Into the Unknown
An expedition to Kazakhstan in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union
The joint Anglo-Kazak expedition, Aral 96, was a journey into the hinterland of the recently collapsed Soviet Empire, bearing witness to one of the greatest of all environmental disasters. Aral 96 involved massive physical and mental stress, testing all involved to their limits. Despite near misses, no-one died. With the passage of time, the traumatic memories have dissolved to be replaced by nostalgia for past adventures and an appreciation for the chutzpah of youth.
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Beginnings
In 1996, when the world was still mostly analogue, a map of the world hung on the wall of my family kitchen. Most mornings, while waiting for my porridge to cool, my eyes would rove around this map, often pausing on a large central section, scant in detail, encompassing exotic-sounding names such as Ashgabat, Bishkek, Dushanbe and Samarkand.
What did things look like at ground level? How did people live and eat within this vast expanse? In the era before wikipedia and youtube, it was not easy to find answers to this kind of question. Fast forward twenty five years and for most people, this region is still a blank.
It was not just the region’s physical remoteness, but also its politics that made it unknowable. Until the early 1990s, the largest country in the area, Kazakhstan, greater in area than the whole of Western Europe, was called the Kazakh Soviet Socialist republic, a constituent part of the vast Soviet Union. For half a century, these remote lands were beyond the wall. A deep recess of a vast empire that was bounded by an impenetrable curtain of iron. In fact, even on the inside of the curtain, most people didn’t know what was going on.
For the apparatchiks in Moscow, the inaccessibility and vastness of Kazakhstan was its most attractive quality. The perfect backyard for its most covert and nefarious activities.
Baikonur Cosmodrome is somewhere in this blank, the launchpad for Sputnik 1 and Vostok 1, first satellite and first human spaceflight respectively. Baikonur, now the world’s largest space launch facility, is a spectacular exception. The majority of activities carried out in this area have had a much less glittering legacy. The role call of disasters sounds like a bad joke. The nuclear wasteland of Semipalatinsk, the atomic lake of Chagan, the anthrax-infested island of Vozrozhdeniya.
Most heart-breaking of all, in the middle of the blank, there used to be a huge sparkling, life-supporting jewel called the Aral Sea. But in the course of just a few decades, this sea was all but destroyed.
The sea that died
I am not sure when the drying-up of the Aral Sea first entered my consciousness, perhaps a National Geographic magazine browsed in a doctor’s waiting room. I was a curious young man and the story of an entire sea disappearing would have grabbed my attention.
At some point, I became aware of the basic facts: Moscow’s central planners decided that the Soviet machine should become the world’s largest producer of cotton by harnessing the vast natural resources of Central Asia.
In practical terms, this meant diverting the flow of the Amu Darya and Syr Darya, the two rivers that feed the Aral Sea. The result — the surrounding deserts would bloom with ‘white gold’ and great prosperity and prestige would be brought to the Motherland. Sacrificing a sea seemed a worthwhile trade off.
Implementation of the plan started in the 1930s and accelerated in the 1960s, when huge machines were sent into the region to build hundreds of kilometres of irrigation canals. The construction was rushed and the quality slapdash. The majority of channels were unlined, so much of the precious water seeped into the ground.
During the peak years, 90% of the Syr Darya river was diverted through the irrigation canals. The effect on the Aral Sea, with only a dribble of flow to counteract evaporation by the fierce desert sun, was that it started to shrink.
The draining of precious freshwater from the region was just one component of the unfolding disaster.
The soil and climate in the Aral Sea basin were not at all suited to the cultivation of cotton which is a very demanding crop. This put local farm managers in a difficult position, who were under constant pressure from the centralised command economy to meet their quotas.
To hit unrealistic production targets, required the co-opting of local populations to work like slaves, as well as plastering the land with massive quantities of fertilisers and pesticides. The result was that cotton fields became more and more degraded, until they were eventually abandoned, when they had been transformed into toxic salt pans.
In 1991, the Soviet Union was in its death throes and Boris Yeltsin phoned his drinking-buddy, prime minister Nazarbayev to wish him luck. The Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan was now a sovereign state.
By now the Aral Sea had divided in two, its salinity far too high for any fish to survive; its once busy harbours were now hundreds of kilometres from the water’s edge. Worse still, decades of intensive chemical agriculture had left a toxic legacy that percolated into groundwater supplies, or swirled around over the vast exposed seabed.
The winds, which became more powerful now the sea has gone, carry this toxic dust thousands of kilometres to the tops of faraway mountains, whose spring melt provides freshwater for tens of millions of people. Not only has a sea disappeared, but an entire region’s hydrological cycle has been contaminated. This has left a healthcare legacy which continues to afflict the population decades after cotton harvests ceased.
In 2009, in the Aral Sea area, 75 out of every 1000 babies die at birth and the majority of 18-year old boys fail their physical tests for national service due to frailty and low weight.
For thousands of years people who visited or lived near to the sea, were cooled by sea-breezes, fed by an abundance of fish and enjoyed the benefits of recreation, livelihoods and beautiful vistas. The Aral Sea was a vast marine oasis that allowed life to thrive in an otherwise inhospitable corner of the world. A few decades of folly was all that it took for a sea to vanish.
The birth of Aral 96
At the beginning of my second year of university, I was struck down by a bout of melancholy. Life felt pretty pointless, the world around turned monochrome, a sterile promontory. Academically I struggled, social interactions felt forced and awkward. In a notebook from the time, I scribbled: “I think my brain has ceased to work.” I felt I had entered a dark forest, with no clear path out.
Nowadays it’s much easier to have a conversation about feeling down. Most people know about of a sport star, a TV chef even a head of state, that has experienced a similar thing. There is a more widespread understanding that blue periods are just a feature of life. Back then, the best that an impoverished student could hope for was a 10-min chat to a GP and a prescription of SSRIs.
This was my state of mind when I walked into my tutor’s office in late autumn, to meet him for the first time. Being a little scatterbrained, at first he mistook me for someone else and started a long monologue about something entirely irrelevant to my circumstances. After a few minutes, I gently reminded him who I actually was and to deflect any embarrassment, steered the conversation towards the possibility of finding work experience at the end of the academic year.
“How would you like to float down a river in Kazakhstan?”
“Sounds interesting — tell me more”. He then asked me if I’d heard of the Aral Sea.
“Yes, I have — it’s a massive environmental disaster zone”
“You’ll need to get a team together and raise some money, but I am sure it will be great fun”.
At that moment, I decided that organising an environmental expedition to the 20th Century’s worst environmental disaster, might be exactly the medicine needed to tame my Black Dog.
“Alright. I’ll do it.”
And just like that Aral 96 was born.
The incubation period
In December 1995, my to-do list looked as follows: make a plan, recruit a team, secure in-country support, find a patron, get approval from the Royal Geographic Society (RGS), raise at least £10,000, procure expedition equipment, undertake training, transport team and equipment to Kazakhstan, implement plan. A significant list at anytime, even more so for a full-time engineering student who was feeling a little blue.
A fairy godsister appeared in the form of a health and safety officer called Susan, from whom, a little ironically, I crashed a cigarette during a geology field trip to Durdle Door.
As we puffed away, I told her about my Aral Sea idea and she seemed interested. Susan’s academic background was soil mechanics, but she was up for an adventure and proved to be an excellent, bordering on neurotic, organiser of paperwork which was an essential skill in the pre-digital age. She also mixed a fine gin and tonic, thus confirming her appointment as first team member of Aral 96. Now as a team, we could start working our way through the list.
The early part of the planning was a giddy mix of high successes and frustrating disappointments. In one week, Earl Jelicoe became our patron; our RGS approval, a prerequisite for many funders, was turned down; and at the end of the week we were handed a cheque for £2500.
Having a bit of money in the bank, made it easier to build interest in the expedition and soon we had recruited a proper team. Winter had now passed, I was thinking much more clearly now, and I needed to, there was a lot going on.
For the first couple of months, fund-raising was our primary activity. Our main approach to this was a numbers game, using lists of potential funders gleaned from the reference library along with a word processor. In 2 or 3 months we sent out over 750 letters requesting support.
Luck and chance encounters played a big role. An article glimpsed in a local paper, a game of squash, a change of university vice-chancellor and even a rejection letter, all these events led to substantial donations. At some point, it became clear that the expedition was going to happen, so we were able to devote a little more time to think about what we were getting ourselves into. What could we expect to confront during the expedition?
A letter from the inside
Finding information about the terrain and conditions in the expedition area was extremely difficult. Few travelogues have been written on contemporary life in Central Asia. The first Lonely Planet for the region was still a decade away from being published. Colin Thubron’s Lost Heart of Asia, was one of the few books that I came across, but this focused more on the historically rich Uzbekistan, which gave birth to a dynasty, that ruled India for two hundred years. Besides Thubron and with no real internet, little else was available.
This made the day that we received a typewritten letter from a wildlife biologist called Artiom Polkanov all the more exciting. In his letter, Polkanov described the landscape and wildlife, as the Syr Darya river meanders through the planned expedition zone:
Sometimes there is a long side forest called a ‘tugay’ which is typical for Central Asia. Pheasants, waterfowl, jackals, wild boars, muskrats are the most common species. And this very type of landscape you will see for hundreds of kilometres.
He also provided some practical tips on water, food, clothing and local preferences to defend against wildlife threats:
Myriads of mosquitoes and ticks and other blood-sucking and stinging insects will follow you. Repellents can be bought, but best of all is to burn cattle shit at night in your tents. The only unpleasant thing — you and all your clothes will have a very recognisable smell
Finally the abstract was becoming real, and we had some information that we could plan our needs around. A picture was emerging of an extreme climate, scarce water, sub-standard food and insects with an unquenchable thirst for human blood.
Polkanov concluded with one final bit of advice:
Please keep in mind that nothing can be done quickly in an oriental (sic) country. So try to have a time supply.
How accurate this Golden Rule turned out to be.
The staging post — Almaty
Expedition logistics are challenging at the best of times. The politics, extreme environment and the general woolliness of information in Kazakhstan combined to make Aral 96’s logistics particularly complex with great limitations on what we could organise from England.
Having done as much as we could in the UK, we put everything in crates, said our farewells, and in early July 1996 boarded an Austrian airlines flight via Vienna to Almaty.
The first few days were a blur of intense bright sunshine, trips to the city, long evenings with our new Kazak friends and several miscalculations about the potency of the local vodka, which was sold in cans on every street corner. When the hangovers subsided, they were replaced by a new headache — the whereabouts of the expedition bus.
We had been assured that a 24-seater would be available from the Academy of Science, and we had made all of our equipment and personnel arrangements around this certainty, without a Plan B.
The day before our planned departure, we were told that the driver’s papers had been stolen and we no longer had a bus.
“Can’t he get some new ones?”
“No, they take 8 months to process.”
“But surely for an environmental expedition of this importance…”
“Nyet. Not a chance.”
Polkanov’s Golden Rule! Back to the drawing board.
A few hours later, after some well-directed phone calls including one to the rector of the State Academy, the expedition suddenly had the services of an ex-Soviet army truck and a driver, the brilliantly named Ivan Ivanovich. The truck needed new wheels, a generator and a tarpaulin, but at least we now had a vehicle for our equipment.
The next challenge was how to transport ten people over 1000km to the expedition zone. Our detailed plan that had been developing for 2 weeks, was evolving all the time.
A long hot train journey
The Almaty to Shymkent train takes you on a journey of about 26 hours, skirting along the foothills of the Tien San. The train offered what in theory seemed a practical, perhaps even an enjoyable solution to our new predicament.
The reality turned out to be a sauna on wheels. As the train pulled away from the station, euphoria turned into sweat, as the locked windows in our private compartment meant we were effectively imprisoned in an oven. Ursula, our pale-skinned scientific officer from northern France, seemed to suffer the worst and we had to regularly prod her to make sure she was still alive.
Despite our massive discomfort, our Kazakh colleagues insisted that we stay in our compartment as it was: “very dangerous”, to wander around. So for hours we braised in our own warm juices, the conversation reduced to a series of moans and monosyllables.
When night fell, the temperature cooled down a fraction, and we were allowed to make the occasional visit to the end of our carriage to use the toilet (a hole in the carriage floor) or the communal samovar. This enabled me to take a closer look at my fellow travellers.
In a diary entry jotted down on the train, I observed: “Kazaks do not appear to be naturally friendly. If I smile at someone, they either look away or in return for my smile I get a stony face completely devoid of any emotion.” Having travelled in Africa and South East Asia in previous years, where every street was wreathed in smiles, it certainly affected my early perception of the country.
Later on a Kazak colleague offered me a theory for this lack of friendliness, explaining that before 1991, it was illegal to talk to a Westerner, and people were still getting used to the change.
The only time during the train journey that I did manage to raise a smile was when bleary-eyed in the morning, I fell into a storage compartment filled with watermelons, that was sunk into the train floor. Whoever had opened it at the last stop had omitted to close the hatch. My mishap prompted a burst of laughter from the gathered onlookers, providing cast-iron proof that schadenfreude transcends all political ideologies.
Finally the River
Once we had made it to the expedition zone, we were denied a settling in period because the BBC World Service had heard about our plans, and wanted to feature us in one of their programmes. Arriving at our truck rendezvous location, we found that they were already waiting for us and informed us that they were on a tight schedule.
A local security guard had suggested as our first base camp an abandoned Czech-built pumping station located about 100m from the edge of the river, near to the village of Tomenaryk. We drove in convoy, while the sky around got darker and darker. By the time we arrived at Camp 1, a full-blown dust storm was roaring, making it difficult to set up camp or indeed hear, see or do anything.
The BBC team, who once again reminded us about their tight time schedule, insisted we try some filming, but after several hours of equipment battering and near capsizes, conditions had deteriorated so badly that even their gung ho cameraman admitted defeat. At some point in the late afternoon, we managed to find a sheltered location to conduct an interview, but just as I started to answer the first questions, we had to flee as a nest of angry hornets decided to close things down.
After a few days, the dust storm exhausted itself, the BBC had departed and we were finally able to appreciate the object of nine months of planning.
Here at last was the mighty Syr Darya, the longest river in Central Asia, born in the meltwater of the Tien San, the fabled ‘Mountains of Heaven’, flowing 2000km down steep valleys, across grassland and desert, finishing its journey in what was once the vast Aral Sea.
In ancient times, the river’s clear waters gave its name, Jaxartes or ‘True Pearl’. After the 8th Century Muslim conquest, it was known as one of the four rivers that flow from Paradise. For millennia it was a major artery for empires, a provider of water, food and transport, that allowed life to flourish in the region known as Transoxiana.
Despite knowing a little bit about its geography and history, as I stood looking out over the river for the first time, I was taken aback by its size and power. Our camp was located far down the river’s length, in what was meant to be the river’s ‘old age’. By now it should have mellowed into wide floodplains with a languorous current. What confronted me did not conform to this stereotype. Here the river was fast-flowing, its width almost half a kilometre wide and its companion a constant strong wind. The Syr Darya looked less like a river, more like a choppy and uninviting sea.
The task that lay ahead of us, that had been conceptual up to this point, now felt very real and very intimidating.
Measuring the beast
The basic aim of Aral 96 was to collect data to determine how the flow of the Syr Darya diminished along a 250km section. At the top of the section, Camp 1, the total river flow would be measured, and this same measurement would be repeated 4 or 5 more times downstream at intervals of about 50km.
Additionally, if there was an offtake or a return drain, the flows of these channels would also be measured. These measurements would be the foundational data for an overall water management model of the entire Aral Sea basin, that would allow better decisions to be made on remediation projects related to the disaster.
To calculate precise river flows (measured in m3/s or l/s) requires the multiplication of two parameters. The river’s cross-sectional area (A) and the river’s current (V). So far so simple. Taking field measurements to calculate A and V was our main preoccupation during Aral 96 and on several occasions almost our undoing.
The methodology required us to manoeuvre a boat a few metres at a time across a slice of the river, taking a depth reading and current reading at each step. The depth measurement was relatively straightforward but the current measurement required a very expensive and very heavy flow meter to be lowered carefully using a winch. Conditions on the water were challenging and the boat was small and overloaded. The gulf between the conditions of our training and reality was as wide as the river, calling to mind WW1 recruits bayoneting straw sacks in a sunny meadow, before being sent to the front.
Stress, goats and near death
Constant technical problem solving, conflict mediation, welfare concerns and physical discomfort. An unshakable anxiety about returning home empty-handed to funders who had invested so much in me. Worse still, having to face those who had told me that I was underestimating the scale of the challenge and biting off more than I could chew. All of these factors created a constant ebbing and flowing of stress, like the moon and the tide, that was medicated with whatever was around, vodka, cigarettes and trance music primarily.
A notable stress peak occurred on the day, early on in the fieldwork period, when we snapped the control cables of our most critical and most expensive piece of equipment, the £40K flowmeter lent to us by Southampton University’s hydraulics department.
This accident triggered various sub-events including my temporary incarceration in Kyzylorda prison for a traffic violation and a 1400km round trip journey to the National Centre of Hydraulics in Dzhambul. Arriving after an 8hr drive, we found a solitary cleaning lady painting a classroom, who informed us that the Centre was closed for the summer and wasn’t opening for a month. With this option off the cards, we put the flowmeter on a train back to Almaty, where it was repaired and sent back to us a week later.
Arriving back after this long journey, we found the camp in an excited mood. Seth, the technical officer, had celebrated his 21st birthday by shooting two pheasants and slaughtering a goat, which he had named after our least favourite university lecturer. Forgetting our difficulties for a day, we set about turning Dr Paul into kebabs.
Guaranteed anxiety spikes occurred on the occasions when we sent a team downriver to measure offtakes. While this happened, the land team would pack up and drive to the next camp, to reunite with the boat team at a pre-arranged location about 50km downstream. A diary entry captured our feelings of powerlessness as we waved them away:
6th August: I watched the boat team floating down the river on the current, trying in vain to get the engine started again and again. Soon the boat and the team were just a tiny speck in my binoculars. Then a miracle! A thin plume of smoke rises up, signalling that the engine had finally come to life. As it transpired this was actually the gear breaking, which had to be mended with a coat hanger.
These long river journeys that separated a small group from the umbilical cord of the expedition for at least a day were anticipated with excitement and trepidation. The boat had no cabin, its engine was notoriously fickle and there was no method of communicating with the mothership. Participation in these trips demonstrated the fundamental quality of a true adventure, the embracing of unknown risks and the possibility of a night or two in the tugay.
Aside from the more obvious hazards of feral dogs, snakes, scorpions and blood-sucking insects, we were also advised to scan regularly with a geiger counter to check for excessive radioactivity. During the Soviet times Kazakhstan had played host to many military projects. Since gaining its independence, various previously unmapped caches of uranium and plutonium were popping up all over the country.
The closest we came to death or serious injury, happened at the end of the very last boat mission. For once the engine was running well. Adair, a local team member, was on the helm and the rest of us were sitting facing backwards, enjoying the sun after a productive and relatively trouble free day.
All of a sudden Adair, shouted out in alarm, simultaneously leaping up and jumping on top of us. As we were flattened onto the floor of the boat, I felt a swish over my left shoulder as we passed under a thin taut steel cable that had been stretched across the river at approximately neck height. Whether this cable would have bisected, decapitated or merely scalped us, I cannot tell, and I am forever grateful to Adair Kystaubaev whose cat-like reflexes prevented us from finding out.
Food and drink
Most cultural generalisations can be ignored, but I feel that I am standing on fairly firm ground if I said that Central Asians are some of the most hospitable people I have ever encountered.
The degree to which this is true is reflected in the fabric of the buildings. Almost all homes have a large, cushion lined open plan room, dedicated to drop in guests. Islam is the main religion in the region and its holiest book the Koran validates my opinion in a pleasing way:
If people knew how much god blesses travellers, they would travel more often.
The high point of Kazakh hospitality is the Sheep’s Head Ceremony, which I first experienced at an official banquet in Kyzylorda. On that occasion, my tutor and experienced Kazak-hand, Professor Tanton was visiting for a fortnight and was the honoured guest, as well as my neighbour at the table.
With undisguised enthusiasm, Professor Tanton plunged the ceremonial knife into the eye socket of the boiled sheep’s head that had been placed in front of him, scooped out an eyeball, that trailed nerves and other viscera. He turned to me and in a faux serious voice he presented his gift:
“Nick I give you this eye, so that as leader of Aral 96, you can keep a good watch on all of the other expedition members.”
All human eyes then turned to me, esteemed recipient of the first and most important head segment. I accepted the eyeball two-handed in an appropriately grave manner, and then sheepishly (how else?), I brought it to my mouth and took a symbolic nibble, thinking this gesture was surely sufficient.
Not for puckish Professor Tanton, who with a mischievous glimmer in his eye barked at me:
“Go on, eat it up, you have to eat all of it.”
And then he pointedly waited, while I in confusion and disgust, put the eyeball and its grisly entrails into my mouth and started to chew.
While in Kazakhstan, the frequency and forcefulness with which food and drink were thrust upon us, I once described as bordering on ‘terrorist hospitality’.
In Central Asia, there is an expression: “The guest is greater than the father”. Hospitality is often appreciated more than the wealth of the table and prosperity of the family. By not accepting an invite, you feel like you are letting everyone down. Being the only foreigners in a 2000km radius, lunch invites could be a daily occurrence. To begin with, of course this was a wonderful cultural experience, an opportunity to share a meal in a family home is about as intimate as you can get when exploring a country. However when aggregated on a daily basis, and factoring in that having invited us, our host would often then have to purchase ingredients and prepare the meal from scratch, which would often then compel us to partake in a series of long and rambling vodka toasts, could write off a whole day.
Once the idea of ‘hospitality’ had mutated from an occasion to enjoy some home-cooking, into a robber of time, we adapted our daily movements to avoid being ambushed.
Ghosts Towns and Endings
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Percy Shelley, Ozymandias
The worst hangover of my life occurred at the Hotel Aralsk after an evening drinking Baikonur vodka, procured from a roadside babushka, close to the cosmodrome which lent the moonshine its name.
In the morning, half-delirious, my katzenjammer was so severe that I mistook the symptoms for something more serious. Instead of taking paracetamol and water, I opted for two 400mg tablets of flagyl, a strong anti-protozoal drug used to combat amoebic dysentery.
To add fuel to my misery, I had inexplicably become the focal point of the anger of the leader of the Kazak team, Mukhtar, who had continued to drink after we had all passed out. By early morning, he had become belligerent and paranoiac, claiming that I was hoarding all of the bottled water for the British team. With barely contained violence, he kept repeating:
“Your team have water. Why my team no water?”,
Mukhtar’s refrain was like a fee-fi-fo-fum rubbing salt into my already severely wounded soul. By now Anglo-Kazak relations and the general mood was now at a low point, so we decided to leave Mukhtar with his demons and instead try to find the Aral Sea.
The view facing out from the hotel was extremely forlorn. A few decades ago, it would have been very different. As we descended the hotel’s stairs, our nostrils would have filled with briney sea air. In front of us would have been a busy harbour, full of colourful boats. Around the edge, fishermen might be offloading their catch — pike-perch, bream, carp, flounder, sturgeon, or any of 20 other native species, watched over by flocks of wheeling seabirds.
What we saw that morning was a scattering of graffitied ship hulls and half-toppled cranes. Leading away from the harbour was a crudely excavated canal that appeared to be a last attempt to stop the sea from escaping. At the end of the channel, a rusty dredger, abandoned as the futility and impossibility of its task was realised. To complete the bleak tableau, a strong, bitingly-cold wind, swirling dust and dead vegetation across the drab seabed. The journalist Christopher Robbins expressed it perfectly when he observed:
“For connoisseurs of desolation and despair and a world-class monument to folly and unconsidered consequences, behold the Aral Sea”
There were conflicting ideas on how far away the sea was. Estimates we had collected ranged from 80 to 180km. The previous day we had met a Hungarian UN worker called Ivan, who had advised against just driving directly out over the seabed, and suggested a town about 150km from Aralsk from where we might be able to catch a glimpse of water. That morning four of us set out in our trusty Lada and perhaps symbolically it was appropriate that our mission was not a success. The whole reason for our expedition was that the Aral Sea was disappearing, and at a rate so fast and devastating, that even our car could not even keep up.
During the long drive we passed strange geometric structures, mini-dams or other hydraulic structures long-abandoned, that may have delayed the inevitable by a few more years. The construction of these structures was perhaps driven by similar forces that compel people to put a brain dead family member on a life-support machine. Completely futile but it feels better than doing nothing.
After several hours of desolation and nothingness, we finally reached the village at the end of the world called Bugun. The first person we met claimed to be the mayor and was very friendly, but apologised that he could not feed us. He told us that we were still 70km from the sea, but that there was no more road, so we should not continue as it would be unwise with only one car. Instead he suggested that we come and watch some of his people dig ditches. For what reason, I was in no mood to find out. We politely declined, turned the car around and drove back to Aralsk to begin our long journey home.
Epilogue
Aral 96 left a great imprint on my life as well as the lives of at least two other team members with whom I have kept in touch in the intervening years. The lessons that we learnt in the desert on dealing with a barrage of adversities with stoicism and good humour has put me in good stead on many occasions since.
The expedition ended on a metaphorical and literal high, continuing from the almost-shoreline of the Aral Sea via Almaty to a high peaks in the Tien San. This final part of Aral 96, trekking up to the glaciers and peaks that feed the Syr Darya, precipitated a 25-year continuous love affair of walking in mountains, revelling in the pure landscapes and high altitude therapy.
Regarding the environment — the conclusion is more mixed.
One does not have to research too deeply to learn that cotton production and the fashion industry more broadly is still having a very destructive impact on environment and farming communities. In countries such as India and Uzbekistan, the demand for water for irrigation of cotton is still very high. Combined with the very high chemical use associated with cotton cultivation and processing, means that the social and environmental costs of the majority of cotton products is still significant.
For the Aral Sea, there is better news. I recently came across a 2018 piece by National Geographic which reported that fish had returned to the North Aral Sea, thanks to a $86 million program financed mostly by the World Bank. The program included the construction of an 8 mile long dam constructed south of where the Syr Darya flows into the sea. The dam led to a more than three metre rise in water levels in seven months, five times faster than expected.
This small success story along with the growing momentum of the agro-ecological farming movement gives cause for optimism, proving the potential for humans to heal and regenerate ecosystems and not just destroy them.
