Disaster by design: the death and partial rebirth of the Aral Sea.

The aurora was a promise of yet another scorcher of a day, as it’d been yesterday and tomorrow was bound to be, but right now it was fresh and cool as I sat on my pack on the first of Aralsk station’s two platform, making myself the first instant coffee of the day. A bright spot – Venus – shone benevolently in the eastern sky whilst, in the unknown lands beyond the railway lines, a canine rendition of the Aida chorus was in full swing.

I briefly ventured on the overpass, perched atop skinny pylons, rising above the railyard. The city lay below me, a town of corrugated metal roofs and the odd tall structure: a water tower, the gutted ruin of a factory, the shiny minarets of a mosque, the two cranes of the old harbour. Serenaded by the barking dogs, Aralsk slept.

I sat on my bag, coffee mug within reach and a bundle of printouts in my hands. It occurred to me that it was probably the first time ever that anyone sat, at dawn, under a lamppost in Aralskoye More train station, Staples yellow highlighter in hand, reading a bunch of academic papers with titles such as “Creeping Environmental Problems and Sustainable Development in the Aral Sea Basin” or the more succinct “The Aral Sea Disaster”.

They didn’t make for an uplifting read. With the characteristic frankness typical of academics, the papers described the worst man-induced ecological disaster ever, the story of how economic planning succeeded in dissolving – literally into thin air – 74% of the area and 90% of the volume of the fourth largest body of inland water in the world.

It was a story of superlatives, all of them of the kind that one couldn’t really be proud of, which began at the time of the American Civil War. Conflict disrupted the clothing industry, with the Unionist blockading the Confederate ports out of which most of the world’s raw cotton was shipped. Nations scrambled to find alternative sources and, whilst Britain ultimately settled on Egypt and India, Tsarist Russia had its eyes set on the lands between the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers. These, with their relatively mild climate, and longer growing season, were to be Russia’s “cotton bank”.

What the Tsar started, Khrushchev improved. Cotton, the “white gold”, was to be harvested en masse by collective farms in what now are Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, to be then shipped to the mills of Russia and Ukraine and, ultimately, to the world’s markets, earning the USSR precious foreign cash. Between 1960 and 1988 production more than doubled, and the hectares of land dedicated to the crop increased by 40%.

It came, though, at a price.

Cotton, you see, is a thirsty bugger. It requires roughly twice the amount of barley or wheat, and a third more than tomatoes. That water needed to come from somewhere and only the two great rivers, the Jaxartes and Oxus of antiquity, could supply it. Canalization on a pharaonic scale was implemented, and the more water flowed into the crops, the less ended into the Aral Sea. What began as a diversion evolved into a proper water grab that got so extreme that literally nothing flowed from the Syr Darya into the sea between 1974 and 1986, whilst its northern sibling ran dry in 1982, 1983, 1985, 1986 and again in 1989. It didn’t go any better when water actually ended in the sea, for on average the 1980s inflow was one tenth of what it used to be before 1960.

The results of this heinous policy didn’t take long before they appeared and, in terms of their impact, they were well worth of the Book of Revelation. Within ten years from the start of mass irrigation, Aralsk harbour dried up. Dust storms began rising in the air, as the fine sediments of the now dry seabed were whipped by winds into plumes that could be 500km long, so large that they could be detected by satellites. In a band as wide as 100 km around the former shoreline, climate changed. Deprived of the mitigating effect of the sea, summers grew hotter but shorter, and winters became harsher and longer, effectively reducing the length of the growing season. Salt crept through the land and entered the groundwater table, pooling with the salt in the air to wreak havoc in the local communities’ health. As a 2001 article published on “Environmental Health Perspectives” put it, “To have a drink of water in the Aral Sea area could be detrimental to your health”. The quantitative of salts dissolved in groundwater in and around Aralsk could be up to 20 times higher than in North America.

The Aral Sea populations began to suffer from the 1970s onwards. Abnormally high levels of tuberculosis, kidney failure, oesophagus cancer, hepatitis and still births were nonchalantly swept under the carpet by Moscow until the onset of glasnost and, ultimately, the end of the USSR. Still, it didn’t make much difference as the horses had all already bolted out of the stable and the door had, literally, evaporated.

I folded away my papers and crossed the deserted station foyer. By now a rich sunlight streamed into the waiting room, where a woman in a flower-print dress and headscarf slept on a metal bench. On the far wall, above a wood panelling, stood an enormous mosaic, depicting the moment when the men of Aralsk answered Lenin's cry for help – his own collectivisation policies having triggered an enormous famine in Russia and Kazakhstan, with nomads slaughtering their own cattle rather than seeing it being pinched – and sent trainloads of fish to the affected regions.

A large square opened outside the station, with a luxuriant flower bed surmounted by the white wooden monument of a sailing ship. On my left, behind an old green coach bought second hand from France – and still wearing the marks “Voyages Pyrenées Rousillon” – stood the tan building of Hotel Altair. I knew of another such establishment in town, Hotel Aral, which could either be open or permanently abandoned depending on who you asked; Altair, instead, was very much in business, boasting rooms furnished with the latest post-Soviet décor, non-working aircon and common bathroom where an unseen guest was busy filling the shower with empty beer bottles.

As I sat eating a breakfast of fried eggs and dubious sausage slices, with just a dab of ketchup – I’d been given early check-in and brekkie for less than a tenner a night – I thought at my role there. How ethical was it to be a tourist in what could effectively be described as a disaster zone? Wasn’t it questionable to be visiting a place whose main attraction, whose main claim to fame, was the terrible, man-made tragedy that had befallen it? Had the lake remained healthily in balance, had the want of cotton never diverted these waters, would I have come at all?

I didn’t seek any self-justification in that dimly-lit, slightly greenish room, and I don’t now. I wasn’t a historian, a journalist or a researcher with a higher sense of purpose. My role in being there, besides answering a call that I’d heard since I was six and reading about the Sea on the “Junior Woodchucks Guidebook” was the same one that brought me to the Occupied Territories in Bethlehem: to see something with my own two eyes and, possibly, to understand Aral beyond the articles and damnatio memoriae I’d read so many times. I wasn’t there to peek into other people’s misfortunes, as much as I don’t enjoy photographing homeless people on the street; in fact, my secret hope was to find out that, at the end of the day, things weren’t as dire as the news reports made them to be. At that point of my lucubration my phone beeped. It was time to go.

I’d seen Serik a long time before we met in the parking lot outside the Altair hotel; in fact, I first read about him on Al Jazeera. Dubbed “Aralsk’s only tour guide”, he’d accepted to be my guide for the day and now welcomed me in his purple Nissan 4WD. He was a man in his thirties, dressed simply in T-shirt, swimming trunks decorated with the Australian flag and shades. A real man of the steppe, he wasn’t one to waste words. Our conversation was to be interspersed with long intervals of deep, but not awkward, moments of silence.

We trundled along a smooth road, overtaking lorries and slowing down to allow patrols of Bactrian camels to serenely cross before us. The road was a far cry from what I was to experience in other parts of Central Asia and it was the first clue of the fact that, at least in that particular corner of the former Aral Sea, those claiming death, disaster and despair ought to be taken with a fairly large pinch of salt.

We passed villages which, however dusty and remote, featured houses with double glazing and, as Serik pointed out, heating, plumbing and electricity. Some were so new that the crates used to ship the cinder blocks still littered their backyards. All this, said Serik, showed that the shores of the North Aral Sea were changing. The villages were still isolated and the steppe an unforgiving environment, but they no longer were destitute. Families were quietly thriving on cattle – cows, camels, horses – fishing was picking up again, so much so that folks now needn’t use their camels for transportation as most houses had two cars. “One to follow the herds, the other to show off in town” laughed Serik, and I joined him. All this, he said, had been triggered by “the project”.

He was referring to a $80m initiative sponsored by the World Bank that had grabbed the North Aral Sea from the brink of death. It included a mixture of improvements to the management of the Syr Darya waters and, crucially, built a dam across the isthmus that used to link the North and South seas. This desperate measure effectively condemned the South, but the results were dramatic. The sea level rose 6 meters, increasing the North’s volume by 68%; salinity returned to levels seen only before 1960 and wildlife appeared out of nowhere, staging a spectacular comeback.

I was aching to see the sea, but we weren’t there yet. We bounced along a goat’s path dug between wispy bushes, having left the tarmac a few kilometres prior. Around us the dry grassland stretched from horizon to horizon, as far as the eye dared to go. Where it met the sky, the dark blue sky and the tan earth were blurred by dust in suspension. But for yet another herd of camels, we were alone on the road, a mournful Kazakh folk whispering out the car stereo. A graveyard stood on an imperceptible rise of the otherwise perfectly flat ground. Cemeteries, here, looked like small citadels, necropolis of domed chapels enclosed behind brick walls, huddled one against the other like timorous children, crescents sticking out of every cupola. Behind it, glittering in the sun, was the view I’d been waiting for a good twenty years: the Aral Sea.

We rolled along the cemetery, the sea growing larger and larger to our left. It was a serendipitous locale for a graveyard, I thought, directly overlooking the bobbing water, so much so that I couldn’t take my eyes off the water for pretty much the entire journey to Aqespe. We drove on the former seabed, the pre-1960 coastline on my right, bone-dry and virtually lifeless. The view to the left was as different as night is from the day. A narrow band of green shrubs ran to the water’s edge, where birds of all sizes and shapes stomped, stuttered, flew and floated. If there was to be a symbol of the success of the World Bank project, the fluttering of dozens of little wings at the passing of our car had to be it. Ten years ago, the waters were kilometres away from here and the birds nowhere to be seen.

In the great poker game of the North Aral Sea, Aqespe had to be the one who picked up a 2 and a 7, offsuit. It didn’t really look any different from any of the countless mildly dilapidated villages straddling the whole former Soviet Union: a main drag along which houses lied, tossed in a random order, grey with corrugated iron roofs, trees in the back garden and a veggie patch for peppers and gherkins. Except that Aqespe barely had any trees alive, there weren’t any back gardens, veggie patches and those big, yellow pipes that appear pretty much everywhere in Russia. Or perhaps there were, but you couldn’t see them, for something was in the way of everything.

Sand. Sand was everywhere, in dunes and mounds and impalpable coatings on every surface.

As we drove in, Serik told me the story of the place. Aqespe was a village of fishermen and cattle raisers sitting pretty by the seaside; as the water receded, the dust, blowing from the dry seabed, began taking its place and it seemed that it liked Aqespe quite a lot. Dunes began forming, covering the pastures, and the wind brought more and more of it, until it started laying siege to the village. Bulldozers were called in to fight them off but, year after year, Aqespe was being swallowed alive. A new village had been built, away from the lake and the dunes, but a few homes still soldiered on, and even fewer villages had decided to stay.

Serik parked at the edge of town and I got out. Up until then I’d seen dozens of photos of those Namibian mining towns being submerged by the desert, but this time it was happening right before my eyes. It was an experience a lot more profound than what I could experience out of a photo from Africa, and a great deal more unsettling. Sand made up the main road, sand so thin and impalpable that I sank in it as if I was walking in snow. Sand munched contently at the abandoned houses, and erected walls around the few houses that remained inhabited, trenches dug around them to keep them away from a mortal embrace. As I stood at the only junction in Aqespe, it occurred to me that this was the only place I knew of where one had to go downstairs to enter his own house.

Aqespe lived on. A man with a bucket exited the first house on the right, the one that looked like the next likely candidate to a sandy oblivion. I watched him as he watched me, walking with his bucket to a friend squatting atop a large dune behind us. Another man tended to a string of horses to my left, feeding them and stroking their lucid, shiny fur. A little girl and her siblings shrieked with delight as they played in a pen where a dozen Bactrian camels sat and looked at me solemnly behind their long eyelashes.

I wasn’t honestly expecting anyone to be living here; hell, I wasn’t expecting anyone to be wanting to be here, and I certainly didn’t expect any children to be here. The sight of the villagers made a neat crumpled ball of all the motivations for being here I made in the Altair’s dining room, and sent it flying along a perfect arc towards the dustbin labelled “Bullshit”. Fact was, Aqespe made me feel like a gatecrasher at a funeral.

I hobbled up and down the road, already annoyed at having to walk like a demented astronaut in the sand, not daring to imagining a lifetime of that. I looked at the man who was tending to the horses, thought what he could possibly be thinking about me, about these tourists nosing into his village’s misfortunes, and decided to hightail it out of Aqespe. It wasn’t until Serik drove us back to the shoreline that I stopped feeling like an intruder.

Google “Aral Sea” and most of the images returned will be of two kinds: black and white snapshots of waterscapes, and colour pictures of rusting boats stranded in the desert like used props of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”. Many an Internet source mourned how, one by one, these relics had been met by the flame, being sold by weight to Chinese scrapyards, as if it was a crime for locals to be trying to make a buck out of this misfortune and at the expense of tourists’ photos; long story short, I wasn’t expecting any beached boats to be remaining in the North Aral Sea and, frankly, I was perfectly happy with it. Aqespe had given me enough doom and gloom.

You can imagine my surprise, then, when Serik stopped the Nissan by the water, pointed towards a small hill covered in reeds and empty bottles of President vodka and simply said “Here’s the first one”. I followed the direction of his hand and, indeed, there it was. A rusty hull, some twenty meters long, partially wedged into the coast, prow lapping against the waters of the resurgent sea. I walked towards her, scaring a number of little birds that scattered around, chirping lamentably.

The air smelt of mud, salt and reeds. It echoed with the calls, trills and cries of the birds that loitered on the shore or bobbed along the shallow water, undoubtedly waiting for me to vacate the premises before returning to their occupations. But I still lingered on, for this carcass of a boat was puzzling. Even to someone as clueless to seafaring as myself, she didn’t look like any fishing trawler I’d seen before. She was long and thin, low on the water, with little if any superstructure to speak of, just a long deck with hatchways opening at regular intervals. This I emphatically reported back to Serik once back into the air-conditioned cocoon of the Nissan.

He nodded. “Yes, that was a tanker” he said. A moment of pause, then he asked: “You know about Vozrozhdenya Island, right?” I did. “Well, she used to run supply missions there, gas and diesel”. Vozrozhdenya, Russian for ‘rebirth’, was probably the most inappropriately-named place in the entire globe, a particularly nasty appendix to the already thick volume of Aral-related disasters. Once a small island bang in the middle of the sea, Rebirth island was designed as the location not of a buen retiro for Hare Krishnas, but as the location for the USSR’s most important research and production centre for chemical and biological weapons.

Details about what went down the small, closed town of Kantubek remain sketchy, but over almost 40 years Soviet scientists, who lived there with their families, created, weaponised and stockpiled tons of pathogens – anthrax, bubonic plague, smallpox, brucellosis and more – which was then stored in silos scattered around the island, its remoteness a guarantee of safety.

We drove on, leaving the tanker to its rest, the heat dissolving the memories of sea crossings to an island of secretive evils. The coastline offered solace from the dark thoughts of Vozrozhdenya, until a scene worth of the original “Planet of the Apes” appeared. I got off the Nissan and, like Charlton Heston when he approached the remnants of Lady Liberty in the planet that turned to be his future’s Earth, walked to my relic.

This time it was a trawler, I was sure of it. She lied on its side; the fo’c’sle had gone, but the quarter was still intact, funnel and hatchways eyeing me. I walked closer, imagining how – had I been able to travel back 40 years – I’d be walking on the seabed, looking up the hull of the ship as her sailors hauled in the day’s catch. A loud crack, coming from my feet, startled me. I’d been walking over a sun-hardened, salt-encrusted mud towards the wreck, and in my daydreaming it hadn’t occurred to me that the mud had gone, replaced by shells. Hundreds, thousands, untold numbers of sea shells littered the shore, piled 30-cm-high in a band sneaking parallel to the waters’ edge, a holocaust of mussels offered to the gods of cotton.

A third relic followed soon, whilst we could still see the previous one lying sideways. It was the entire hull of another fishing boat, its above-deck structure gone or never existed in the first place. She lied at a slight angle, aged but nonetheless looking as if she could still take on the sea which now seemed tantalisingly close. I looked admiringly at its forms, but I was growing tired of doom and destruction. There’s just a number of times you can hear “fire and fury” before it loses its ascendant, and I’d reached precisely that point. I stopped looking at the rusting hull and began noticing other things, signs of rebirth that had so far escaped the spotlight.

Minnows swam furiously in the shallows, joined by other small critters who zoomed back and forth in the brackish waters. Unperturbed by my presence, birds who nested in the ship’s hull flew out of the peepholes or scampered along the muddy banks, picking the critters one at the time. Up above, flocks of larger birds cruised in the blue sky: honing their V-formation, dive-bombing into the sea, or gently caressing the waters before settling for the smoothest landing. I couldn’t see them, but I could feel the presence of fish in the waters of the sea; besides that, Serik had told me that, out of pretty much nowhere, fishing had reappeared and that last year 7,000 tonnes were caught by fisheries all around the North Aral Sea. The dive-bombing birds added to the tally.

I left the rusting legacy of disaster and returned to the car rather contently. From then on, it was only nature; harsh, perhaps unforgiving at times, but nature nonetheless. Villages like Zhalanash, once known for their boat graveyard, looked happier without them, free to be roamed by splendid horses and inquisitive camels, whilst everyone else waited for the sea to return. Outside, the wispy scrubland continued and we bounced along dirt tracks into the steppe; sometimes within sight of the water, sometimes far. The land was big and endless, a flyspeck of the ocean of grassland that started in Mongolia and wouldn’t end until Hungary.

Aralsk slept in the heat of the early afternoon. Serik drove in town whilst I still day-dreamed about the birds flying above the water. He spoke of seeing the lake for the first time, of having to borrow a car from friends to see the lake, which he – born and bred in Aralsk – had never seen. I asked him about how it felt when he finally met it, a good drive out of Zhalanash, looking its worst before the onset of the project. “It was great to see the water, but also very sad”. Now, he said, it was better and, should the project be complete, it’d be only a matter of years before Aralsk harbour. “I’d love to see that”, I said. He smiled like a Cheshire cat. “I’ll sure let you know” he beamed, before driving off.

I’d expected the whistling undertaker from For a Fistful of Dollars to be appearing at every corner I turned. I was to experience this feeling again, in Central Asia, but Aralsk looked – even smelt, if that was ever possible – the part of a Sergio Leone Western village before a Mexican stand-off.

A gate with a lock led to the smallest city park I’d ever seen. Four benches along a path, two of which in the shadow, and both laden with elderly men staring impassibly at me. The path led past them and then turned left; Serik told me to follow it. I nodded to the men and walked on. A rather incongruous log house, of the kind one’d be expecting to see in the tundra, lied to the left. The city’s museum, shut. Around it, painted gaudily in the colours of a Russian flag, were three fishing boats, monuments to the dead harbour which, as Serik promised, lay just behind.

A tall concrete wall severed the port from the city itself but here, behind the boat, was an unlikely first row seat to the oddest spectacle, a prime spot to witness what sort of plague mankind could be when it really gave it its damnest.

Aralsk harbour descended quickly from the margin where I stood. How deep? Six, eight, ten meters? It arched wide into a vast gulf that then opened to a sea that wasn’t there yet - or anymore - depending on your level of optimism. On the near side stood the two cranes I’d seen before, together with store rooms and depots. On the far side the gutted shell of the cannery rusted away quietly, a testament to the thousands of fishing jobs deemed less valuable than those brought by cotton. A few meters away from me, a handful of cows munched serenely on the scrubs growing on the harbour’s slope.

As I stood there watching my mind brought me to an episode of my childhood. It was a winter evening and my mum and I had gone to the local pool to pick up my brother from his swimming practice. It was a day as different from today as it could be – cold, misty, dark, with lampposts glowing yellow in the fog – and we were early.

The café, where mum and I waited, looked directly above the empty Olympic swimming pool. To my five-year-old eyes the sloping depths of the pool and its glistening porcelain perfection felt endless, mysterious and somewhat menacing. It was a feeling I wasn’t to taste again until some 25 years later, as I stood on the cusp of Aral’s dried-up harbour.

How could that happen? How was it possible for a port to run dry, for a sea to all but disappear and for the Book of Revelations to add a new chapter without anyone raising concerns, pounding the alarm or demonstrating dissent? I asked that to Serik, and I was immediately, politely, reminded that I was matching a democracy with an autocratic police state. Concerns had been raised, medical reports – especially from Uzbekistan’s Karalpakstan district – urgently raised, but no action was taken from Moscow. Cotton was deemed to be too strategic and, besides, the USSR’s environmental record was appalling anyway. “The decline of the Aral Sea was expected and [the cotton policy was] deemed a positive outcome” wrote Kristopher White in the Journal of Eurasian Studies. And that, as they say, was that.

I ate at one of the two restaurants recommended by Serik. A nondescript house without so much of a sign, standing opposite the Aral Hotel. The menu filled three pages of dense Cyrillic but only a handful of items were available; still, the chicken was tender and flavourful, the vegetables fresh and the fries had been cut and cooked by hand, rather than coming straight out of an industrial frozen pack. I felt the other clients’ gaze – all six of them – for the whole time. It was neither threatening nor hostile, just laden with curiosity and unasked questions. I felt it whilst I tucked into the chicken, the vegetables and the fries. I felt it as I dipped the hard bread into the meat sauce. I felt them looking at me as I drank Tassay water from the bottle, forgetting the glass left beside the plate by the gold-toothed waitress. And, as I stood up, gave a crumpled 1000 tenge note and waved away the change I felt them registering my every move.

I ambled about the deserted main square for a while, eyeing the I Love Aral sign and the monument to the glorious dead of the 1941-45 conflict, the list of name impossibly long for such a small place, as is the case in almost every ex-Soviet village I visited. Somewhere to my right, a train siren blew. Two women walked across the square.

It was hot outside, but it was even hotter in my room. A white air conditioning unit had been mounted, protruding incongruously out of the dark green-and-brown tapestry, but no amount of cajoling succeeded in getting it to work; the air remained immobile, stifling and still. I felt I could hear the sound of drops of sweat working their way through the coating of dust and salt that had covered me like a shroud. I left again, seeking breeze and shadow.

Saturday night in Aralsk. As the sun fell the nightclub opened, not looking any less seedy than it was before; both restaurants I’d been recommended were, instead, shut. A crowd of thirty-or-so teenagers congregated at the railway station square, below the wooden galleon. They didn’t bother checking me out as they set up a sound system based out of an impeccably kept, aubergine-purple Lada sedan and began dancing to the hardbass blasting out of the car’s open windows and doors. I went to sleep with that unlikely lullaby, and it still went on when I left the Altair at 5 AM, heading for the station.

Aralsk disappeared into darkness as I fashioned a comfy cocoon out of my third-class berth. I arrived in town without a clear expectation of what was waiting in store, and even now as the train rolled out I wasn’t too sure I understood what I’d seen. Images of yesterday played through my mind like diapositive. The shores of the Sea, birds: rebirth, recovery, the future. Aqespe, Aralsk: abandonment, disaster, the past. The villages, I reasoned as I was lullabied into a deep sleep by the swaying train, reminded me of Clint Eastwood’s character in Gran Torino: a man reacting to hardship not by becoming mournful and mellow but, rather, by turning tough, tougher than he’d thought he could ever be. And I couldn’t deny feeling a pinch of admiration for that.