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. None of our published journeys goes this far west. It is arranged as an extension from Khiva, a few hours’ drive away past the desert fortresses of ancient Khorezm, or as a journey of its own; your travel designer will tell you how many days it honestly needs.