[LINK] "Dreaming of the sea, or a holiday in Moynaq"

[rfmcdonald]

Daniel Metcalfe's book excerpt at Open Democracy takes the reader to the Uzbekistani city of Moynak, once a pleasant fishing- and tourism-oriented city on the coastline of the Aral Sea, now an environmental disaster with the coastline's recession by forty kilometres.

It was a famous holiday resort, the Crimea of Central Asia. In summer, several flights a day brought Soviet citizens to the beach. At the time, writer Viktor Vitkovich described the Aral Sea as ‘exceedingly pure, as deep and delicate as aquamarine, but without the touch of green, as intense and bright as Badakhshan azurite, and as translucent as sapphire’. The entire town lived and worked with the sea and its related industries, packing and canning. Without the sea, the town was as good as dead, and I did wonder how a town with no means of livelihood and almost 100 per cent unemployment could be anything other than that. The only vague hope for Moynaq was tourism, but even that wasn’t exactly the healthy kind.

[. . .]

As we hoisted up our bags, we noticed the deathly quiet. There was just no one around, no cars, no sound. It was like a Sunday afternoon in mid­summer, when everyone should be away – but holidays were a luxury no one could afford. Everyone was still here. So where were they? The wind swirled the sand and the odd bit of metal clacked, increasing the silence. But there was no birdsong. The road ran straight ahead between two rows of run-down housing, the tarmac obscured by drifts of sand that crept silently.

Bohodir and I started the trudge to the hotel, passing one or two bent-backed women with babies.

‘Where are the men?’ I asked him.

‘In Kazakhstan, mostly,’ he said. ‘They send money home. Keeps Moynaq alive. Same in Qongirat.’

The population of (supposedly) 9,000 had been whittled down to a few mothers and children. The only men I could see were a crowd of puffy-faced drinkers at the taxi rank.

It felt like walking through a film set: a broken tractor on its side, a train carriage rotting on the street, miles from its track, bleached skiffs parked on the pavement, their wood split and tackle rotten. I recalled that Morrissey lyric, ‘This is the coastal town. That they forgot to close down . . . Come, Armageddon! Come!’