Nukus. It is like a boomtown, frontier town, and ghost town in one. There is admittedly little to do in Nukus itself. The state museum boasts the last Caspian Tiger. You can see it stuffed. There is, however, a world class art museum, the Savitsky Museum. The director, Igor Savitsky, collected all banned Russian art work and accumulated over 90,000 pieces. While the art has survived, many/most of the artists themselves languished in the gulags or adhered to strict Soviet regulations about how their art should look and what it should represent. Savitsky was able to get away with this because Nukus was – as it is now – a backwater. Far from Moscow, little attention was paid to this region and to what the museum director was doing. The museum was pretty interesting and contained an ethnographic section, Khorzem history section, Karakalpakistan artwork, and Soviet dissident art.
The people in Karakalpakistan are wonderful. Everyone I pass eagerly says "hello." The children are beautiful and happy…especially considering their living and health conditions.
I arrived in Nukus on Wednesday night after crossing from Turkmenistan. I quickly met two travelers at my B&B. Jerry is an older semi-retiree from Canada who seems to have traveled everywhere in the world and has the wildest stories I've ever heard. Miles is a Brit a bit older than myself who works in London. We enjoyed some beer and tea on Wednesday night. On Thursday I spent part of my day at the Savitsky and part of it finding an internet café while wandering through Nukus. I also tried (unsuccessfully) to change travelers checks. It was in that first internet café, Fortuna, that I realized blogspot is blocked here in Uzbekistan. So are many other sites: BBC, Facebook, LiveJournal, and oh so many more. This is I'm sure part of Islam Karimov's policies of keeping islamists in check. Not sure how many have blogs. In any case, many thanks to Anna Melman for posting my last two posts. So posts will be slower coming as they'll have to go via email to someone who can actually put them up on strategery101.
Thursday evening my mother arrived after her very long trip to Uzbekistan. I went with our driver to meet her at the airport. That night the four of us (me, my mother, Jerry, and Miles) all enjoyed beer and tea at our B&B in the beautiful courtyard with the horse wagon with a big sign stapled to it denoting that it is from the "19 th century." Yes, it might be, but the staples look 21st century.
Friday, my mother and I set off for Moynaq, a city which was once surrounded on three sides by the Aral Sea. Today it is over 200k from the shores of the Aral. All this has happened within the last 3 decades or so. The Aral Sea is (was?) the 4 th largest inland body of water, but it has been shrinking rapidly due to cotton cultivation, general irrigation, and damming/redirecting river flows. The result has been much hotter summers and much colder winters, the utter destruction of the one thriving fishing industry, and increased salinity of the ground (which in turn means more water is required for irrigation and the crops are of poorer quality…which of course leads to further salinity), to name just a few problems.
So as we drove to Moynaq I noticed that the road was a good couple of meters above the surrounding area and I realized that this must have been part of the peninsula and the Sea must have extended alongside. Moynaq itself is a very depressing town. The Moynaq sign is adorned with fish, but there are no fish. For heaven's sake, there is no sea! I went a bit off road to take a look at what Moynaq is famous for today…beached rusting fishing boats. Amazing, there are just boats stranded everywhere (although I only saw about 6 or 7). The earth is visibly caked with salt and it feels weird to walk on it. The cows look sick. The people look sick. In our lifetime we will have witnessed the Aral Sea shrinking into oblivion at the expense of the people who live here and the climate. And what's crazy about it is that the shrinking sea is a totally man made problem. Of course the people here are also sick because of the chem & bio weapons that were developed in this region. The Soviets developed super duper anthrax germs in this factory, which I'm sure hasn't helped the situation here any.
So today the Aral Sea is a quarter of the size it was and it's all because of Cotton. Cotton started to be planted by the Tsarist Russia and the policy continued under Soviet rule as cotton production grew exponentially. Worse yet, the Uzbeks (other Central Asians too) were forced to sell their cotton at well below market prices to Moscow and were never given the tools to develop manufacturing so that they could process this cotton themselves. The post-independence these policies continued. But the environmental disasters started to add up in the late 80s and this legacy was left for the newly independent countries to deal with. What they have done is continued to crop cotton – only now it consumes more water (it's a thirsty crop to begin with) and the land is drying up. There are frequent droughts and sandstorms that farmers must now compete with. It was weird, driving past the endless landscape of cotton fields there are only little children and women harvesting the crop. Where are all the men? I really feel for the Uzbeks. What are they supposed to do? Stop growing the one thing that they can export (aside from gas/oil which causes its own problems)? Starve their people? Or continue disastrous policies. It's a problem with no good solution.
Here's a good Soviet joke:
What would happen if the Soviet Army took over the Sahara Desert? For fifty years, nothing. Then it would run out of sand.
That basically explains the environmental disasters throughout this region.
I'm in Khiva now and my next post will be on this amazingly beautiful city.
No comments:
Post a Comment