Visiting the Aral Sea: Q&A

[steven]

All questions on travel to the Aral Sea, from Uzbekistan or Kazakhstan, are welcome below.

We gather up all travel intelligence in our Aral Sea travel guide.

[overlandlass]

Hi we are travelling from the UK through the Stans to Mongolia and China so this site has been amazing in helping us with our planning. A question I would like to ask is has anyone done a self drive tour to the Aral Sea from Nukus? we are entering Uz from Turkmenistan and would love to visit the Aral sea, everything I have read on the web suggests you need to use a guide but I am reluctant to pay large amounts of money to get someone else to drive us when we have our own vehicle.
So question number one is it possible to drive yourself ? question no 2 if you camp for a couple of nights what do you do about the registration that seems to be required to monitor your every move?
Any info gratefully received

[steven]

Hi,

You don't need a guide to go there, if you know where you are going, that is. Camping is ok, make sure you get a registration every couple of days to be on the safe side but you can skip a few.

[overlandlass]

Thanks, after a bit more research it seems that going alone is not a problem, I suppose our only issue is now fuel - our van runs on diesel and it would seem that isn't easy to get!

[manny]

I don't think there's any land border crossings near the Aral Sea, is it possible to cross the Aral Sea by boat?

[mazeno]

probably not, because you cannot reach the hard ground of the coast from the boat, even on your knees.
almost all the uzbek coastline is bloody muddy. there are hard ground some places, but they're difficult to find.
along the shore there is a thin dry crust over the mud for some 20-50m (or even more) from the water to the inland, so when it crashes...

[AdamL]

hi! I'm wondering if you managed to visit ship cemetery near Moynak? I will be passing by this region on motorcycle in middle of August, and I'm would love to see this site, but I received signals from different sources that Moynak ship cemetery doesn't exist any more, and all ships were scrapped

[Lisa and Michael]

We were there about four weeks ago, and it existed and was impressing...

[leela]

Yep, the ships are there, but artificially placed. I expected ships abandoned where they foundered. But these are ships collected up from various places and arranged together. Possibly the only practical way to let people see them, but they lose some poignancy.

[semmel]

They arrenged them together to "protect" them. As far as i know these are the last remaining ships in the southern aralkum. All others were demolished by steal-robbers