Dry Humor

A trip to the Aral Sea

- Yusup Kamalov, chairman of the Union for Defence of the Aral Sea and Amudarya

^ transcript¹

The singular person that you hear starting to laugh at the end of this audio clip is, of course, me. Yusup was popping jokes like that throughout his hour-long lecture on the current state of the Aral Sea, the responses to which ranged from stifled giggles and full-on laughter from me and silence with the occasional awkward chuckle from the rest of the room.

I wander his way after the presentation to introduce myself, but he speaks before I do.

“You live here in Khorezm region?”

I blink. I am almost never clocked as a Khorezm resident, and when I am it’s been because I’ve been speaking Uzbek in my very Urgench-ish accent. “How did you know?”

“No one from outside of Khorezm laughs at the jokes.”

It makes sense. The collapse of Aral Sea, an environmental catastrophe, isn’t very funny. But like most non-laughing matters, the people affected by it usually laugh about it anyways. My colleagues joke about the raised cancer risks and deformations from the polluted air. When I forget my mask on a particularly windy day and start coughing from the dust, my friend smacks me on the back. “It’s okay,” she says. “You’re just overwhelmed by the patriotic spirit of Khorezm.”

A brief history of the Aral Sea

I’m not going to get super into this. Want to know more? Google it.

The Aral Sea is an endorheic lake. That means rivers flow into it, but they don’t flow out of it. Think, like, an endorheic lake is the end of where the water goes.

The rivers that feed it start up in the mountains, so the Aral Sea used to be fresh water. “Used to”, because now the saline levels are so high that shortly after getting out of the water your skin cracks over with a layer of dried salt. Also “used to” because the sea is now mostly gone.

The idea that the Aral Sea used to be fresh water is kinda hard to believe—this kid got water in his eyes and started crying because of how salty it was. What a wimp, am I right?

For 3 million odd years or so,² the Aral Sea was a ginormo sea full of sharks and stuff. Then, in the 60s, the Soviet Union decided that they wanted in on the cotton industry and that Uzbekistan was the place to do it.

They redirected the rivers that fed the Aral Sea into farmland. The runoff from the farms would flow back into the rivers, washing the salt from the earth and the pesticides from the fields downstream. As a result,³ the Sea began to shrink and toxify. Prosperous fishing towns found the water receding away from them.

“The Aral Sea is a useless evaporator, a mistake of nature”

- Aleksander Voeikov, a very incorrect Soviet climatologist

Now, the Aral Sea is less than 2% of the size it used to be.

The Shore

A hop, skip, and a a 12 hour off-road dead into the desert after Yusup’s lecture, we’re on the shore of what remains of the Sea. I didn’t do much learning beforehand, so I was surprised to learn that the area around the sea is very neat rocks.

The desert is very texture-rich. These salt deposits look rocky, but they crushed underfoot like hardened baking soda.

The sand near the Aral Sea is soft in a way that you don’t want sand to be soft—like stepping into flour. You can see the swirls of dust coming up when my friends walk. In the longer stretches of dessert, it kicks up into mini-tornados that sweep around erratically. We see one every twenty minutes or so, and our driver says that the stronger ones are capable of tipping a car.

The Sea

My friends and I didn’t bring swimsuits, so we are the first to the water. My friend is wearing light-colored pants, which he rolls up above his knees.

“I think I’ll just get my feet wet,” he says.

Four feet from the water he abruptly gets a couple feet shorter. What looks like a continuation of the solid sand is, in fact, the start of the mud.

Ah, yeah, mud time. RIP these pants.

The mud is NASTY. Powdery, soft, unfortunate-smelling, and deep. Wading out into the water really means wading out into a layer of water over a much deeper mud layer.

Not for the easily grossed out, or for those with a lingering childhood fear of quicksand. You sink like it’s water, but stick like it’s mud.

It was unpredictable, too—one second it’d be a foot deep, the next three. My friend and I are the same height and standing the same distance from the shore, but you can see how much deeper the place I’m standing is.

”It’s like the Dead Sea”, my friend says, “but the exact opposite. You know, like instead of having healing properties it’s actually toxifying us.”

Like the Dead Sea, the high salt content of the Aral keeps us afloat once we’re all the way in. Unlike the Dead Sea, ⁴ it makes our skin tingle and sting.

Washing the mud off reveals that my calves are covered in what look like razor burn. An older woman who was with us comes out of the water with cuts across her feet.

Fauna, Post-Aral Sea Collapse

Here is a non-comprehensive list of all of the animals that we saw:

• Camels

  • I was floored by how HUGE camels are. I guess the one that they always have around at Khiva, the ancient city near where I live, is kinda tiny because I thought they were all big cow-sized. Instead they were way taller than our jeep. I went so crazy over them that our driver stopped the car so that I could get out and see them closer. After that, every time he saw another camel (so every 5 minutes or so, for a while) he would point to it and ask if I wanted to stop.

• Horses (wild) (very cool)

• Horses (not wild) (less cool but still okay)

• Tortoises

  • I also made the driver stop to look at these.

    

• Goats

• Flamingos (!!!!!!)

  

• Fox⁵

• Cows

• Crows

• Dogs

  • Although they’re starting to become a status symbol in fancy cities like Tashkent, most people in developed cities in Uzbekistan are pretty anti-dog. There’s something in Islam about them being dirty, which I kind of understand—at least, compared to cats. The further you get from cities, though, the more you see them and the bigger they get. Driving through rural Karakalpakstan it seems like the most common group that I see walking roadside is two small children and one very large dog.

• One REALLY huge bird (unidentified)

Fauna, Pre-Aral Sea Collapse

I would love to tell you about the fauna pre-Aral sea collapse, which I’ve been told is varied and interesting. I actually visited a museum that was almost entirely dedicated to now-gone Aral Sea wildlife! Unfortunately I spent most of my time there hiding in the bathroom, for reasons which I will explain in the form of a short screenplay.

INT. YURT CAMP ON THE SHORE OF THE ARAL SEA — NIGHT

Ottilie and friends have just enjoyed a delicious meal of national food and a couple beers. Sore from a day of driving, Ottilie and Friend #1 decide to polish the evening off with a little nightcap.

Ottilie sticks her head into the KITCHEN. The following is in strong Khorezmcha.⁶

OTTILIE

“Aka, turt aroq bama. Ikkita uchun.”

WAITER

“Awa.”

Ottilie returns to the table, and the waiter follows a minute later.

WAITER

“Excuse me. But we do not have

enough shot glasses. Can I give

you two normal cups with doubles?”

He winks, which is a terrible sign.

The Waiter leaves and returns shortly holding two “double shots”.

Anyways, the night went a bit downhill from there (or uphill, depending how you feel about antics). It shook out like so:

Here’s what I remember from the museum: some kind of very large cat (bobcat sized). Pelican.⁷

Okay I am tired of writing that’s all I’ve got for you 👍

Much love (unless you are Slovenian),

Ottilie

1. If you’re having trouble opening the audio, try viewing it in a different browser—chrome works for me, usually. Here’s the transcript:

“Maybe final words from me should be a little bit optimistic. Because despite of all of the pollution water in the rivers, despite of dust from the bottom of the Aral Sea, despite of these 2 weapons tests sites, even Baikonur, which is space port which is very close to us on the north of the Aral Sea… despite all of this stuff, we are very optimistic. Because if Armageddon, or end of the world, will happen. Only we will survive. Because we are already here on the end of the world.”

2. give or take some millions

3. and of a variety of other factors. The forests along parts of the rivers were harvested for lumber, for example, causing the rivers to evaporate more quickly in the direct sun.

4. Actually I’ve never been in the Dead Sea so I have no idea if this is true or not

5. Okay, my friends saw the fox. I was putting all my energy into not losing my lunch (more on that later). I’m told it was pretty cool. The fox, not the puking.

6. The only variation of Uzbek that I know. As a point of reference, imagine English in the strongest Scottish accent that you can imagine, and full of slang, to the point where it’s almost entirely unintelligible. People in Tashkent don’t understand when people from Khorezm speak. Also, a cultural note: Khorezmian people are known as heavy drinkers.

7. Atrociously taxidermied. Probably the only fully cognizant thing I did in this museum was trying to send a video of this pelican to Hank Green, but unfortunately the Aralkum desert doesn’t have great reception.