Rusting and stranded, ships that once operated on the Aral Sea now attract adventure tourists. Credit: Adriane Lochner/EurasiaNet

By Adriane Lochner
BISHKEK, Apr 15 2014 (EurasiaNet)

“I’m going for a swim,” says Pelle Bendz, a 52-year-old Swede, as he rummages in the jeep for his bathing trunks. The other tourists look at him, bewildered. What’s left of the Aral Sea is reputed to be a toxic stew, contaminated by pesticides and other chemicals.

But the weather’s hot and Bendz insists his travel agency told him “swimming” was part of the package.Activists have been jailed for exposing the disappearing sea’s impact on Karakalpakstan residents’ health.

In Nukus, the sleepy regional capital of western Uzbekistan’s Karakalpakstan region, local tour operators say the number of sightseers is growing each year. Many come to this remote part of the Central Asian country to see the famous Savitsky art collection. There are excursions to ancient fortresses and historic Khiva, once an important stop on the Silk Road.

But the Aral Sea – one of the world’s most infamous, man-made ecological disasters – is probably the top attraction.

“Last year almost 300 foreigners went on camping trips to the coastline, and numbers are increasing,” says Tazabay Uteuliev, a local fixer who arranges transport for several Uzbek travel agencies.

Spring and autumn are most popular, but this year he even had a group in January. “More and more people seem to like it extreme,” Uteuliev tells EurasiaNet.org. The tourists are usually adventurous, not looking for a trip to the beach, but to see the famous lake before the last of the water is gone, he adds.

Bendz, the Swede, claims a special interest in unusual places. On a previous trip to Ukraine he visited Chernobyl, site of the 1986 nuclear accident. As he runs toward the shore, his feet sink in mud. The other two tourists and their driver follow him with their eyes.

The driver explains that over the course of only one year, the coastline has receded about 50 metres. The former seabed is still damp and covered with clams.

“You don’t even have to swim,” Bendz shouts, giddily floating on the water. In 2007, one estimate put the Aral’s salinity at 10 percent. As the sea continues shrinking, salt content is believed to have risen to about 15 or 16 percent, or half the concentration in the famously salty Dead Sea.

For local activists, the swell of foreign interest offers a chance to educate, as well as entertain.

In a hotel in Nukus, a group of Swiss tourists listens to a seminar about the history of the Aral catastrophe as part of their tour programme. The lecturer asks EurasiaNet.org not to print his name because he is implicitly criticising Uzbekistan’s authoritarian government.

He has a legitimate fear: activists have been jailed for exposing the disappearing sea’s impact on Karakalpakstan residents’ health. In 2012, one activist said she was beaten and threatened with forced psychiatric care.

During his presentation, the speaker shows satellite images and videos of fishing boats from the time when the fish-packed Aral Sea was one of largest lakes in the world. He describes the consequences of the water loss for locals: extremely hot summers, freezing winters, dust storms and lung diseases.

“Only the government can do something about it,” the activist says, describing wasteful irrigation upstream on the Amu-Darya River.

In his opinion, poor government management of water resources is the main cause of the environmental problems. Only about 10 percent of the water diverted from the river makes it to the fields, he says. The rest evaporates or leaks out of aging irrigation canals.

“People should [be required to] pay for the water, then they would save it,” he says.

Uzbekistan’s centralised agricultural plan aims to produce three million tonnes of cotton annually. To meet this target, officials require farmers to grow the water-intensive plant and press-gang residents to help with the harvest each autumn.

Environmentalists are also concerned that powerful international interests have little reason to save the Aral: Energy companies from China, Russia, Uzbekistan and elsewhere are drilling in the former seabed for natural gas. The tour group drives past their rigs the next morning, across a salt desert, to visit Muynak.

A generation ago, this former fishing village was a port at the southern end of the sea. Now it is about 100 kilometres from the water’s edge. Ships once anchored offshore are now popular tourist attractions, rusting, leaning over into the desert sand. Local children play on the graffiti-covered wrecks.

Only a few hundred kilometres to the north, on the Kazakhstani side, there is hope for the Aral Sea. There, a dike built with assistance from the World Bank in 2005 catches water from the Syr-Darya River, helping bring a tiny portion of the lake back and spawning a renewed fishing industry.

But the Kazakh side does not attract as many visitors, says a representative at Tashkent-based OrexCA, a travel agency specialising in Central Asia.

The agent says she receives occasional inquiries but no bookings to visit the lake in Kazakhstan. She thinks visitors are discouraged by the higher prices and also because Kazakhstani officials have removed so-called ghost ships, selling them for scrap. Instead she touts OrexCA’s “shrinking Aral Sea tour” on the Uzbek side.

The package includes visits to historical sites and, according to the agency’s website, is “designed for admirers of extreme tourism, adventurers and fans of exotic photography.”

Editor’s note:  Adriane Lochner is a Bishkek-based writer. This story originally appeared on EurasiaNet.org.

Researchers from Kyrgyzstan's Geology and Mineral Resources Agency hike to Adygene lake and glacier, above Bishkek, to assess its flooding potential. With glaciers retreating, many of Kyrgyzstan's 330-plus glacial lakes, 22 of which are classified as extremely hazardous, pose increased danger of flooding, but geologists only have resources to monitor the top five most dangerous. Credit: Adriane Lochner/EurasiaNet

By Adriane Lochner
BISHKEK, Mar 31 2014 (EurasiaNet)

It is a tough climb to the weather station: The trail leads across snow-covered boulder fields and steep, icy slopes. But for four researchers from Kyrgyzstan’s Geology and Mineral Resources Agency, the six-hour climb to the Adygene Glacier weather station, perched at 3,600 meters above sea level, is routine. From there, they can monitor 18 growing lakes at the glacier snout in the mountains above Bishkek.

The largest of these melt-water lakes is a potential hazard for the capital city, 40 kilometres down the valley, says the team’s debris expert, Vitaly Zaginaev.

“The lake is dammed by an underground ice plug that usually thaws slowly and feeds the Ala-Archa River. If the temperature rises too fast, the ice melts rapidly and can cause a sudden outburst. The flood could develop into a mudslide, endangering not only the valley but possibly also Bishkek,” Zaginaev told EurasiaNet.org.

Thanks to global warming, glaciers are retreating, new melt-water lakes are forming and the risk of so-called glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs) is increasing, many scientists agree. Back in 2007, the United Nations Environment Programme classified GLOF’s as “the largest and most extensive glacial hazard […] with the highest potential for disaster and damage.”

But even before that, Central Asia was feeling their effect. In July 1998, more than 100 people died during an outburst flood in the Shahimardan Valley, which Kyrgyzstan shares with Uzbekistan. A similar flood in the Shakhdara Valley in Tajikistan’s Pamir Mountains in 2002 claimed 23 lives. In both cases, local communities did not receive early warnings and had no time to take emergency action.

Today, tight budgets and bureaucracy are stretching Kyrgyzstan’s ability to prevent a similar disaster, one that could possibly strike the densely populated areas around the capital.

When the ice holding back Teztor Lake in the mountains above Bishkek melted on Jul. 31, 2012, the Geology and Mineral Resources Agency predicted it with precision.

“Within just a few days, the water level rose by 16 centimetres,” said Sergey Erokhin, head of the research group. But it took the Ministry of Emergency Situations (MChS) several days to release a warning after receiving notice from the scientists.

“We informed MChS 10 days ahead but they didn’t start putting up warning signs and evacuating people until right before the outbreak happened,” Erokhin said.

In a written response to EurasiaNet.org’s queries, MChS deputy head Davletbek Alimbekov credited the ministry’s emergency plan and warning system for averting fatalities and noted that no damage occurred. Local sources, however, reported thousands of dollars in material damage: several yurts were apparently flooded, and the mineral water pipeline to a commercial bottled-water plant was destroyed.

In contemplating hazard-reduction measures, some point to Switzerland, a country with topography similar to Kyrgyzstan’s, as a model. In a case similar to Kyrgyzstan’s Teztor, Grindelwald Lake in the state of Bern burst out in 2008. The material damage was over half a million dollars.

To avoid such a disaster in the future, government and local authorities implemented costly measures: For over 15 million dollars, they built a drainage channel and several automatic monitoring stations. Probes constantly measure the water level during summer. If numbers exceed a critical threshold, sensors trigger an alarm in the valley. In addition, a dedicated website informs residents about changes around the glacier and the lake.

“The probability of catastrophic lake outbursts is still small, but it increases with each new lake. This applies especially to high mountain regions such as Central Asia, the Himalayas, the Andes and the European Alps,” said glaciologist Wilfried Haeberli of the University of Zurich. Haeberli and his team predict melting glaciers will form up to 600 new lakes in Switzerland this century.

“We can quite accurately simulate where and when the new lakes will form. Therefore, it is possible to plan ahead and take early action,” he told EurasiaNet.org.

Haeberli recommends preventative measures including artificially lowering a lake’s water level or building a reservoir dam to break the dangerous tidal wave (a rock slide can trigger a sudden “tsunami”). Early warning systems and emergency plans are important to evacuate people on time.

Of course, impoverished Kyrgyzstan does not have resources like Switzerland’s. Kyrgyz scientists say they have the means to check on only a fraction of the 330 lakes around the country that Alimbekov of MChS says are prone to outburst this year, and only a handful of the 22 that are considered extremely hazardous.

The six specialists from the Geology and Mineral Resources Agency monitor five of Kyrgyzstan’s seven provinces. In southern Batken (where the 1998 outburst that killed more than 100 happened) and Osh provinces no one is monitoring glacial lakes, they say.

In this situation, Zaginaev and his team do the best they can. Each year, they pick the five most dangerous lakes, hike to them by foot and measure parameters like temperature, precipitation and solar radiation. “At least installing some automatic measuring stations would make our work a lot easier,” said Zaginaev.

Editor’s note:  Adriane Lochner is a Bishkek-based writer. This story originally appeared on http://www.EurasiaNet.org

Ready for the wedding night? Credit: Courtesy of David Trilling/EurasiaNet

By Adriane Lochner
BISHKEK, Feb 27 2014 (EurasiaNet)

It starts out like any gymnastics class: A teacher guides a roomful of women through stretching and breathing exercises. The yoga, ballet and tai chi moves train pelvic muscles, the stomach and legs.

You only realize you are in a “sex class” when the egg-shaped stones appear. They are used for vaginal weightlifting, a Chinese technique for strengthening muscles and increasing sensitivity in the genital area. The goal is something rarely discussed in Kyrgyzstan: better sex.“After the fall of the Soviet Union, sex hit Kyrgyzstan like a hammer. People were not ready." -- Bubusara Ryskulova

“I wanted to create a place where women can develop their femininity,” says 30-year-old Rakhat Kenjebek kyzy, founder of the Jade Gift School, which is named for the stone eggs. When she opened three years ago, people were sceptical. Now the school has more than 150 students between the ages of 18 and 66.

In the Soviet Union, sex was a taboo topic and femininity discouraged.

“Women had to function like robots […] Today they need to wake up from their post-Soviet stupor,” says Kenjebek kyzy, who lived in China for several years. “I was surprised when people there spoke openly about sex. Women proudly showed their feminine sensitivity, elegance and emotionality,” she says, adding that she was surprised by how comfortable Chinese men and women seemed around each other.

Back in Kyrgyzstan, talking about sexuality is still discouraged. Thus many young people are confused about sex. That leads to all sorts of problems, says Bubusara Ryskulova, director of the Sezim women’s crisis centre.

“After the fall of the Soviet Union, sex hit Kyrgyzstan like a hammer. People were not ready,” she says. “Girls were experimenting and wore provocative fashions. This was interpreted the wrong way and rapes happened.”

Since 1998, with foreign donor support, Sezim has operated Bishkek’s only women’s shelter. They also offer a hotline and counseling. About 3,000 women seek Sezim’s help each year: some 60 percent are fleeing domestic abuse; others face trafficking and bride kidnapping.

A lack of awareness about sex contributes to the abuse, Ryskulova says, citing the example of a woman abused by her husband for 20 years. They had had an arranged marriage and the husband repeatedly raped her.

“If a couple is not educated in sex this can lead to unpleasant experiences,” says Ryskulova, “Sex might not be the main cause of a bad relationship but often it is an underlying problem that can make big waves, even lead to domestic violence.”

In Ryskulova’s opinion, sex education is sorely needed in Kyrgyzstan and she cautiously supports the Jade Gift School.

There’s more than just sex ed at Jade Gift, though, which helps explain its success. Besides the regular gymnastics classes (which cost about 35 dollars per month and are advertised on a variety of social networking websites), the school offers one-time classes in “partner massage” and “sexual fantasy.” The courses, says Kenjebek kyzy, help women learn to enjoy and respect themselves.

Jade Gift’s clients are eager to talk about their experiences, on condition of anonymity. A 29-year-old Bishkek woman who has been married for a year-and-a-half says she came to the school because “I wanted to please my man and we are in a very happy relationship right now. This is not only because of great sex but also has spiritual reasons. I learned to love myself and he feels that.”

She has only told her close friends and sisters that she is attending the classes because “there are many people who wouldn’t understand.”

In a culture with rigidly defined roles, men, too, can face extra pressure. “There are cases of men being psychologically abused by their wives. There are also issues caused by unemployment, alcoholism and gambling,” Ryskulova from Sezim says. “At least women can talk with relatives or their kids about it. Men usually don’t have anyone to talk to. They are three times more likely to commit suicide than women.”

Jade Gift has started catering to male clients, too. Recently, it established a “Men’s Power Class” taught by former bodybuilder and fitness coach Alexander Novitsky.

“Like in the female class, we want to strengthen the muscles used during sex,” said Novitsky, who also teaches his students techniques to avoid prostate cancer and gives tips on how to please women.

Currently, he has a group of five students. One of them proudly tells EurasiaNet.org that after two months’ training, both his wives got pregnant. (Polygamy is technically illegal in Kyrgyzstan, though it is thought to be common among wealthy men.)

“We were surprised by the open-mindedness of the men in Bishkek,” says Kenjebek kyzy. “Right now, we are offering just the physical workout but we might teach a cunnilingus class in the future.”

Editor’s note:  Adriane Lochner is a Bishkek-based journalist. This story originally appeared on EurasiaNet.org.