Subject: Trip to Aralsk from Rich

Sent: 5/10/19 12:21 AM

Dear Mom,

It is a cool and windy morning here, the kind you miss when it turns into the oven of summer. We went for a walk on the river last night; I with a backpack full of dirty laundry for Dixie's and boots to get in shape for our hike this summer. Joan wore sandals and whined around about all the camel dung we walked through. Dixie has some cable TV now, and we watched CNN - live coverage of protests in China! Do they really think that NATO would deliberately bomb the Chinese embassy? Get a clue... There was also some sort of manly channel that had car racing, big time wrestling and girls in their underwear, writhing around and begging you to call them on a 900 number. It worked for me, but the ladies quickly vetoed that channel.

So we went to Aralsk last weekend. I went there last year in the early spring with Brian Randall for a English teacher conference, along with some site development visits that PC wanted him to make. Joan, I, Paul, and Angela all left on Friday afternoon, on a nice, sunny, warm day. We arrived after nine hours of cards, napping, reading, crossword puzzles, chess, and eating to cold, windy, rainy weather. Unfortunately we had forgotten to take into consideration that Aralsk is nine hours north of KO. Joan and I only had our sandals! Joan had to borrow a pair of black dress socks from Paul and wear them with her Tevas. She wore a dress for the conference that was not quite long enough, so you could occasionally see the tops of the socks - she looked very professional...

The most interesting thing about the train ride was the huge satellite complex we saw off in the distance, most likely near Baikanour, where the Russian space center, the Cosmodrome, is. It¹s a hill where enormous satellite dishes pointed straight up, all surrounded by buildings, towers, wires, and a power plant. Very cool - it looked right out of a science fiction movie. I had a good time explaining to Joan and Angela about geosynchronous orbits and Lagrange points.

We were there to give a workshop to local teachers on Environmental English. There is a summer camp there, and they wanted to include an Environmental English part to it. Unfortunately only a few of the 20 odd teachers were actually going to participate in the camp, so some of the activities were not really relevant or interesting to the majority of the teachers. They are also definitely more old fashioned and restrained up there compared to our teachers down here. They really only relaxed and had some fun at the end of the workshop.

The school where we had to workshop was a classic Soviet school. There were all sorts of Sovieticus stuff on the walls and texts written about the working class rising us against the capitalistic upper class. One text, in English, extolled the benefits that the Soviet army bestowed on the countries they had liberated. The school was on the edge of town, surrounded by sand. With all the broken buildings and rusted metal out there, it looked like a battlefield from the Gulf war. Paul and I escaped from the workshop for awhile and played chess at a little table in the hallway where we saw a camel walk by the window.

There are very few foreigners up that ways, and we were constantly surrounded by a bunch of staring kids between classes. They crowded about us, literally inches (OK, centimeters) away, talking about us and making comments. Finally a teacher would come along and shoo them all away; they would break up like a flock of birds and scramble for their classrooms.

There is a Danish group of fishermen who are working with fishermen in the Aral area, trying to help them as the sea dries up and the fish supply decreases. Zhanat, the president of the Aralsk branch of the Teachers of English of Kyzylorda (TEK), is also their main person on the ground. She speaks English almost fluently and was a Physics teacher in high school. English was/is her hobby and has really worked out for her.

We stayed in an apartment that is kept for people staying on fisheries business. It was quite comfortable with all the beds in one room - two mattresses on the floor. Can you say slumber party? The bathroom was outside - ugh! Us lucky guys got to use the drainage bucket for the sink as there was no indoor plumbing. The poor girls had to venture out into the cold and rain.

The UN provides a vehicle and driver for us to go out to see the cemetery of the ships, outside of town. Since it was a weekend, we had to pay the driver overtime - ooohhh, a whole $5 a hour (plus gas). The four-hour trip cost a total of $28. Not a bad price to see something that few westerners have ever seen.

The drive out was pretty rough as the paved road, when it was paved, was pot holed and wash boarded. Soon we were driving on a dirt road, sometimes only a sandy track. The horizon was dotted with camels and occasionally one or two would be near the road. There were single and double hump ones, chewing their cuds. Some had halters on, and a few were even wearing a blanket with a hole cut out to go over the hump(s) to keep it in place.

I thought I saw a large turkey or pheasant sitting on the ground. In fact it turned out to be a large hawk. I have never seen so many hawks in one place. We must have seen 50. At one point, the driver slowed to a stop and pointed ahead on the road. There was a large pile of sticks and trash on the shoulder. We could not figure out what he was trying to tell us, and then he started flapping his arms. Suddenly, a LARGE head with two beady eyes appeared over the edge of this nest. It was a honkin' big mamma hawk, sitting on two big eggs. As we came closer, she reluctantly took to wing and hovered in the strong wind nearby, anxiously watching us as we drove past.

We continued to drive through the flat steppe, surrounded by rolling plains on sand and scrub grass. On the left and right horizons were occasional hills and jagged edges. Cresting a slight slope, we looked down on to a dry basin, with a small village crouched on its dry edge.

Maybe 50 or so houses in the middle of nowhere, it was once a booming little fishing village. Now with the disappearance of the Aral Sea, there is nothing happening there. We saw many people just sitting in front of their houses, staring at us as we drove by. One activity there must be gathering and drying camel dung to be made into circular bricks. Geometrical stacks of the camel cakes were precariously leaning everywhere. With not a tree to be seen for miles, this must be the only way they can produce something to burn in the bitter cold of winter.

Behind the city and in the center of the basin, we could see seven or eight ships, beached on the sands. The driver put it in four when drive and took off across the dunes, following a rough track. From what I had heard, I though the ships would be bigger, cargo carrying monsters and the like. In fact, the two largest were cheek to cheek; fishing boats that had been left behind as the waters receded. The other ships were a great deal smaller, and two were barges.

Holes had been cut in the sides of the ship, probably for access to remove parts and metal. The insides had been gutted of anything that could be removed and were full of sand, trash, and bird poop. We climbed up to the upper where the captain would have stood and looked out over the water. We looked out over the sands and saw the dusty village in the distance and the UN jeep below us.

It was about this time that we noticed the floor was sagging and bouncing beneath our steps. Constant exposure to sun, wind and rain had been flaking the steel away for years, and it was tissue thin. We beat a hasty retreat. I would hate to be the humanitarian aid worker who falls through that.

After about a half an hour, we had seen enough. While fascinating in a morbid way, there is not too much to see and is rather depressing to see what has happened. We piled back into the jeep and took off for the one and a half hour drive back to Aralsk.

Once back, we relaxed and took a nap as the train was not until 11:30 that night. We were still so stuffed from the lunch and teas at the conference that we did not eat dinner. Zhanat reported that tickets were not available for this train and that we would have to "make an arrangement" with the conductor. Can you say, "Bribe?" She said that they had talked to someone at the train station who guaranteed we would be able to get one.

So as the Moscow to Bishkek (in Kyrgystan) train pulled up, we scurried along the platform, trying to find a conductor that would let us on his wagon. Finally we were joined by a high ranking police officer that Zhanat knows who commanded a conductor to let us on.

Zhanat had told me not to pay more than 1500 T for all three of us as it was cheaper to bribe one's way on than the ticket price. The ticket price up the way up had been 670 T each. So we were ushered into the wagon and waited in the corridor, while the conductors looked at us with a gleam in their eyes. Paul and I, as the men, were called in to a 'koo-pay' (compartment) to talk to the two under conductors about whether we had documents, that we would have to pay, that if the police came along, etc., that we were to just play it cool and let them take care of everything.

Then we went into the half compartment where the big boss was who looked over our documents asked us who we were and where we were from and all that. He asked us how much we would pay, and I, the fool, pulled out two 1,000 T bills (about $20). He took them from me and put them down on the table, as if they were an offering. One of the under conductors, behind my shoulder, said, "Oh, mala" which means 'little' in Russian. I assume this is all part of the routine. Then he fiddled around with a piece of paper with the schedule and distances of the train and proclaimed that it would another thousand. At first, we were refused, but Paul negotiated the sheets and towels in the deal (an extra 120 T), and a deal was struck. In total, we paid less than we would have with legitimate tickets and sheets. So it really didn't matter that we got fleeced compared to the locals. We just wanted to get home.

Back in the compartment, we were given sheets and told that everything would be OK and that they would wake us in the morning when we arrived in KO. We went to sleep and woke up the next morning, Sunday. A long nap was followed by a banya with the family and a little outdoor basketball in the evening finished off a great weekend.