Man makes such disasters

Man makes such disasters

Uzbekistan Diary -2

I shall continue from last week’s post where we were to board the Tashkent-Urgunch-Khiva-Andijan train.

The 14-hour train journey brought us to Khiva, a UNESCO heritage place around 11 a.m. The day turned out to be a little disappointing, so I shall share it with you next week.

Today, however, let me tell you what we did the following day because Khiva was our connecting point for going to Aral Sea, a lake ‘formerly’ in (northern part of) Uzbekistan and (southern part of) Kazakhstan, which dried up due to over-exploitation. Many of us do not even know it existed. What remains is a large patch of dry arid land and what is called a cemetery of ships.

We started at 6.00 am for the day-long journey from Khiva, in Khorezm region of Uzbekistan, to Karakalpakstan.  

The first stop after nearly three hours on the 370 km long journey (one side) was the Chilpik Kala Fortress.  

It is a round mud-walled structure on a small hill. Although it looks like a fortress, it is supposed to have been a Tower of Silence before the Arabs came here. The Zoroastrians leave the bodies of their dead on raised structures out in the open for the vultures and other birds to feed on. The skeletal remains are then collected and buried.

The wide concrete steps lead to the hill. I was told there is a yurt (circular dome made of wood poles and covered with fabric) camp there. We gave the steps one look, looked at one another, nodded our heads in agreement to continue with the journey, like true soldiers with our eye on our final destination, even though the access and entry were free.  

About fifty km further, we reached Nukus, the capital of the autonomous Republic of Karakalpakstan, a territory of Uzbekistan. Nukus is known for Savitsky museum, officially called Karakalpakstan State Museum of Art. Set up by Russian collector and archaeologist Igor Savitsky, it has 90,000 exhibits, said to be banned under Soviet censorship.

Better not ask me about it, because only when I stared at the heavy closed doors, did it dawn on me that it was a Monday and most of the museums are closed that day.

We decided not to take this defeat to heart and drove on. The driver took a short detour with the promise to show us something grand, and as we approached it, it was once again time to put our heads together and decide.

From outside we could see hundreds of graves and gravestones of Mizdakhan Necropolis. The team-member with mending heel was emphatic– only one graveyard per day. We all looked at one another and as if understanding her ordeal, agreed we should carry on, in our hearts hoping nobody wanted to stop till lunch time.

Before you ask why did we go in the first place, if we were not planning to stop anywhere, let me explain. The road was bad, broken and bumpy and hitherto unknown parts of our bodies had started groaning with the impact. There was almost zero traffic on the road which seemed to be going into a nowhere land for hundreds of kilometres.

The terrain too was nothing to talk about- dusty, brown, arid lands with desert bushes and no habitation. So drab was it that the member whom we had assigned the honorary title of group leader, had stopped his story-telling and I could hear his rhythmic snoring in the back.  

We had driven about seven hours (yes!) when we stopped at a roadside eatery/restaurant frequented by truckers. It sold all the goods used by truck drivers from gloves, jackets, boots to spanners, engine oil and of course, food.

That break gave our weary bodies some rest. Our batteries recharged with an odd combination of food, we started again, but the question loomed large - aur kitni door (how much further). There were no petrol stations, shops, or eating places after that.

If you can magnify on your screen, it says New Delhi 2397 km.

The timeless journey ended when around 3.30 pm, the driver took a short right turn, entering the parking lot of a small building.

We unfolded our tired forms out of the van (there is no public transport to go there) to look at the board of Moynaq History Museum.  Inside, a circular corridor around a closed room was the exhibition area where paintings and photographs of the times when the Aral Sea existed, were on display. Also on display were stuffed birds and animals which had lived, cans of fish which was caught, and some tools used, all decades ago.

A few examples Left: Flamingo  Middle: Sparrow Hawk, Wild cat (Manul) 
Extreme right top: Eagle, Extreme right bottom: water fowl   

The small museum charges a fee and the young lady sitting behind the counter opened the closed door to guide us in to a small theatre to watch a film on Aral Sea.

The twelve-minute documentary told how the Aral Sea was a source of employment for people catching, preserving, canning and selling fish there, and how irrigating water-intensive cotton fields slowly robbed it of its main resource-water. This slowly dried up the small inland sea, not only depriving 16,000 qualified people of their livelihood, but damaging the locals’ health with deadly gases that fertilisers seeped into the soil gave off, as the water dried. This killed the economy and ecology of the area. Summer temperatures went up. People had to leave their homes and move elsewhere.

According to https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/world-of-change/AralSea

In the 1960s, the Soviet Union undertook a major water diversion project on the arid plains of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. The region’s two major rivers, fed by snowmelt and precipitation in faraway mountains, were used to transform the desert into farms for cotton and other crops. Before the project, the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya rivers flowed down from the mountains, cut northwest through the Kyzylkum Desert, and finally pooled together in the lowest part of the basin. The lake they made, the Aral Sea, was once the fourth largest in the world…

As the Aral Sea has dried up, fisheries and the communities that depended on them collapsed. The increasingly salty water became polluted with fertilizer and pesticides. The blowing dust from the exposed lakebed, contaminated with agricultural chemicals, became a public health hazard. The salty dust blew off the lakebed and settled onto fields, degrading the soil. Croplands had to be flushed with larger and larger volumes of river water. The loss of the moderating influence of such a large body of water made winters colder and summers hotter and drier.

It adds how in a last-ditch effort to save some of the lake, Kazakhstan built a dam between the northern and southern parts of the Aral Sea.

About the film? I saw it, was moved by it but coming all the way to see a shabby dubbed film, left me feeling cheated. It reminded me of films I saw in school, yellow stars constantly blinking on the screen, crackling noise disturbing the narration and yet you came out looking pleased because something was better than nothing.

Timeline of how the sea shrank, from the Moynaq monument.
Top right: A woman dries fish for sale (before cotton crop irrigation)

A few metres from the museum stands the Moynaq Aral Sea monument reminding you of the human cruelty against nature.

From that point, you saw only dry land with not a drop of water in sight, shrubs and small woody trees here and there for several kilometres and a row of rusty abandoned small ships. Now useless, these wood and iron skeletons have been sitting here, a sad reminder of what man’s greed can do.  

I possess too little wisdom to be paid attention to, yet the words cemetery or graveyard seemed wrong to me. Those once-precious vehicles of livelihood have been sitting there merely for the occasional curious onlooker to come and look at mournfully. They are neither buried nor do they carry any plaque or stone saying what they meant to a man, a family, a village, a community or an economy.

Everyone was quiet during the seven-hour drive back. Nobody asked if it was boredom and fatigue from sitting in the van hurtling on the pitted road for hours or the rude exposure to man’s selfishness.

As nature turned on a colourful display – thin pink veils of clouds in the blue sky against a setting sun, we realized that mobile connectivity was back. Nikhil, the youngest among us, opened the bag of sugary snacks, put on some mellow old Indian film music, everyone asked for a song of their choice to be played and the driver who had been gorging on bread, sausages and Fanta, started singing.

Physically and mentally exhausted, a little hungry, we stepped back into the hotel around 11.30 p.m. It was, however, not food but longing for the comfort of a bed that made us call it a day.

Visiting this disaster tourist destination had been our sole purpose for the day. It is good we had not stopped anywhere on the way.

We had to leave for Bukhara the next morning.

The evening sky Photo: Nikhil Singh

                                                                                                -Anupama S Mani