Moynaq's fishing fleet still sits where the water left it, and the nearest water is now some 150 kilometres away. Until the 1960s this was Uzbekistan's port town, a fishing and canning centre on the Aral Sea — then the world's fourth-largest lake — with a shoreline that began at the end of its streets. Soviet planners diverted the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya to irrigate cotton fields, and the sea, no longer fed, began to withdraw. For a while the fishermen followed the retreating shore; then the shrinking water turned so salty that the fish died out altogether, and the boats were abandoned where they lay. The cannery held on for years on fish trucked in frozen from the Baltic and the Pacific, until it closed too. About a dozen rusted hulls now rest below the old harbour bluff, on the floor of the Aralkum — the youngest desert on Earth, tens of thousands of square kilometres of seabed that were still underwater in 1960.
Walking out among the ships, you cross the old waterline on foot. Sand has drifted against the keels, saxaul scrub grows where trawlers once dropped their nets, and visitors have layered the steel with scratched names and graffiti. From the bluff, where the harbour wall still traces the vanished coast, the view runs flat and empty to the horizon. The sea's absence is still working on the town: wind lifts salt and old agricultural chemicals off the dry bed, worst in spring, and saxaul has been planted across more than a million hectares of it to pin the dust down. Some 13,500 people remain, and a small museum keeps the before-and-after photographs and the cannery's old labels. The ships are going nowhere, and the South Aral is not coming back.