I'm Alex. I'm Marko,

and you are watching Vagabrothers.

And in this episode we'll be exploring one of the most unique places on earth:

the Aral Sea.

We've spent the last week traveling to the Silk Road cities of Uzbekistan,

and they were all beautiful.

But now we're traveling to the northwestern corner of the country

to experience one of the worst ecological disasters on earth.

The Aral Sea was once the fourth largest inland sea.

Now, it's a giant desert bed full of rusting ships and broken dreams.

What happened?

To find out, we're hopping in these trucks

and driving the last stretch of the road

from Nukus all the way to the water's edge.

You're watching Vagabrothers,

and this is the journey to the Aral Sea.

Well, we have been driving for essentially the entire day.

We left Khiva at 7 a.m. this morning.

We drove to Nukus, switched vehicles into 4x4 vehicles,

and now we have just arrived to Moynak.

This is essentially kind of the end of the road.

It used to be right on the water.

It's no longer right on the water.

But we're staying at a little guest house.

We're going to get some food,

kind of get a lay of the land,

and then go and take a look at the ship graveyard.

So we're sitting down to lunch right here.

We got some pickled food, some stew with lamb and potatoes and some tea.

This house belongs to a family

that used to work in the fishing industry.

But like a lot of the local population, without that industry here,

they're pivoting towards tourism.

We've been looking on Google Maps to just try

to put into perspective where we are because

we're kind of at the convergence of all of the "stans."

But we're in a place that's called the Autonomous Republic of Karakalpakstan, which means

the Land of the Men in the Black Hats.

And if you do look on the map,

it's pretty incredible because we are

smack dab in the middle of Central Asia.

I'm standing now at what used to be the bottom of the Aral Sea.

There used to be a hundred ships here,

but the mayor cleaned up the place and sold the rest for scrap metal.

So there's only about ten that remain right here.

But this is really a surreal experience

because the water used to be going as far back as you can see,

and now it's this kind of bizarre playground.

But to answer our question about how the Aral Sea disappeared in just a few decades,

we have to start with a story of the American Civil War.

The story of how these ships became marooned 100 kilometers from the Aral Sea

starts with the American Civil War.

During the Industrial Revolution,

the United States grew rich on cotton grown in the South,

picked by slave labor and sold to the

European textile industry for a very high price.

But when the American Civil War broke out,

the supply was cut off,

and Europeans had to find a new supplier of cotton.

In step the Russian Czars who saw the perfect opportunity to fill the gap in the

market with their newly conquered lands in Central Asia,

which could be perfect for growing cotton,

if only they could get water into the desert.

So they diverted some of the rivers flowing into the Aral Sea without too much of an impact on the environment.

After the Communist Revolution,

Lenin advocated for turning the area into a self-sufficient cotton belt of the Soviet Union saying,

"Irrigation will do more to revive the area and regenerate it and make the transition to socialism more certain."

And it worked for a while.

In the 1930s Uzbekistan was exporting cotton worldwide,

and the area prospered.

There were plenty of fish in the sea.

Tourists actually came and visited the beaches here, and

the Soviet Union was the world's leading cotton producer

with over 70 percent of it coming from Uzbekistan,

irrigated by the rivers that flowed into the Aral Sea.

Then in the 1950s the Soviet government attempted an overly ambitious

irrigation project that tipped the ecological scales too far.

Between 1960 and 1980

the water levels here dropped 20 full meters

leaving the Moynak fishing fleet

marooned and leaving the remaining seawater

so salty that all the fish died.

By 1984 industry in the area had dried up, just like the lake,

leaving Moynak and its fishing fleet a ghost town.

It's just really hard to imagine that this was floating at one time

and that where we're standing was a body of water.

Well, now we have swung over to the museum,

the ecological museum,

just to see what used to be here.

So here behind me are some images from NASA that show how the sea has dried up over the years.

As you can see it not only shrinks in size, but also color.

It's actually a hundred thousand tons of salt that's been mixed up with all the chemicals and fertilizers and pesticides

that they used in irrigating the cotton fields that have made it basically poisonous,

and that goes up in the atmosphere.

It's been spread all the way around the world.

We are on a mission to get a bottle of vodka

to go with dinner because it's cold,

and there's not a lot to do in ways of entertainment out here.

So vodka will have to check all the boxes.

Cold as hell. We are here in the middle of December.

So it's a very, very cold time of year.

There's no cloud in the sky;

so there's really not that much heat trapped here.

It's going to get dark fast,

stay dark until about 8 o'clock in the morning.

You can tell why places like this have a problem sometimes with drinking

because that's one of the only things you can do out here.

Well, it is 8:18 in the morning.

It's minus 8 degrees Celsius outside,

and we've piled back into the cars and we're leaving Moynak,

and we're going to be essentially driving into what was once the Aral Sea.

The goal today is to reach what's left of the sea.

It's over a hundred kilometres away.

We just finished driving across the bottom of the basin and came up this mountain.

It just gives some perspective on how much water has vanished

because at the bottom of the basin we were 60 meters underwater and now even coming up top,

we still would be underwater.

Yeah, it's insane to think that this landscape...

when you look at it now, you could never imagine that there was water here, ever.

But to know that there was over a hundred feet of water,

it's just pretty mind-boggling because there's nothing out here now.

We've seen a skull of a bull on the side of the road.

We've seen like a flock of birds, and

that's pretty much it.

When you think about it, it's really not that different than

the Grand Canyon or some other places in the United States that used to be underneath an ocean.

It's just that it happened so much faster,

and it happened directly because of mankind.

And you can see, I found this on the bottom of the ground over there,

and this is something that

you find in other parts of the world that used to be under the ocean.

But in those other places,

the ocean was there around the time of the dinosaurs,

like hundreds of millions of years ago,

and here it's only fifty years ago, sixty years ago.

Our driver was saying that when he was a kid,

he used to come out here and go swimming back at the fishing village we used to be at,

and locals there definitely remember it being a normal port,

and yet now it's so far from that.

Now, we're starting to climb up into a plateau.

You can see geologically lots of levels of sediment that's been deposited over the millennia,

but we're going to continue driving.

Supposedly, we're going to go into some canyons and then eventually

into what's left of the sea.

This behind me is what's left of the Aral Sea.

It's now one tenth of the size that it once was,

originally the fourth largest Inland sea in the world.

The situation today is not looking good.

In order to fix this problem,

they would have to stop producing cotton here in Uzbekitan,

which is a major part of the economy,

and it does not look like that's going to happen.

Without diverting water away from cotton production,

most experts believe that the sea will dry up entirely by 2025.

The sand that's left here is toxic.

It's going up into the air and spreading across the entire atmosphere

throughout the world and locals here have a higher rate of cancer,

tuberculosis, and anemia because of the pesticides used in growing cotton.

Well, we've made it to the water's edge and the first thing

that I've noticed is the smell.

It smells pretty bad.

It's salty, super salty smell but also kind of

what it smells like when something's dying

and like decomposing.

There's also this really large like gyrating foam.

There's just foam coming off the edge of the sea.

I've never really seen anything quite like it.

It's very bizarre.

We've made it.

We're here at the edge of what's left of the Aral Sea, and

I feel sad. I feel really sad.

I mean, this is like.... I love the ocean.

I love lakes. I love water and

to see the magnitude and the scale of

this environmental catastrophe

and to be on the edge of what's left of

this lake and smell it.

It smells so bad.

It's crazy. It's all done by man.

It really puts a lot of stuff into perspective nowadays

Yeah, you can see the satellite photos show how much the lake has receded.

This is really the only part that's left.

I think as the first place that I've really been to, as kind of a dark tourism theme,

I think it's weird to come to a place and

kind of be looking at someone else's situation

and be able to be here for a day and then leave.

But I think it makes you empathetic for the people who live here,

and it's also a situation I think that affects everyone.

When we drove in here,

there were these two handmade airplanes

that were kind of hobbled together

from pieces of driftwood and a nail and then kind of like planted into the earth.

I just found those planes really symbolic,

whoever made those

was dreaming of hopping on an airplane and

leaving this place and I just feel really

humble and lucky to be able to do that.

It's a crazy place to wrap up for our time here in Uzbekistan

because this is so different than the rest of our trip.

We have seen some beautiful places.

Uzbekistan is a lovely country.

We've gone to some historic cities.

And I think the theme that you see in this part of the world is that it's a place

where you see empires come and fall, and

we've seen the high point of civilizations

like in Samarkand, the Silk Road cities, and the Timurid Empire

and the Greeks and everything like that.

And then you see the low watermark of civilizations.

And in a way, this is really the low watermark of the Soviet ambitions

in trying to build a vast,

a prosperous region here,

and then seeing those plans collapse into this.

Honestly, I have enjoyed my time here in Uzbekistan.

I think that this is a part of the world that gets overlooked quite often, and

I doubt most people watching this would be able to find Uzbekistan on a map

if given an opportunity.

It's been an interesting trip.

It's one of highs and lows, just like you said.

We're at a lowest point right now,

but we're ending it on a high.

And I think that it has a ton to offer.

This country is beautiful.