The Aral Sea and Karakalpakstan

Karakalpakstan is the western third of Uzbekistan and feels like another country, which in language and landscape it nearly is. Its capital, Nukus, is a grid of Soviet avenues on the edge of the Amu Darya delta, and it holds one of the least expected museums in Asia. Igor Savitsky, a painter turned collector, spent the 1960s and 1970s gathering the work of Russian and Central Asian artists who had fallen foul of official taste and storing it here, far from Moscow. The result is one of the largest collections of Russian avant-garde painting anywhere, hung in a modern building alongside Karakalpak silverwork, carpets and the finds of Khorezm’s archaeologists. Give it a long morning and a guide who knows the pictures.

North of the city the road runs for a few hours to Muynak, a fishing port whose sea left. The Aral began to shrink in the 1960s, when the rivers that fed it were turned onto the cotton fields, and the shore is now a day’s drive away. The boats that once worked it lie in a row on the sand below the old harbour, and the small museum beside them keeps the photographs of the cannery and the catch. For those with the time and an appetite for empty country, a four-wheel drive continues from here across the Ustyurt plateau, past chalk escarpments and the occasional camel, to what remains of the water: a night in a camp on a shore of salt, a sunrise over a sea too salt to sink in, and a silence with nothing to interrupt it. It is a long day each way and the tracks are unpaved. We say so plainly, and we go anyway.

Between Khiva and Nukus the desert is scattered with the fortresses of ancient Khorezm, mud-brick walls raised more than two thousand years ago and still standing to the height of a house. Toprak-Kala was a royal city with a palace whose painted walls were long ago carried off to museums; Ayaz-Kala is three forts on a hill with the Kyzylkum falling away on every side, and a yurt camp at its foot where the extension usually spends its first night. None of our published journeys goes this far west. Karakalpakstan is arranged as a private extension from Khiva, a few days at the least and more to reach the sea, with a driver and guide who know the road and the people along it. Your travel designer will tell you honestly how many days it needs, and when the heat or the cold would make it unwise.