O my flippity gosh. This has to be one of the most breath taking things that I have seen.
Unsurprisingly I woke late. I noticed that my rear tyre was flat. I must have picked up a slow puncture coming into town. So I fixed it and then headed into town. Aralsk itself is a fairly ordinary small to mid sized Kazakh town. It is not the bleak desolate outpost that many commentators will have you believe. Money has been pumped in to try and resurrect the town. It has a nice new town square with a stage for cultural performances. The train station is very smart and the area surrounding it has a nice new hotel (that I wish I had spotted before booking into mine!). Murials portraying fishing life are everywhere. Even my salad was shaped like a fish! It was not until I reached the actual port did it hit me. The sea has gone. Completely gone. There is no sea anymore, just dust and a derelict fishing industry dotted with broken cranes and a harbour littered with with remains of fishing boats, stuck in the mud akin to a fossilised memory of what they once were. I walked around what was once the sea and gazed back at what was once the shore. The sea in now 60kms away as the crow flies. There is a museum dedicated to the environmental mess that is the Aral Sea in an old fishing boat next to the harbour. Inside it has many paintings of young healthy happy fisher folk always working under the sun and always smiling. And then a map showing how the Aral Sea has contracted in the last 40 years.
Not fields or desert but this is where the Aral Sea once was. It is now 60kms over the horizon.
What's left of the fishing fleet. The scrap metal merchants have harvested the top section, leaving the hulls buried in the mud.
My fish shaped tuna salad!
Unsurprisingly I woke late. I noticed that my rear tyre was flat. I must have picked up a slow puncture coming into town. So I fixed it and then headed into town. Aralsk itself is a fairly ordinary small to mid sized Kazakh town. It is not the bleak desolate outpost that many commentators will have you believe. Money has been pumped in to try and resurrect the town. It has a nice new town square with a stage for cultural performances. The train station is very smart and the area surrounding it has a nice new hotel (that I wish I had spotted before booking into mine!). Murials portraying fishing life are everywhere. Even my salad was shaped like a fish! It was not until I reached the actual port did it hit me. The sea has gone. Completely gone. There is no sea anymore, just dust and a derelict fishing industry dotted with broken cranes and a harbour littered with with remains of fishing boats, stuck in the mud akin to a fossilised memory of what they once were. I walked around what was once the sea and gazed back at what was once the shore. The sea in now 60kms away as the crow flies. There is a museum dedicated to the environmental mess that is the Aral Sea in an old fishing boat next to the harbour. Inside it has many paintings of young healthy happy fisher folk always working under the sun and always smiling. And then a map showing how the Aral Sea has contracted in the last 40 years.
Not fields or desert but this is where the Aral Sea once was. It is now 60kms over the horizon.
What's left of the fishing fleet. The scrap metal merchants have harvested the top section, leaving the hulls buried in the mud.
My fish shaped tuna salad!
No comments:
Post a Comment