Aralsk, Aral Sea

Aralsk & North Aral Sea - darkometer rating : 7 - This poor town used to be the main fishing port on the Aral Sea , before the latter began drying up. It's still the main settlement in the North Aral Sea area in Kazakhstan and thus the natural base for exploring this desolate part of the world. The town itself also has a few points of interest to the dark tourist. But it is certainly no picnic getting (and staying) there. Only for the really dedicated. > More background info > What there is to see > Location > Access and costs > Time required > Combinations with other dark destinations > Combinations with non-dark destinations > Photos More background info: see also under Aral Sea for more general background information about the whole area. The town of Aralsk, also known by the shorter name Aral, only came into being with the arrival of the Tashkent-Orenburg railway in 1905. It soon began developing rapidly, thanks to the rich fishing grounds of the vast Aral Sea. Parallel to Muynak at the lake's southern end in Uzbekistan , Aralsk became the main fishing industry town at the northern end of the Aral Sea. Aral's finest hour came in 1921, when the fishermen of the town heroically responded to an appeal by Lenin and provided more than a dozen trainloads full of fish to be sent north to feed to the hunger-stricken population in Russia and other parts of the newly created Soviet Union . The fishing industry of Aralsk continued to prosper until the 1960s. Then the well-known man-made disaster began to strike: the two rivers feeding the Aral Sea, the Syr Darya and Amu Darya, were partly diverted and tapped into on a massive scale mainly to provide irrigation for the rapidly expanding cotton-growing industry further east and south-east in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan . With less and less water reaching the Aral Sea, it inevitably began to shrink.