Uzbekistan: Aral Dead Sea

Taxi up north for our Dead Sea trip...destination the boring Nukus town. We have to change cab half way to the trip, and, while waiting for the shared cab to be fill up with other passengers, Arnaud and I managed to see an Uzbek fight between a huge coloss and an old guy who wanted to take the cab with us (guess who won)...anyway after taking the poor face bleeding old guy to the hospital with the cab'.. we finally managed to ride up north to the desolated Karakalpakstan province where nothing seems to grow anymore since the Aral Sea desaster.

Arrived in the desolated Nukus town of the desolated Karakalpakstan province, let me tell you that we don t expect that much of the town except maybe the museum which is suppose to be one of the best of Central Asia (Why here ???). the hotel is litteraly falling appart and the unskilled"managers" try their best to properly run it. Anyway, we manage to have quite a lot of fun there and simply accept that such dead/crappy/unreal places are part of the trip. Hopefully we meet Miquel, this funny Spanish guys who s doing a year trip on a beautifull BMW motorbike.

....OK, so now, let s see the sadly famous Aral Dead Sea, for thoses who don t know about the story of this sea (like me a few days ago) lets say that the Uzbek government decided to develop agriculture and added a lot of cotton field. Cotton of course needs a lot of water to grow and all of the water needed for it and taken from the river that was going to the Aral Sea... it didn t take that much time before the Aral SDea became totally dry.

Monyaq, the fishing port of the Aral Sea (220km foar from Nukus) has now only a few thousands inhabitants, and the weather that was once "liveable" by the influence of the sea.... is now hot to death...

Let see the good points...makes quite a good scenic spot for pictures: