To The Aral Sea with a sleeping bag and backpack

Almaty,Kazakhstan November 2002 Jenna Fisher
I have just returned from the middle of nowhere on earth. The first quarter of my last year as a English teacher in Kazakhstan went by pretty fast and suddenly vacation showed up begging to be spent -away from my village. Adventure called. With five whole days to do anything, go anywhere and spend as little money as possible. I knew where I was heading: The Aral Sea.
As soon as I finished my last class and wished my students an “interesting” holiday, I stuffed my sleeping bag and some underwear in my pack and met a friend in Almaty. From there we took the 15 hour overnight train to Taraz where we met another fellow Peace Corps Volunteer, and then wandered through the meat and vegetable section of the Southern Bazaar admiring the head of lamb or giant hog's leg, occasionally slipping in puddles of blood draining from the hanging meats until our next train; the 17 hour train to Aralsk was due.
On the train we met Nurlan who had just come from the Kazakhstani version of "Who wants to be a millionaire." He was a round Kazakh man with a kind face and gentle eyes. He hadn't won the million dollars he told us, but he had had a good time. We went over his questions with him, which he had written down on little scrap pieces of paper and talked about what he answered, why and what the correct answers were. He showed us a picture he had taken with the show's host and told us how excited his nine year old daughter would be to see it.
Outside our train window the steppe flew by. The vast majority of land in Kazakhstan is not like what I get to see out of my bedroom window every day. (My town Issyk is at the foot of the Ala-Tau mountains, while the rest of KZ is said to be flatter than a pancake.) As I stared out of the train window I saw that there was only a small amount of low vegetation and every so often we'd pass through a tiny town, but the rest, steppe, seemed to go on forever.
Kazakhstan is a country that boasts contrast. Mountains and steppe, intense heat in the summer upwards of 40 Centigrade in the south and frigid, icy winters often below -30 C in the North. As the ninth largest country in the world you expect some of these dichotomies. Even so, it is still startling to look out of a train window for hours and see no sign of people. Glued to the window, it had been three hours since the last sign of a village and I was reminded of a contrast that is not so boasted in this country. Though Kazakhstan is huge in size, it holds less than 15 million people. I was happy to be on a train where the windows were not nailed shut in the last of this southern November heat. I had my eyes peeled for people or camels. Which would come first?
We passed what looked like the remains of an ancient city in the middle of sand and desert on the morning of our second day on the train. I asked Nurlan what it was. "It’s the remains of an old city" he clarified for me. Later I learned that it was the ancient city of Sairam, and birthplace of Kozha Akhmed Yasaui, famous Sufi teacher, founder of Yasauia Sufi order and Turkic Poet. We passed close to Baikanur, where Russia still launches all of its sputniks and cosmonauts and saw the hugest satellite dishes and other such contraptions you could dare to imagine. It felt like we were traveling across Mars. Still, no people.
When we got to the tiny town of Aralsk, once estimated to have more than 40,000 people living there, it was cold and dark and desolate. The train slowed down just barely long enough for some men standing in-between wagons to push us off. We had no idea where we were going. We were the only three that got off the train.
Aralsk was named for the sea that it used to border. The Aral Sea that once lapped at the edges of the fishing town has now receded some 2 hours away. It is one of the world's environmental disasters. The sea, once smaller in size only than the Caspian Sea, Lake Victoria and Lake Superior is now devastatingly smaller. About 40 years ago, with the goal of increasing cotton production on a massive scale throughout the USSR, the Soviet government decided to divert the rivers that fed the Aral Sea. What resulted was both expected and devastating. Cotton production rose but water levels dropped so drastically that by 1987 the Aral Sea broke into two sections, north and south. The climate has been affected in a major way; the air is drier, winters start earlier and are colder, summers are hotter and plagued with sand/salt/dust storms. Locals sometimes have to walk through the town with clothing over their mouths and eyes. The town, once a prosperous fishing port, is now struggling to survive.
We putzed around for a while in the early morning darkness trying to figure out if and where there was a hotel, and finally were taken by an ambitious taxi driver for the cost of about $2 the equivalent of about three blocks to the dorm-style building in the center of the town. The hotel wasn't heated but they gave us old plug in heaters to help cut the cold. We asked the girl at the front desk wearing heavy jacket and gloves, if she knew how we could get someone to take us out to the Sea. She immediately picked up the phone. When she hung up she told us a man would be out to take us in the morning.
We woke up to snow on the ground and could see our breath in the hotel. At 8:00 we jumped into a white military jeep and met Timour who used to work for the UNDP in Aralsk. He told us the organization had been active and useful in his area, and spoke about how affected he and his family had been by the chance at what he called “helping to restart their life with tools.”
The first thing Timour said after we left the main drag in Aralsk was "where the heck is the road" or some thing close in Russian, as he off-roaded a little left and a little right over the snow covered jeep trail heading off into the bed of the dried up sea. We slid around a little on the wet ground and gaped wide-eyed at what lay around us. Absolutely nothing. And then...
Camels. (Cue the music) trains of camels. Grazing camels, walking camels, camels playing, camels snoozing, camels chewing. Camels.
I had been waiting, the whole of my year and a half stint in Kazakhstan to see the two humped, Bactrian Camel native to Asia; and here they were. In the middle of the Aral Sea.
We passed what Timour called the "ship graveyard" where more than 10 massive rusty hulls, relics from prosperous fishing days, were sitting ominously this way and that in the sand and salt. After winding our way through the ships we drove through a town with no more than 10 houses built up out of mud and straw. I guessed it was an old fishing town given its state, but Timour told us that it was in fact, a camel town. "Each of these houses, own 17 - 30 camels, 16 is very little.” He had told us earlier that a camel runs for 100,000 Tenge, about $600 dollars. “These people that live here are rich people." And we drove on.
When we finally got to the shore of the Aral Sea the wind whipped at our faces like a belt, and the seconds I exposed my fingers were too long. There were no houses along this shore, just a yurt and a couple of metal wagons for the fishers to warm up in. There were two men working with their nets pulling black and white flounder from them and tossing them in piles on the rocky beach. The boats that rested there were not massive hulls, they were tiny wooden boats. Toys in comparison.
We had reached one of the most remote places I have ever been in this world. And you could feel it. We breathed it. These men lived it. It was both desolate and spectacular. The Aral Sea.
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