In mid June 2025, I took a car and driver and headed north from Karakalpakstan’s capital, the Soviet-era city of Nukus. The journey was unusually quiet: unlike earlier in the expedition when we chatted, laughed, and listened to vintage pop music, Miskola and Sophia weren’t with me. One of the risks of a long, much-delayed expedition is that people’s commitments change. Life happens, and however much you want to be out in the world adventuring, family and work take precedence. I was therefore going to the Aral Sea missing two-thirds of our trio.

Nukus is the hub of Karakalpakstan’s wheel, and the further you travel along a spoke, the poorer the road surface becomes. I’m told that the road to the former Aral City port city of Muynak will be upgraded this year, but on this scorching summer day we bounced along over the potholes, opening the windows for a breeze only when the dust would allow.

The Oxus gives up the ghost not far north of Nukus, reduced to a dribble and, then, nothing at all.

In its absence, and spreading across what until all too recently was the sea bed, is the Aralkum, the world’s newest desert, which grows more and more each day.

Muynak has, understandably, an air of desperation. The fishing industry which supported this once thriving town has gone and won’t come back. Boats lie rusting on the sand beneath the lighthouse, dust and sand blow through, and much of the working age population has left to find jobs elsewhere. Respiratory diseases and cancers are higher than they should be. Aid and investment programmes come and go, but the long term direction is decline.

In spite of this, there are pockets of positivity in Muynak. The annual Stihia Festival — an eclectic, unexpectedly appealing combination of electric music and eco activism in an apocalyptic landscape — has sparked an interest in tourism and various projects related to the creative economy. The local museum has been promised an impressive new building with virtual reality exhibitions telling the story of the ill-fated sea. And a number of families have opened guesthouses and homestays, offering warm hospitality with the trickle of tourists passing through.

I stopped for lunch with one of these families, whose dining table was weighted down with stuffed dumplings and deep fried pastry snacks. The freshness of the tomato and cucumber salad was a welcome contrast and a reminder that although hydroponic farming has its place, nothing beats the taste of vegetables grown in the soil and drenched with sun. I wasn’t the only visitor: two Swiss tourists and their Karakalpak guide, Mansur, joined me, and we chatted about water issues and the town.

You will start to understand how critical Karakalpakstan’s water issues have become when I tell you it now takes a good four hours to drive from Muynak to the sea shore. The statistic often bandied around is that the Aral Sea has shrunk to 10% of its original size since the 1960s, but that hits home hard when you drive on and on through the flat, sandy landscape which should be at the bottom of the sea. There’s not much to look at on this stretch of the journey save an occasional installation drilling gas from deep underground, and the thousands of thorny saxual bushes which have been planted in a moderately successful bid to green the desert and reduce dust storms.

Long before reaching then, I saw the cliffs which drop from the edge the Ustyurt Plateau. Water should lap at their base, but for the most part there’s now just jagged rocks, including the dramatic geological formations known as the Aral Canyons. Birds of prey nest in the cliffs and circle above them on the thermals, diving every now and then to snack on some poor, unfortunate rodent.Here, there’s no meaningful road, just dirt tracks through the desert. I was glad to be in a 4×4, because in temperatures of nearly 40 Celsius I didn’t fancy having to stop and dig the car out from the sand. Eventually, we climbed the cliff onto the plateau and looked back. For the first time, I was struck fully by the scale of the empty seabed and what has been lost.

I was subdued but we carried on. I made photo stops at the canyons and we took a short detour away from the cliff edge to see a nomadic cemetery. No one lives in this area now, but a few generations ago the semi-nomadic Karakalpaks fished in the sea and hunted birds and mammals in the surrounding marshes. Some of the headstones had inscriptions in a Perso-Arabic script, a reminder that the local culture as well as ecology have changed. The Aral Sea comes into view without drama. At first, it’s a faint shimmer on the horizon, and in the late afternoon light it’s not all that clear where the water becomes the sky. But it is there, sparkling, against all the odds. And it is a sight beautiful, almost spiritual, to behold.