Karakalpakstan and the Aral Sea

Karakalpakstan takes up the western third of Uzbekistan and receives a small fraction of its visitors. It is a republic within the republic, with its own language and a landscape of steppe, salt and the Amu Darya delta, and the reasons to go are unlike anything further east. In Nukus, a museum built around one man’s collection holds paintings by Russian and Uzbek artists of the 1920s and 1930s, gathered by Igor Savitsky at a time when much of the work could be shown nowhere else. It rewards a long morning and a guide who knows the pictures.

North of Nukus the road runs to Muynak, once a fishing port on the Aral Sea. The sea is now far beyond the horizon, and the boats that once worked it lie on the sand below the old harbour wall, a place where people tend to fall silent. Those with a further day and a taste for empty country can continue across the Ustyurt plateau to the water itself and sleep in a camp on the shore. On the way back, the necropolis of Mizdakhan, a hill of tombs and shrines outside Khodjeyli, has been in use for more than two thousand years.

This is not a comfortable region in the conventional sense, and we say so. Distances are long, the roads beyond Muynak are unpaved and the hotels in Nukus are simple. What it offers is a kind of attention that the Silk Road cities, for all their beauty, no longer give: to be somewhere almost no one goes, with a private driver and guide who know the country and the people along the road. Our Khorezm and the Aral Sea journey gives the republic three of its seven days: Nukus, Muynak and a night below Ayaz-Kala on the way to Khiva. The shore itself is a long day and a night more, which your travel designer adds for those who want it. The region also joins any route that reaches Khiva.