Abandoned Ships & Cosmonauts!
Tuesday July 30
With our Immigration Card ordeal over with, we are off in search of the Aralsk harbor and the lost Aral Sea.
Years of Russian irrigation starved the Aral Sea of much needed water. It has been nearly 40 years since the sea receded, strangling a fishing town of its livelihood and a harbor for its ships. There is apparently now a huge International surge underway to try and revitalize and restore this part of the Aral Sea back to it’s former glory via a series of dams, dykes and channels. Currently the “sea” sits about 23km offshore from the town of Aralsk and there is hope that in a few years the sea may return. In the meantime, there are a handful of boats in “dry dock” that stand as a memorial to the once former bustling harbor / fishing town. There is a more formal “Ships Graveyard” further up & around the western coastline, but we do not have the time to schedule this guided day trip. Being a sailor, it is hard to see such an empty harbor devoid of life, fortunately, we also have fun with some of the local kids and the “other” current inhabitants of the harbor.
Our journey south away from the blistering 50 deg celsius (120 degF?) heat toward hopefully cooler mountain weather (still a day or two away) continues.
Next up – a quick drive through the town of Baykonur, and views across the valley to the more famous Baykonur Cosmodrome. (This is a great link to a NY Times Article on the town and the Cosmodrome’s history!)
This nearly 7K square kilometer area is the site of the Russian manned space program, and where the Soviet’s space race & Yuri Gagarin’s famous launch as the world’s first human into space occurred in 1961.
Post the Soviet breakup / Kazakhstan’s independence, the Russians now have to lease this site and the town from Kazakhstan (scheduled til 2050). NASA is also now paying to use this site to launch our astronauts into space to the ISS, since our manned space program is no longer funded for US based launches.
For a NASA/space buff like me, getting a tour of this place would be an amazing life experience. Unfortunately, despite it’s near desolate remote location, I have read that they are INCREDIBLY hard to come by, are very expensive, and require months of advance preparation/paperwork / approval from the Russian Space Agency. So we settle for the views along the road of the satellite arrays and a drive through the part of the town that lies outside the gates. We considered trying Sarah’s, “But we’ve driven all this way in an American school bus. We’re from America. You have to see our bus, you have to let us in…” but decided this may not, in fact, work on these guards.
The part of town we can drive through is as dilapidated as so much of the rest of the countryside we have seen. However, like the rest of the Kaz people we have met in this part of the country, they are very friendly and wave enthusiastically back at us as we pass them.
Off The Rhumb Line 