Waiting for the sea

I visited Aralsk a few years back (it's Aralsk, not Aral - the locals call it Aralsk, the signs all say Aralsk), and it's a gobsmackingly depressing place.

The main industry there is now "sitting and waiting", and the old waterfront is a dismal shadow of a bustling fishing port.

One thing that we found interesting was North Korea's involvement - there are quite a few buildings in Aralsk emblazoned with Kim Il Sung - it turns out they invested in the cotton boom, and provided "labourers" to the USSR.

Tourism is practically non-existent - the only way to get there is a long, long drive (or cycle... we bumped into an Aussie cycling from Shanghai to Dublin (we were en route from London to Bishkek)) through barren desert.

It's hard to see how Aralsk will continue to exist, with or without the return of the Aral, as the population is overwhelmingly old (although we did see a rather extravagant Kazakh wedding parade while there), and levels of corruption in Kazakhstan are pretty astounding, meaning that getting any concern off the ground is a challenge for your average person, unless they happen to be the son-in-law of the local police chief.

It'll be interesting to see what happens when the Baikonur lease is up (most there believe this will happen much sooner than 2050), as it's a major source of revenue for the region, and provides much of the raison d'etre for the surrounding towns and cities. Most people we met between Aktobe and Kyzylorda were either in some way involved in supporting the operations there, or were subsisting, or providing auxiliary services to people directly involved in Baikonur.

One final thing that seems to generally be missing from people's understanding of the Aral sea - it hasn't "dried up", so much as "gone underground" - there's still a vast amount of (severely polluted) water there - if you wander down to the old sea floor, most of it is several-yard-deep mud - very little of it is dusty and dry.

Anyone interested in a more thorough and context-ladden history of Aralsk, Uzbekistan, and the transition from the Soviet Union to a sovereign country should check out Tom Bissell's great, great book, Chasing the Sea [1], about his time a Peace Corps volunteer there and afterwards. Great writer, really interesting topic.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/233072.Chasing_the_Sea

I read this on my iPad this morning and, although I like the idea behind the presentation, I found it really annoying that when I scrolled the line of text I was reading to the top of the screen, it would often start to fade out while it faded in the next section further down the screen - it was like reading with the screen brightness turned right down.

Altough, looking at it again now from desktop Chrome, I can't reproduce this, even at a small screen size.

It's amazing how quickly the Aral dried up (well 90% of it).

These "immersive" stories will disappear once the realization that the RIO on them doesn't work. Who actually sits down and passively consumes media in this half passive/half active way?

The only companies left using them will be those with no concern about ROI such as here; the state-funded BBC.