The Moynaq Ship Graveyard is a fishing fleet rusting on the dry bed of the Aral Sea, in Karakalpakstan in western Uzbekistan, about 150 kilometres from the nearest water. Until the 1980s this was a port. The sea came to the end of the streets, the town lived by fishing, and its cannery supplied much of the Soviet Union. Then the rivers that fed the Aral were sent to cotton fields instead, and the sea went. The shape of the harbour is all still here. Moynaq sits on the low bluff that was its waterfront, and the harbour wall still runs along the edge, marking exactly where the water stopped. From the top there is no sea in any direction, only pale flat seabed to the horizon. A staircase built into that wall drops onto it. You go down the same steps the fishermen used to reach their boats, and at the bottom there is sand.
The hulls can be climbed. Gaps in the plating and welded ladders let you onto the decks, where portholes, rivets and decades of scratched names have layered up on the steel. Several ships have keeled right over, tipping their propellers down to eye level in the sand, blades still sharp. A few more lie further out among the saxaul scrub, and reaching those means walking the seabed itself over cracked salt crust until the memorial is a shape behind you. What you are walking on is called the Aralkum, a desert younger than the people standing on it, and storms lift something like a hundred million tonnes of salt dust off it every year, carrying old Soviet farm chemicals with it. Since 2018 a festival called Stihia has put stages and thousands of people among the hulls for one weekend each summer, the single time of year this place is loud. The dozen ships below the wall are not where they were moored. They are the ones that escaped the scrap crews of the 1990s, when a hull was worth more as steel than as a boat, and somebody gathered them into a row.