There are no settlements of any sort on the motorway over the huge distance from Aral to Aktobe, so we stopped at a huge service station at the turnoff to Yrgyz where we had a nice meal of manti, greek salad and chips. In the morning we had a plate of derevenskii zaftrak (village breakfast) consisting of two eggs, two hamburger type sausages, and bits of tomato and cucumber.
In the morning we drove through Aral which is not a pretty town by any means. It also seems rather impoverished since the Aral Sea receded and left Aral port high and dry with a few rusting cranes and abandoned boats. It seems that the only activity is salt collection and processing according to the little museum we went to. It has some interesting exhibits such as a stuffed boar and birds, agicultural instruments and a harp shaped like a guitar. There is an attractive mock-up of a yurt and some paintings of Aral in its heyday when it was a thriving fishing port. There were a huge number of former citizens of Aral in the fields of politics, the army, medicine, sport etc which were not the least bit interesting.. Six years ago, we passed numerous women standing at the side of the road trying to sell dried fish but the Aral Sea has become so saline that the fish are said to have disappeared. The museum was interesting in its own way, although all the explanations were in Kazakh; we were accompanied by a lady who helped us to understand things by speaking in Kazakh. The only other language we saw was Engish: four words explaining the identity of pickled fish in jars (barbel, sturgeon, pike and something else.
We then continued on a long dreary journey for mile after mile after mile towards Aktobe where the landscape was totally unchanging apart from the occasional herds of camels, horses and sheep. And no people or buildings, apart from the ubiquitous nomad cemeteries and the occasional isolated mausoleum or shrine.
Stuffed wild boar in the museum
Weapons (including molotov cocktails) from WW2
Weapons from the 1920 Civil War
Photo of the biggest fish caught in the Aral sea
Painting of a battle at Aral during the Civil War
Mock-up of the inside of a nomad’s yurt
Traditional harp from the Aral region
Painting of a priest and mullah playing chess.