The Ships in Aral – 8/17/12
Aug 18th, 2012 by admin
The ride to Aral at the top of what used to be the northern lobe of the Aral Sea is about 375 miles and the GPS again says that it’ll will take over 8 hours. After yesterday, we cringe at why that might be.
We ask the waitress at breakfast where we might find a supermarket and, lo and behold, there’s one right next to the hotel. We find it and stock up on supplies, mostly water, for what expect to be a night camping. Back in the car. Fuel up. Head for the M32 and we leave Aktobe.
We’re bracing for the worst but trying to convince ourselves that the road to Aral will be better than the road from Atyrau. After all, it’s an M road. If the road quality is at least as good as the surface from Shubarqudiq, we’ll be happy. If it turns out to be like yesterday’s 200 miles of hell, we’ve decided to blow off Aral and head back north to Russia.
We have to be out of Kazakhstan in 3 days because we have only 5 day immigration passes so the plan is to go to Aral, see what’s left of the village now abandoned by the sea and return to the north to leave Kazakhstan by way of Petropavlovsk. If we end up with another road bummer, we’ll never make our exit on time. We have no idea what, if any, consequences there might be and we don’t want to find out.
As we pass the turn off for the road to Atyrau, the M32 leaves Aktobe and it looks great. Smooth, no potholes and no traffic. This is too good to be true. It even gets better. We cross onto a section has just recently been paved. We just hope it lasts.
It does last for some 200 plus miles through the empty desert. This could be the Mojave desert through California. All along the route we see free ranging cows, horses, camels, sheep and goats.
And eagles. We count tens of these big, brown eagles. They are everywhere. We no trees at all, these eagles are perched either on the ground or on highway signs. Not a safe way for an eagles to make a living and there are carcasses on the road to illustrate the fact. I have no idea what birds this big can find out here to subsist on but there must be something. Although there are flocks of small birds on the roadway, they are too quick and nimble for the eagles to catch. We’ll have to research this later.
At about 200 hundred miles our luck finall runs out. The road is closed and there is a sign directing traffic to a dirt and gravel side road. Here we go again. But there’s only about 10 miles of this and then we’re back on the newly paved M road. In the remaing 100 miles, there’s only one more short stretch. Almost all of the road from Qarabutaq to Aral is fine and fast.
We leave the highway at Aral and head into town to see the derelict fish processing plant anf now empty harbor. There’s a memorial built in town that has 4 boats on stands that commemorate the missing fisherman of days past when there was an Aral Sea.
We stop in the town center to see the market and meet two couples from France whoh are traveling to Istanbul in Rvs. They left Paris earlier in the year and passed through Moscow to Beijing to Ulan Bator to Aral. They were staying at the decrepit hotel or actually RV camping next to it. We chat a bit (my French is equivalent to their English) and wish each other well.
The main reason for the stop at the market is to try to get directions to Jalangash, the site of the iconic stranded coastal steamer sitting on the sand that was the bottom of the Aral Sea. We know where it is on our suspect Kazakhstan map but we can’t find our way out of this rabbit warren of a town. We ask but the directions we get are very vague so we’re in grid search mode until we find a road that looks like it heads out of town to the west. It’s very unlikely that there are two roads.
So what is the deal about the Aral Sea? For a great and detailed description of the Aral Sea and the environmental disaster that it has become you should check out the Wikipedia entry. This is the short, very short version. In the early sixties, the Soviets dammed both of the rivers that fed the Aral to provide irrigation water for the upstream cotton plantations, err, collectives. (Now that I think about it there are very few differences between the operation of a cotton plantation and a cotton collective. Think about it and you may come to the same realization.)
Any way, the Soviets knew full well that the fine fishery that existed historically would die if they cut off the flow of the influent rivers but the choice was made to support cotton at the expense of the fish and the fishermen. In typical Soviet fashion, when the fish started to disappear and the fishing fleet died, the Soviets trucked in fish from the Baltic and Black Seas to the cannery to keep it in operation. Not very cost effective.
In the intervening time, the water in the part of the Aral, the North Aral, virtually disappeared and the salinity and toxicity of the larger South Aral continued to climb until the entire sea ecosystem went into catastrophic failure. In 2002, the construction of a concrete barrier was started and finished in 2005 that closed a channel between the north and south parts of the sea. Financed by the World Bank and others, the goal is to save and retore the North Aral and abandon the South Aral now generally considered to be beyond recovery due pollution by dust blown in from the surrounding deserts that is contaminated with pesticides and other harmful pollutants. The goal is to have the North Aral restored by 2015 and have water back in the harbor for a new fishing fleet.
We finally find a road that heads west out of town. We’re trying to find the stranded ships and the Lonely Planet guide says that they are about 35 miles west of Aral in a hamlet named Jalangash. It’s probably down this road but the road is a terrible ribbon of corrugated gravel. We having trouble making 20 mph. As is common, there is a dirt track cut along the road. We try that but it’s not much better. We may not make it by sunset. That would be a world class bummer because we want to see the sips but we really don’t want to overnight here.
We decide to drop the Cherokee’s tire pressure to about 20 psi to soften the ride. It works and we pick up speed. In about an hour we’re in Jalangash. We can see the iconic ship across what used to be the bay but is now a flat depression. We ask for directions and a local man points us to a dirt track. We follow it and we end up at a bluff over-looking the ship. Park the car and hike down the bluff and across the white sand to the relic.
It hardly even looks like a ship any longer. Scrap monger have cut off the major pieces of steel and what remains is nearly rotted away. But here is is: the post chaild for environmental disaster. It’s just about the time in the late afternoon that the photographers call the golden hour, when the light is still intense but due to the light’s longer trip through the atmosphere all the colors are softened by reds and browns. The natural rust brown color is heightened by the late afternoon sun and the bright white graffiti characters that some one has painted on the hulk (the ship’s captain on the bridge, a crewman here and there) pop off the desert floor of the old dry seabed.
We snap our pictures. Proof that we’ve been here. And then hike back to the car and back up the dirt track to the hamlet and the road back to Aral. The sun is almost set but the lowered air pressure in the tires gets us back to Aral in less than hour just as darkness falls.
We drive past some young men by the side of the road who are talking to some policemen. They all give us the WTF look and as we pass them the policemen jump into a car and chase after us. They pull up alongside us and motion us over. We know that this is either a document check or a curiosity check as we have been intentionally going slowly through town.
It’s definitely a curiosity check. There are four of them and as they come up to the car each wants to shake hands and welcome us. They start questioning us in Russian and I tell them in Russian that we don’t speak Russian. One of them asks what I do speak. I tell him English. He keeps asking questions in Russian. It turns out that they are just curious. They loved the GPS’s moving map, especially when they could see where they were and the M32 leading down south. They wished us well and sent us on our way.
Just as we left Aral and headed back to the M32, we stopped to get fuel and pump up the tires with a small inflater that John carries. The pumping takes a while, thousands and thousands of small poofs. And just before we got the last tire pumped up, the inflater over-heated and decided to take a break. About 20 minutes later we finished and left.
Up the Aral access road and onto the M32. Off for the first short construction detour. Later, another detour – this one about 10 miles. Back on the M32 again and into the first picnic area. It’s over 250 miles back to Aktobe and we’ve decided to camp for the night. Set up the tents. Have some wine. Cook and eat a freeze dried meal (pasta primavera, yummy). Into the tent and sleep
Obi-wan
One Response to “The Ships in Aral – 8/17/12”
Nice pictures of the Aral Sea. The Salton is close behind, although at least the Salton wasn’t a real sea to begin with. Apparently even the graffiti can’t get by without a healthy ration of vodka.
Drive carefully.