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About Uzbekistan
Muynak
The water that serveth all that country is drawn by ditches out of the River Oxus, unto the great destruction of the said river, for which it cause it falleth not unto the Caspian Sea as it hath done in times past, and in short time all that land is like to be destroyed, and to become a wilderness for want of water, when the river of Oxus shall fail.
Anthony Jenkinson, 1558
Hidden in one of the most obscure corners of the former Soviet Union lies one of its darkest secrets; the disappearance, in a single lifetime, of the Aral Sea (Orol Dengizi), once the fourth largest inland sea in the world. Moynaq (population 12,000), 210km north of Nukus, encapsulates more visibly than anywhere the absurd tragedy of the Aral Sea. Once one of the sea’s two major fishing ports, it now stands some 180km from the water. What remains of Moynaq’s fishing fleet lies rusting on the sand in the former seabed.
Muynak (Moynoq, in Uzbek Latin, Mojnak in Karakalpak) was once the largest port on the Aral, a finger of coast where a significant part of the Aral catch was processed and canned. In 1921 as the Volga region suffered a terrible famine, Lenin appealed to the Aral fleet for help and within days 21,000 tonnes of fish had been dispatched, saving thousands of Russian lives. Today it is a nightmarish town of stagnant, corrosive pools and deserted factories, the victim of a Soviet crusade to overcome nature. Not a single fish can survive in the sea, 10,000 fishermen have lost their jobs and the port of Muynak has lost its ratson d'etre. The only reason to visit it is a macabre one; to witness the death throes of the sea and the dramatic sight of dozens of deserted fishing boats rusted at their moorings, submerged in sand, riding the crest of a sand dune, 160 kilometres from the shoreline. Many of the ships have been sold off for scrap in recent years so you might have to hunt around to find some.
The mostly Kazakh residents have moved away in droves, and Moynaq today is a virtual ghost town populated by livestock herders and the elderly looking after grandchildren whose parents have left to find work elsewhere. The few who remain suffer the full force of the Aral Sea disaster, with hotter summers, colder winters, debilitating sand-salt-dust storms, and a gamut of health problems.
Moynaq used to be on an isthmus connecting the Ush Say (Tiger’s Tail) peninsula to the shore. You can appreciate this on the approach to the town, where the road is raised above the surrounding land. The town itself consists of one seemingly endless main street linking the bus station at its southeast end with the Oybek Hotel and the ships graveyard to the northwest.
A solitary taster of the debacle ahead lies on display at the bus station and a wider view of the area can be gained from the northern promontory. A ship's graveyard has been created by relocating several of the beached fishing boats to a spot five minutes' walk from the Hotel Oybek. Surrounding the town is a crunchy, white top soil of salt and sea shells. The town has a small museum (closed Sunday) with photos and paintings of the Aral's heyday. Only in Moynaq can fisherman's nets, anchors and cans of fish be considered displays from history.
Sights
Coming to Moynaq is, perhaps, what you'd term disaster tourism': there are parallels to be drawn with the Polygon or Chernobyl. You come to see where the sea used to be, and the suffering it has left behind.
Poignant reminders of Moynaq’s tragedy are everywhere: the sign at the entrance to the town has a fish on it; a fishing boat stands as a kind of monument on a makeshift pedestal near Government House. The local museum in the city hall has some interesting photos and paintings of the area prospering before the disaster.
The beached ships are a five-minute walk from the Oybek Hotel, across the main road and beyond the collection of homes. Once difficult to find, most ships have now been moved to a centralised location beneath the Aral Sea memorial, which occupies a bluff that was once the Aral Sea’s bank. There were at one stage many more, but most have now been sold off for their scrap value in a desperate bid to compensate for the loss of income from fishing.
From the memorial you can spot a lake southeast of town, created in an attempt to restore the formerly mild local climate. It didn’t quite work, but it’s at least given the locals a source of recreation. The lake was filled to the brim in 2009, as a dam in Tajikistan came close to bursting, prompting a massive release of water, some of which made it all the way to Moynaq via canals linked to the Amu-Darya. The Amu-Darya itself peters out in the desert southeast of Moynaq.
The Moynaq Museum on the main road has photographs of the town in its heyday, as well as fishing nets and cans of long out-of-date fish. Admission, should you choose to enter, is US$1.
Transport
Muynak used to be a closed, forbidden town, but today little fuss is made if your papers are in order. Public buses depart twice a day from Nukus and take three to four hours. The town can be comfortably visited as a day trip from Nukus with your own transport.
Muynak monuments map
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Muynak
Hidden in one of the most obscure corners of the former Soviet Union lies one of its darkest secrets; the disappearance, in a single lifetime, of the Aral Sea (Orol Dengizi), once the fourth largest inland sea in the world. Moynaq (population 12,000), 210km north of Nukus, encapsulates more visibly than anywhere the absurd tragedy of the Aral Sea. Once one of the sea’s two major fishing ports, it now stands some 180km from the water. What remains of Moynaq’s fishing fleet lies rusting on the sand in the former seabed.
Muynak
This museum, modest by metropolitan standards, with less than two hundred exhibits, tells the visitors a tragic story of the bygone era, when things were humming in this region and the Aral Sea was so large and affluent that it was called as sea.
Nukus
On the colorful cliffs of one the Sultauizdag eastern spurs, in the Kyzyl Kum desert there survived ruins of one of the largest castles of ancient Khorezm– Ayaz-Kala. Ayaz Kala is located on the western side of the Sultan-Uiz-Dagh Mountains. The site consists of three fortresses which were built from the 4th cent. BC to the 7th cent. AD. The fortresses were part of a series of forts located at the edge of the Kizilkum Desert, which provided defence against raids by nomads and the Saca of the Syr-Darya delta.
Nukus
The highlight of Nukus is the recently relocated Igor Savitsky Museum, home to one of the finest collections of Soviet avant-garde art from the 1920s and 30s; an age of relative artistic freedom before the demands from the 'centre' changed in the mid-1930s and Stalinist socialist realism became the only acceptable form of Soviet art. Nukus's backwater obscurity enabled Savitsky to collect a wide spread of artistic life, from local folk art to Russian icons, at a time when the more celebrated museums in Moscow and St Petersburg had their wrists ideologically tied.
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best priceTashkent - Samarkand - Bukhara - Khiva
8 days
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Group also visited Nur fortress built by Great Alexander, had lunch and a rest at the guest house, visited the mosque, Sheikh Kasim, located in the pocket. Happy and full of impressions children back in town for a long time discussing his journey. According to the young tourists, they learned a lot about the history of his native land and now proudly will tell their peers.
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