Mo‘ynoq Shahri

I crossed the land border from Turkmenistan into Uzbekistan and arrived in Nukus, the capital of the Karakalpakstan region in the west. Karakalpakstan is mostly desert and is sparsely populated. It is also home to the Aralkum Desert, what used to be the Aral Sea. The Aral Sea was the 4th largest lake in the world, but unsustainable irrigation projects by the Soviet Union in the 1960s onwards led the lake to nearly entirely dry up, with less than 10% of the lake remaining. What remains of the lake became too salty and toxic for any fish to survive which led to the collapse of the fishing industry, and the dry land is a source of toxic dust that pollutes the air creating a public health hazard. I visited Moynaq, once a prosperous fishing village on the shore of the Aral Sea that is now 150km away. There are ruined boats stranded in the desert serving as an eerie reminder of the not too distant past. On the way back from Moynaq I picked up hitchhiker Garima, an Indian girl that had been travelling for 6 years and was on her way to Afghanistan solo. If anyone thinks I'm brave for doing what I do remember there are always way more hardcore people than me out there! I politely declined her invitation to go to Afghanistan with her... "We'd just need to find men to pretend to be our husbands to get across the border!"

Nukus is a modern soviet city but lacks the charm of the other cities in the region. Its isolation made it the perfect home to the Red Army's Chemical Research Institute where Novichok was created - which is partly responsible for the toxic air that now plagues the region. More positively its remoteness also led to the survival of a large collection of Uzbek and Russian art from the early 20th century. Stalin tried to eliminate all non-soviet art in this period, and sent most of the artists to gulags. Artist Igor Savitsky hid the art in this remote corner of the Soviet Union where it survived and is now on display in the Nukus Museum of Art. I'm not really an art connoisseur but it was a nice museum, and I enjoyed the local art that depicted the fishing villages that would have been commonplace at the time of painting, as poignant as it was.Read more