish rather too far from the sea….

Soon we were on the move again, crossing over the fabled River Oxus. In my mind this sits along side the Euphrates, Nile and Amazon as being watercourses that have shaped history. The Oxus is the longest river in Central Asia (1,500 miles) and is locally known as the Amu Darya. Many local people refer to the river as Jayhoun which was thought to be a derivative of Gihon, the biblical name for one of the rivers of the Garden of Eden. The river is also known by this name to most of the medieval Islamic writers and is (from the pictures in the Khiva museum) is still spanned by the same bridge as in 1900. It felt like it.

The Oxus is the main source of water in this dry region and is very broad and shallow. It was coming to the end of the dry summer and had been reduced to a number of channels winding timorously across the sandy bed, this gave a very false impression of the real might of the river which would prove a definite obstacle in full spate, especially to a people for whom a donkey is the most sophisticated form of transport.

Sadly, use of water from the Oxus for irrigation has been a major contributing factor in the shrinking of the Aral Sea. The Soviet Union decided in 1918 that the two rivers that fed the Aral Sea, the Oxus (Amu Darya) in the south and the Jaxartes (Syr Darya) in the northeast, would be diverted to try to irrigate the desert in order to grow rice, melons, cereal, and also, cotton; this was part of the Soviet plan for cotton, or "white gold", to become a major export. (This did eventually end up becoming the case, and today Uzbekistan is one of the world's biggest exporters of cotton.) The irrigation canals began to be built on a large scale in the 1930s. Many of the irrigation canals were poorly built, letting water leak out or evaporate; from the Qaraqum Canal, the largest in Central Asia, perhaps 30–70% of the water went to waste. Today only 12% of Uzbekistan's irrigation canal length is waterproofed, maybe it’s run by Thames Water?

From 1961 to 1970, the Aral's sea level fell at an average of 20 cm a year; in the 1970s, the average rate nearly tripled to 50–60 cm per year, and by the 1980s it continued to drop, now with a mean of 80–90 cm each year. Despite this, the rate of water usage for irrigation continued to increase: the amount of water taken from the rivers doubled between 1960 and 1980; cotton production nearly doubled in the same period. The disappearance of the sea was no surprise to the Soviets; they expected it to happen long before. The Soviet Union apparently considered the Aral to be "nature's error", and a Soviet engineer said in 1968 that "it is obvious to everyone that the evaporation of the Aral Sea is inevitable".

This once vibrant environment is also heavily polluted, largely as the result of weapons testing, industrial projects, and fertiliser runoff before and after the breakup of the Soviet Union. It has also become hugely more saline as a direct result of the decreasing water volume. Even the recently discovered inflow of about 4 billion cubic metres of submarine groundwater per year into the Aral Sea will not in itself be able to stop the desiccation. This groundwater originates in the Pamirs and Tian Shan mountains and seeks its way through geological layers to a fracture zone at the bottom of the Aral Sea.

In 1987, the continuing shrinkage split the lake into two separate bodies of water, the North Aral Sea and the South Aral Sea; an artificial channel was dug to connect them, but that connection was gone by 1999 as the two seas continued to shrink. In 2003, the South Aral further divided into eastern and western basins; but the evaporation of the North Aral has since been partially reversed.

Work is being done to restore, in part, the North Aral Sea. Irrigation works on the Syr Darya have been repaired and improved to increase its water flow, and in October 2003, the Kazakh government announced a plan to build a concrete dam separating the two halves of the Aral Sea. Work on this dam was completed in August 2005; since then the water level of the North Aral has risen, and its salinity has decreased. Economically significant stocks of fish have even been returned, and observers who had written off the North Aral Sea as an environmental catastrophe have been surprised by unexpected reports that in 2006 its returning waters already were partly reviving the fishing industry and producing a catch for export as far as Ukraine. The South Aral Sea, which lies largely in Uzbekistan, was generally abandoned to its fate, but the project in the North Aral has brought at least a faint glimmer of hope.

As of summer 2003, the South Aral Sea was vanishing faster than predicted. In the deepest parts of the sea, the bottom waters are saltier than the top, and not mixing. Thus, only the top of the sea is heated in the summer, and it evaporates faster than would otherwise be expected. Based on the recent data, the western part of the South Aral Sea is expected to be gone within 15 years; the eastern part could last indefinitely.

The ecosystem of the Aral Sea and the river deltas feeding into it have been nearly destroyed, not least because of the much higher salinity.

The receding sea has left huge plains covered with salt and toxic chemicals, which are picked up and carried away by dust storms as toxic dust and spread to the surrounding area. The land around the Aral Sea is heavily polluted and the people living in the area are suffering from a lack of fresh water and other health problems, including high rates of certain forms of cancer and lung diseases, just to name a few. Crops in the region are destroyed by salt being deposited onto the land. The town of Moynaq in Uzbekistan had a thriving harbour and fishing industry that employed approximately 60,000 people; now the town lies miles from the shore. Fishing boats are scattered on the dry land that was once covered by water, many have been there for 20 years. The only significant fishing company left in the area has its fish shipped from the Baltic Sea, thousands of kilometres away.

In 1948, a top-secret Soviet bio weapons laboratory was established on the island in the middle of the Aral Sea (now disputed territory between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan). The exact history, functions and current status of this facility have not yet been disclosed. The base was abandoned in 1992 following the disintegration of the Soviet Army. Scientific expeditions proved that this had been a site for production, testing and later dumping of pathogenic weapons. According to the Kazakh Scientific Centre for Quarantine and Zoonotic Infections (who wouldn’t want that on their business cards?), all burial sites of anthrax were decontaminated. I’m not sure that fills me with a huge about of assurance….

Despite a huge desire to visit what remains of the Aral Sea – the lure of bio-weapons laboratories encouraging The Aussie – we weren’t able to make it out there. It is just so far from civilisation that it would have been a monumental – and expensive - diversion. There is one other draw to the local town (Nukus) which is rightfully weird – the Karakalpakstan Art Museum which houses some of the best Russian art from 1918 – 1935 in existence. Although quite believable (in a Central Asian kind of way) that a museum be sited in the middle of a desert next to a shrinking, highly polluted inland sea, the real reason for its existence is that Stalin did his best to destroy all Soviet art from this period. Adding insult to injury he also sent all the artists to the gulag – however he managed to overlook this windswept corner of the Union, so in a fairytale sort of way is escaped unharmed.