The Endless Steppe and the Aral Sea (Also, Giant Spiders): 14 Photos from the Road

Shymkent/Шымкент, Kazakhstan to the Aral Sea/Арал Теңізі, Kazakhstan–635 km this section (Total Mileage: 8791 km/40,075 km)

I’ve ridden over mountains, through a summer in southern China and an early-spring blizzard, but it was the Central Asian Steppe that got me. I cycled for days to get as far as I did. Most of them temperatures reached into the high 90s or low 100s and a headwind slowed my progress. And every time I looked up, the same flat horizon.

In the end, I flagged down a Russian trucker and got a ride through the last 400 km to the Aral Sea (the train was necessary for visa reasons). I didn’t feel I was gaining much from this particular misery, and I was behind schedule to meet my friend in Tbilisi.

My route through western Kazakhstan.

Aral Sea (1 of 35) — The largest city in Kazakhstan once stood near here. It was called Sauran, and it was relocated over the centuries to follow the river that runs through these parts. But eventually the site fell out of favor and other cities grew across the region.

Arachnophobes, I’d skip the next 5 images until you get to the photo of the baby horse.

Aral Sea (3 of 35) — In the biodiversity file: Spiders used to scare me, too, but how can you really be scared of something that cool-looking? These guys were everywhere in the desert between Shymkent and Kyzylorda. They had about the same radius as a softball, and weren’t agressive (I walked through a web while taking a bathroom break and she just hung out on my pants for a few seconds before dropping to the ground)

Aral Sea (4 of 35) — At the end of one long, hot day, I took a break to watch one of them working through their supper.

Aral Sea (12 of 35) — A foal only just learning to walk follows mom to join the herd. All across the Kazakh plain, people make their living herding horses, cows and camels, though many of the animals, like these, seem to be wild.

Aral Sea (10 of 35) — My new Russian trucker friend and I stopped outside of Baikonur Cosmodrome, from which Sputnik took flight, and shared a supper of bread, cheese, energy drinks, and home-cured pig belly.

Aral Sea (13 of 35) — The road from the town of Aral (Listed as Aralsk on Google because Russian grammar) to Zhalanash. Aral now sits more than 20 km distant from the Sea itself, but it seems like it is a hub for the slowly recovering fishing industry. I had heard that most of the vessels that once stood beached in the bay near the city had been broken down for scrap, but that some were still left outside the nearby town of Zhalanash. It was a day’s ride down a dirt road, cooled by the approaching thunderstorm (which I narrowly missed; the old shore still seems to have a collection of microclimates that the surrounding plains do not.)

Aral Sea (14 of 35) — The town of Zhalanash is located on the old shore, was probably a fishing village, but now most people make their living herding camels. The actual waters of the Sea lie off in the distance to the left, still invisible from the town itself. In the 1950s, Soviet irrigation projects diverted the two rivers that fed the sea to quench thirsty cotton crops, and by 2007, the sea was 10 percent of its original size. As the water’s salinity increased, massive quantities of fish began to die off, and by the 1980s, a fishing industry that had once supported 60,000 jobs had disappeared altogether.

Aral Sea (15 of 35) — The cotton industry left even more disturbing marks on the landscape. Irrigation from the increasingly salty lake caused a buildup of salt on fertile land, rendering farming unsustainable. The local climate became more continental, shortening the growing season. Pesticides, which had once been diluted by the vast sea, were left in deposits over 28,000 km of exposed seabed. Wind then whipped those salts and chemicals into the air, through the towns that lined the old sea shore, and as far as Pakistan and the Arctic. Cancer and respiratory illness bloomed throughout the region.

Aral Sea (16 of 35) — In 2005, the Kazkh government completed work on a dam separating the northern region of the sea (the “Small Aral”) from the southern part (the “Large Aral”), which is controlled by Uzbekistan. Cotton remains vital to the fragile regional economy in Uzbekistan, and the large Aral continues to shrink. Many predict that it will soon disappear altogether. Many sections of the Small Aral, like the one pictured above, remain desiccated and dead, but the water is slowly rising again, and as early as 2006, people were returning to the water to fish. In a region once wracked by poverty, I saw new homes being built and met truckloads of fishermen on their way to work (Gleefully, “We are *fishermen!*“).

Aral Sea (19 of 35) — There’s still a long way to go for the region to fully recover from the ecological disaster that is the Aral Sea Crisis, and much of the region is still headed in the wrong direction. Now, in a historical moment when our global society is coming to terms with the massive human impact of climate change, it seems right to consider the lessons this smaller crisis, one that lives on a different timeline and scale but has the same core components: collapse of ecological systems; the realization that everything we have and have built relies, on a day-to-day basis, on the abundance of water (and the right kind of water); and an ecological crisis (be it a shrinking sea or accumulating greenhouse gases) that brings the weight of every accumulated ecological stress-point down upon us (overuse of pesticides, unsustainable irrigation practices, inappropriate crop choices, biological warfare, the fickleness of climate…).

While looking around at the ships near Zhalanash, I found some amazing painted portraits on the walls of an old ship. They seem to be the work of a French-Algerian graffiti artist know as Zoo-Project. I’m still following up leads and editing those photos, but watch out for those soon. In the mean time, you can read more about the Aral Sea:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea

http://aralsea.org/

2 thoughts on “The Endless Steppe and the Aral Sea (Also, Giant Spiders): 14 Photos from the Road”

Dan Herbert says:

July 2, 2016 at 3:17 pm

1. I had thought of steppe as waving seas of grass, not the bleak desert you found. I can understand how when you seen one such verst you’ve seen ’em all.
2 I had also thought that the name for the fierce Cossack horsemen that broke up masses of revolutionaries in the Russian Revolution might be derived from “Khazak,” but Google says No — it comes from the Turkic word for “free men.” So, go figure!
3. Better keep those giant spiders there in Khazakstan. Ten thousand miles from here seems about right.
4. Your travels have made us much more aware of the geography of that part of the world. Thanks for keeping us up to date with your vivid pix and captions.

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1. fqwatkins says:
  
  July 2, 2016 at 6:04 pm
  
  Don’t quite know for sure what Cossack denotes, but it seems to be an ethnic distinction, and I’ve encountered at least one person who referred to “Cossack hospitality” in reference to himself, though that was filtered through Google translationand I don’t know what the equivalent Russian terms are (he was seemingly an ethnic Kazakh). I found this post explaining that they have a common etymology but refer to different groups, but on the ground here there seems to be some overlap: http://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/4678/what-is-the-relation-between-the-words-cossack-and-kazakh
  
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