Moynaq: The Cost of Cotton
Moynaq, Uzbekistan - June 2026
I arrived in Khiva the evening before with just enough time to walk the walled city before turning in early to prepare for a day trip to Moynaq. Moynaq sits in Karakalpakstan, an autonomous region within Uzbekistan that once contained much of the Southern Aral Sea. The Karakalpak people actually have more in common with Kazakhs than with Uzbeks, in both language and cuisine, which is easy to forget when you are still technically inside Uzbekistan's borders.
Fifty years ago, Moynaq was a large fishing town, one of the main ports on the Aral Sea, home to a large cannery and a fleet large enough that roughly 500 ships once worked these waters, pulling out roughly 25,000 tons of fish a year. The Aral Sea itself was one of the four largest lakes on earth before the 1960s, covering something like 68,000 square kilometers. Then the Soviet Union built a network of canals to divert the rivers feeding it, in order to irrigate cotton fields across the deserts of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, and the sea started disappearing almost as fast as the canals could carry the water away.
I set off at six in the morning for the long drive north. The town itself is a shell of what it used to be. The fishing industry is entirely gone, most people left decades ago, and what remains is mostly elderly residents and a handful of children in what is now a remote desert outpost. At the edge of town, there is a cliff that used to be the shoreline, and below it, the rusting remains of the factories and boats that used to support the whole local economy.
I stopped at a small museum in town that lays out the disaster in more detail before walking out to the cliff itself. Standing there, I tried to picture what it would have felt like to look out at a sea so large it seemed endless, instead of a flat expanse of desert. In my head, the Aral Sea had always been something like a shallow puddle that dried up, but the reality was a genuinely deep sea, home to sturgeon and carp and a real fishing economy.
Walking down off what used to be the shoreline, I reached the ship graveyard, a collection of old fishing vessels that once worked the Aral Sea and are now just rusting in the heat. A few young Uzbek soldiers were out there too, wandering around and climbing on the boats the same as I was. I spent a while walking around on what used to be the bottom of the sea before heading back into town.
It was hard to really understand the scale of what happened here until I was standing in the middle of it. Moynaq is now something like 150 kilometers from the current shoreline, which is itself still receding. The lessons of the Aral Sea disaster feel as relevant now as they ever have, a tangible reminder of what large-scale human intervention in nature can actually do, not as an abstraction but as a town full of people who watched their entire livelihood disappear, permanently, in less than one lifetime.
On the drive back to Khiva, the driver and I stopped at a traditional teahouse for lagman, chay, a tomato salad, and fresh Uzbek bread, a welcome meal and a reasonable way to come back down from the day.
If you go…
Moynaq is best done as a long day trip from Khiva, starting around 6am given the distance
The region is culturally distinct from the rest of Uzbekistan, Karakalpak rather than Uzbek, so don't expect the same language or food
