Nukus

Due to an odd timetabling quirk of the Uzbek train network, it was easier for us to catch a night train from Samarkand all the way across the country than to go to a neighbouring city. So after an uncomfortable 12hr ride (during which the man sharing our cabin said "why are you going to Nukus, there's nothing in Nukus"), we arrived in Nukus.

There are two reasons to come here—and the first is not even in Nukus. You can catch a 3.5hr bus north to a graveyard of rusted, abandoned ships in the middle of the desert. This is the dusty remains of the Aral Sea, formerly the world's third largest lake, which was dried up in the Soviet era when the rivers that fed it were diverted to irrigate enormous cotton plantations. Now it is the world's newest desert. It's maybe the worst man-made environmental disaster in history. But since we were only spending one night in Nukus, and had barely slept on the train up, we didn't fancy a 7hr round trip and decided to skip this detour.

What we *did* make time for was the Savitsky Art Museum. During the Soviet era (again), an artist/archaeologist called Igor Savitsky made it his life's mission to collect all the avant-garde art that was produced in the USSR, before it could be destroyed or suppressed by the authorities as 'degenerate'. Tucked away in a small, desert town on the edge of the Soviet Union, he built a collection of over 82,000 works which eventually came to be known as the 'Louvre of Uzbekistan' or the ‘Louvre in the desert’. We spent a couple of hours marveling at some of these strange and forgotten works, joined (inexplicably) by quite a large regiment of the Uzbek army.

Dan is still suffering with food poisoning from a dodgy shwarma in Samarkand, so laid low in the afternoon reading and watching YouTube. Unironically, it was The English Patient and clips from Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares. Chelsea enjoyed a long walk around Nukus, surprised by how quiet it was on a Saturday afternoon - until she found the extremely bustling locals-only bazaar. She was also chased out of a garden that she’d made no especial effort to get into, a guard shouting ‘no photos’ as she beat a confused retreat. Nothing suspicious about the massive white palace in the garden that doesn’t appear on Google Maps, then, eh?

The fencing they should have put round the secret palace has instead been deployed around two things: defunct labs for chemical weapons testing, and medical facilities treating basically the entire population. This region has extremely high rates of cancer, disability, and infant mortality because the Soviets weren’t hot on health and safety measures. The Russians built the fantastic train network across Uzbekistan (they even do high speed rail!), but they used it to transport and dump toxic chemicals all over the shop, just to see what would happen. Nothing good, obviously.

Spurred on by the weak global economy, we decided to depress ourselves further by spending the evening updating our CVs and getting the ball rolling on our job hunt for January 🥲 If anyone would like to save us the hassle…Baca lagi