A Visit to the Aral Sea
August 11th, 2014 by DavidWhen we considered crossing Central Asia in a Ride for Climate, I knew we had to visit the Aral Sea – or at least what remains of it. Even though the sea’s demise wasn’t due to global warming, it’s one of the world’s worst environmental catastrophes, serving an example of how humans can alter the planet. We wanted to visit the sea, meet the people who live near it, and understand if it is truly the cautionary tale we’ve heard it to be.
The Aral Sea was once fed by two mighty rivers, the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, which flowed from the mountains of Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan into a vast desert, where they formed the Aral. The sea has no outlet – its water levels are determined by the balance between water flowing into it (or falling into it through rain) and evaporation. Fifty years ago it was the world’s fourth largest inland body of water, with a surface area greater than Lake Michigan’s. It contained over a million square kilometers of water – about 30 times the amount of water Lake Mead can hold at capacity. In the early 1960s, more than 40,000 tons of fish were caught annually in the sea.
While people had been using water from the Amu Darya and Syr Darya for centuries to irrigate crops, in the 1960s the Soviets dramatically increased the water withdrawn from these rivers to feed agriculture, with an emphasis on cotton, one of the thirstiest crops. As less and less water reached the sea, its level started dropping. By 1970, the Aral Sea had dropped six feet. As the level dropped, the water became saltier, and fewer and fewer fish could survive. By the early 80s, the fishery disappeared entirely.
When the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, the sea’s water level had dropped 50 feet, and its area was cut almost in half. The newly independent countries where the sea is located – Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan – continued the agricultural practices started by the Soviets, and the sea continued to shrink. Today the Aral is a series of small lakes, with less than one tenth the water it once held. The satellite images below, provided by NASA, show the lake in 1989 and 2008.
The Aral Sea in 1989 and 2008
After taking the train to Kungrad, Uzbekistan, Lindsey and I biked the 90 kilometers to the town of Moynak, which once sat on the shore of the Aral Sea. Our ride to Moynak intersected with several canals, which appeared to bring a feeble amount of the Amu Darya’s final water to the town. These canals kept the surrounding landscape from being entirely barren – we saw pockets of water and green bushes instead of pure desert. The town itself follows a long road, as it used to jut out as a peninsula into the lake. It was dusty, with a few abandoned buildings, and at the far end sat an abandoned cannery, where thousands of tons of fish were once processed every year.
It was over 100 degrees F when we arrived, and we bought some water at the one store we found, where several of the packaged items we inspected were expired. We struggled to find food to eat in town – there appeared to be only one store (we later learned that there were a number of small stores, but they weren’t labeled, as they aren’t set up for outside visitors). We also didn’t trust the food at restaurants, as the water supply isn’t good, and intermittent electricity means that refrigeration is sometimes lacking. The town has one hotel, which cost $8 per person per night. We had hoped to stay at the one homestay mentioned in our guidebook, but we learned that the police had shut it down (we’re not sure why).
We hired a guide, a man who spoke English and has lived in Moynak his entire life. He told us he didn’t like the criticism his town receives, and that it actually has a good community that supports itself – it isn’t the ghost town suggested by some journalists. Following him around Moynak, we found more stores where we could buy food (and vodka), as well as a treatment station built by the French where people get drinking water for a few hours every day. He also said the population was growing and not shrinking, as it did after the collapse of the fishing industry.
I asked our guide what the biggest problems were in Moynak. He said “water, weather, and unemployment,” in that order. Moynak is literally the last town to get water from the Amu Darya River, and by the time the river reaches town it is too salty and contaminated, as it has already been used by millions of people upstream. As for weather, our guide explained that it was too hot in summer, with horrible dust storms, both of which are a result of losing the sea. And of course, there isn’t much work in the town – the fishing industry collapsed long ago, as did the cannery in town.
In our reading of the literature on the Aral Sea, one topic that comes up over and over is how increased dust from the old sea bed – contaminated with toxins from industrial agriculture – has led to cancer and respiratory problems. Rates of childhood pneumonia are higher in this region than anywhere else in the former Soviet Union. We asked our guide about this, and his response was interesting. He said that yes, there were health problems, but that the media made it sound worse than it was.
One scholarly paper we read listed the health effects of losing the Aral Sea, but then also noted that the most serious health issues “are directly related to Third World medical, health, nutrition, and hygienic conditions and practices.” In other words, while changes in air quality have hurt the population, the biggest problems are the same as those faced by any poor population in the world. However, one major reason for the poverty is that the town has lost its major industry – fishing.
Our guide took us to the highest point in town, a hill that was once a bluff overlooking the inland sea. Stretching out to the horizon was the former lake bed, a flat desert emptiness with a row of rusted boats lining the former shoreline. Our guide told us that this was a holy place: during World War II, soldiers bound for the front lines were bid farewell from that point – and then they sailed north across the Aral Sea. It felt surreal to hear this story and envision parents watching their sons disappear on boats to cross the sea and fight Hitler. Now all we saw was empty desert.
We decided to see what is left of the Aral, so we hired a jeep, and along with our guide and a Korean tourist who also wanted to visit the sea, drove out into the former lake bed. I was surprised to find a paved road, and then pass by gas wells. Apparently, the drying of the lake has made it easier to extract fossil fuels. I asked our guide what people thought about the gas wells. “They’re good,” he said, because they were giving people in the region jobs.
The paved road quickly gave way to a rutted jeep track, and it took three hours on a bumpy road to reach the shore of the sea, where we found ourselves in an isolated, beautiful place in the desert. The water was once one third as salty as the ocean; now it’s three time saltier because the fresh water has evaporated, concentrating the salt (and anything else in the water). We went for a swim after our guide assured us that it was clean enough to do so. Salty water makes you more buoyant, and I almost fell asleep in the water lying on my back. It felt strange to so greatly enjoy a place that I knew was an ecological disaster. That night, we camped on some cliffs overlooking the water, and then woke before dawn to watch the sun rise over the shrinking sea. It was beautiful, sad, and lonely.
The next day, we drove back through Moynak and our guide took us to where the Amu Darya now ends. A dike blocks its progress, creating a lake that collects the small amount of flow that makes it this far. We were told that there are several projects creating such lakes to provide habitat and some opportunities for fishing. A few bulldozers sat idle nearby. A river with an annual discharge about one seventh that of the Mississippi is stopped by a simple dirt wall.
Our jeep drove us to the town of Nukus, where we started biking again, following the Amu Darya upstream. We crossed the river, finding that it had grown in size. And then, as we passed rice and cotton fields, we saw where the Aral Sea has gone. It has gone to agriculture. Whereas Moynak had almost no water, it was everywhere in the upstream floodplain. Families have canals running behind their homes, with verdant gardens in every yard. We’ve heard about many problems with the agriculture that feeds off the Amu Darya – it is hugely wasteful of water, and soil salinization is lowering yields. But after seeing the emptiness of the Aral Sea, it was almost refreshing to see a place with so much life and water.
Based on studies we’ve read (I read much of this book, and highly recommend it), even if agriculture becomes many times more efficient with water use (as it could, especially if they stop growing cotton and rice), the Aral Sea won’t come back soon. It would take too long to refill, and there is simply too much thirsty agriculture. One bright story is the Northern Aral Sea in Kazakhstan, which we didn’t visit. A dam has been built to block off part of the sea. The small lake that has formed now has low enough salinity to support many of the species of fish that used to live there, and a small fishing industry has begun again. But most of the Aral Sea will be gone for many generations. Also, climate change will likely make the return of the sea less likely. Here in the Aral basin, warmer temperatures will cause increased evaporation, meaning that even more water will be needed for irrigation, making it even less likely that the Aral will ever be refilled.
While this journey is named “Ride for Climate,” the tragedy of the Aral Sea is not due to climate change; it has shrunk to a tenth of its former size due to poor water management. However, the Aral Sea serves as a reminder of how dramatically humans are able to reshape the face of the planet, and what happens when the balance of water is changed. Climate change will upset this balance all around the world and require us to improve how we manage water. At the very least, this basin serves as a warning.
Baku to Kungrad: Boats and Trains
August 9th, 2014 by LindseyWe left our home in Baku at 11PM and took one last trip through the Old City before biking to the Port. There, we went through a quick customs process and were pointed towards the ship. It was completely dark and there was no obvious place to board with our bikes, but a few men stepped out of the shadows and pointed the way – which involved hopping over a wide gap between the dock and the ship, bikes in hand. We put them on the lower deck where they shared the trip with a bunch of train cars.
Then we climbed the stairs to the upper deck and were shown to our cabin. The ship was built in 2005 and had all the comforts we needed – reports from previous travelers conflicted, with some noting rickety Soviet ships with unspeakable bathroom conditions, and others gushing over private cabins and delicious meals. Our ship was somewhere in between – we shared our 6-bunk cabin with three mostly friendly Azerbaijanis, and three reasonably palatable and priced meals were served every day. For entertainment there was a volleyball net, TV, and ping-pong table.
David went to sleep right away, as it was after midnight by the time we settled in; I spent the night squirming around in the age-old struggle to achieve the optimum balance between mosquito-avoidance (must use sheet!) and overheating (ugh, no covers please!). By the time it got cool enough to sleep, the sun had come up… and we were still in port. In fact, we didn’t leave until about 2PM, 14 hours after boarding. I don’t know why, but this seems to be the norm – there was a lot of moving around of trains during the night and the next morning, and I guess they just can’t predict how long it will take to load the cargo so they just get the people onboard whenever they feel like it.
In any event, we were eventually underway, and we spent the next 24+ hours smoothly and quietly – surprisingly so – motoring northeast, towards Kazakhstan. It was strange being contained on a cargo ship for the better part of two days and nights; at 155m long, it was large enough not to be claustrophobic, yet small enough to feel a bit stir crazy, especially as it was stuffy in the cabin and hot anywhere outside of the sparse shade on deck. We managed to find a shady spot near the bridge (and were invited in to look at the controls and maps), where we caught up on blog posts and data management, and I read a book about Uzbekistan and the Aral Sea (Chasing the Sea by Tom Bissell – highly recommended).
In the early afternoon the second day, land came into sight and we got excited for our fourth country of the trip. However, we soon noticed that we were no longer moving towards the land; we seemed to be parallel to the shore… and then we heard a grinding noise and realized we had dropped the anchor. We were told it would be four to five hours before we could dock. We had read reports of being stalled outside of port for days, so we were OK with a few hours. As it turned out, we sat there for the rest of the afternoon, and then started again in the early evening. Once we had docked, Kazakh customs officers came on board with a drug-sniffing dog, and then we were allowed off the boat – fortunately we didn’t have to wait for the train to get off! After a longer-than-expected customs process in the port (they didn’t seem to be expecting us), we and our bikes were on the road in Aktau!
We had no map, didn’t know the currency, and had only our three words of Russian to rely on. It was lovely. Between the port and town were several kilometers of beach, and families were out enjoying the water at sunset. We couldn’t resist a quick swim in the Caspian – the water was refreshing, if a bit dirty – and then we rode into town. Here things broke down a bit. We had planned to stay at a hotel recommended by a Warmshowers host who had recently moved away from Aktau, but my plan to bike to the city center, find internet, and look up the hotel didn’t work out very well. As far as we could tell, there wasn’t really a city center. There was a ‘promenade’ – a wide avenue with a park in the middle that had a MiG plane and a WWII memorial (common in every Central Asian town of any size, as we’d discover), and a busy street with roundabouts, but no obvious center. When we finally managed to find internet and look up the hotel, it was out of our price range. We settled on the ‘budget’ option in the Lonely Planet. It was definitely affordable, but the lesson may be to splurge from time to time. Nonetheless we survived the night, and we spent the following day in an air-conditioned cafe writing blog posts and planning our route to the Aral Sea.
We had already decided not to try to bike all the way from Aktau to Muynak, the jumping-off point for the Aral Sea. It is nearly 1000 km through desert wasteland, and reports from previous cyclists indicated that certain misery, in the form of extreme heat, strong headwinds, dirt roads, and occasional dust storms, is in store for those who ride it. Plus, our Uzbekistan visa had already started – there was no way we could bike every mile and visit the Aral Sea, not to mention some of the ancient Silk Road cities on the way. So we planned to hitchbike – we had heard that most people driving the route are traveling long distances, so it seemed possible to catch a ride that could take us all or most of the way.
In the evening, we rode back to the beach with a plan to watch the World Cup finals at midnight, then sleep on the beach until prime hitchhiking hours. We found a restaurant and sat down next to a table full of friendly Kazakhs. Before long, we were trading predictions on who would win the Cup and had an invitation to watch with them. We are still struck by the presence of so many outgoing, uncovered women after our time in Turkey. The ringleader of this group was Zuliya, a 25-year-old woman who lives with her boyfriend (!) in Aktau. We went with her to another bar, where we were treated to shashlik (BBQ) and beer while watching the game. She had never been on board with our plan to sleep on the beach, so before the extra time started, she led us to her apartment and her boyfriend went out and got dessert (another novelty – the woman invited us, and the man did the work!). Together we watched the final, crushing overtime. We didn’t get to sleep until 3:00 AM, and then we woke up and left at 7:00.
We were tired, grumpy, and sad over Argentina’s loss, but we hopped on our bikes and rode through nasty air and rush hour traffic towards a point on the road we had heard was good for finding rides. After 25 minutes with no luck (one passenger car stopped, and one truck stopped because he thought we wanted directions but wouldn’t take us), David said, out of the blue, “I wish we were on a train.” I confessed that I also wanted to take the train. Something about the certainty of getting to a destination, and our total unfamiliarity with the culture and languages, made it seem like a better option for the 1000km trip to Kungrad in Uzbekistan, where we were prepared to start biking again.
The train turned out to be a bit of a disaster. First they said we couldn’t bring our bikes on board, then they said we could but it seemed a bit hush-hush and we weren’t sure what was going on. Ultimately, I’m certain we were scammed – we didn’t have an actual seat for the first 12-hour leg from Aktau to Beyneu (I think the people who got us on the train made a deal with the conductor and pocketed our fare, since we ended up without an actual ticket) and kept getting shuffled around. At one point we thought the conductor was going to throw us off after he caught David wandering into other cars with his camera (apparently a no-no). He escorted us into his compartment and sat us down, then made a phone call… We were feeling nervous – were we in trouble? Then he unlocked a cabinet, got out 2 cups, and said the magic word: “Chai?” He was offering us tea and a place to sit! We thought we had our own compartment for the next leg of the trip, which left at 2AM. Imagine our disappointment when we boarded, only to be shown to the same sort of open bench seat we had been on for the previous leg! The whole time David was pouting, saying that he wanted a truck, and while I’m not as evangelical about hitching as he is, I found myself wishing for a truck as well.
Crossing the border between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan was somehow a 4-hour ordeal; around 3AM conductors came through and made us all sit up, so the people in the upper bunks joined us below. Then they walked through every 1/2 hour, just as we dozed off, to look at our passports. Finally border control came aboard and processed our passports and we were out of Kazakhstan. A couple of hours later (I have no idea how this works), we repeated the process to enter Uzbekistan. This time, they questioned us and searched some of David’s luggage and made us fill out customs declarations. Finally they left and we were on our way again. The whole morning was quite slow – we seemed to stop every 20 minutes, and vendors would come on board selling everything from bread to perfume. It was interesting to see how the train-commerce worked, and convenient as I was able to change my money onboard. I also made some friends – two Uzbek ladies on a nearby seat came over to chat – one invited us to stay with us in Khiva – and then everybody else nearby crowded into our compartment. After chugging along for the better part of the day, we finally made it to Kungrad in the afternoon and gleefully rode into the desert.
Climate Change in Georgia and Azerbaijan
July 13th, 2014 by DavidCrossing Georgia and Azerbaijan, we conducted fewer interviews and did less research than we did in Turkey. That was partially by design – we wanted to focus on Turkey and Central Asia, and Georgia and Azerbaijan just happened to be between these regions. Nonetheless, we still interviewed experts and lay people, and did some basic online research on the climate issues in the region. Here’s what we found.
Georgia is one of the few countries on our route that does not (yet) have serious water quantity issues. The western part of the country, and especially the mountains, receive significant rainfall and snow. This also meant that the water was clean and good to drink everywhere we traveled – and in the mountains, a fresh spring could be found in almost every village. The eastern part, and especially the southeast (which we didn’t visit) is drier, and might be facing water shortages in the future, according to a professor we talked with in Tbilisi.
Through translators (and Google Translate), we asked a few laypeople if the climate had changed where they live (Are winters warmer or colder than they used to be? Are summers warmer or colder?). One man near the Black Sea said there was no difference in temperature, but that it rained more than it used to (he said it was because of a nearby reservoir that had been built in the 1960s). In the mountains of Svaneti, we interviewed the man who operated our hotel, as well as his wife and mother. All agreed that winters were far milder than they once were, and that there is now less snow. The man, Davit, said that weather was more unpredictable, and that it made it more difficult for farmers. In contrast, his wife and mother said that life was much easier now because the winters were not as hard. Another family in central Georgia agreed that winters are warmer than they used to be, but they didn’t think it had much of an impact on their lives.
In Tbilisi, we spoke with academics at Ilia State University, where we also gave a presentation on our trip, and with the “Young Greens,” a youth political activist group promoting progressive social and environmental policies. We asked both groups what they thought were the most pressing environmental problems in Georgia. The two groups mostly agreed. The biggest problems, they say, are deforestation and waste management. Climate change did not make the list, although a professor at Ilia State said that desertification was becoming a bigger problem in the country’s southeast.
In Azerbaijan’s countryside, we spent even less time talking to people than in Georgia – we biked five days without visiting many towns, and staying with only one family (who we were unable to ask about climate change – or rather, our limited-English translator couldn’t understand what we were asking).
Azerbaijan’s economy is dominated by oil. Entering the country, I wanted to know if oil was good or bad for the nation. I asked this question the last time I crossed an oil-producing country, Venezuela, and I was surprised how un-nuanced the answer was: oil clearly seemed bad for Venezuela’s politics and economy, as counterintuitive as that seemed. (See the Venezuela chapter of The Bicycle Diaries.) Venezuela seemed struck by The Curse of Oil.
Was Azerbaijan struck by the same curse? The answer seemed mixed, and more nuanced. Azerbaijan’s economy has done very well over the past decade; there are countless new buildings in the capital, Baku, and we witnessed little abject poverty, although admittedly we didn’t go to the more remote areas. However, while people we spoke with mentioned poverty as a big problem, and country data indicates that some certainly exists, the same data show that there is less poverty than in Venezuela, which corresponds with our observations. When I asked people in Venezuela if oil was good for the country, most (surprisingly) said no. In Azerbaijan, one person said “it is a blessing” for the nation, and nobody flat out said it was bad, although some mentioned pollution as a problem. It felt, based on our interactions, like the country was doing economically well, and it was due to oil. Politics, though, is a different question.
In Azerbaijan, we were greeted in almost every town, by a picture and statue of the country’s now deceased Communist leader, and then president, Heydar Aliyev. It actually reminded me of Venezuela, where I had seen pictures of Hugo Chavez everywhere. Before Heydar died, he named his son as his successor, and his son is now the president. In theory, there are elections. In practice, the country imprisons journalists, and elections are far from free. One person we talked to told a story about how, when he was in the army, he went to vote and he and his fellow soldiers received ballots that were already filled out. He asked for a blank ballot – which they gave him after carefully recording his name. Freedom House gives the country extremely low ratings on civil and political freedoms. While oil may not be directly at fault, oil money lines the coffers of the government and its officials, making it easier for the government to be less accountable to its people.
The few people we talked to in English suggested that climate change is an issue that is rarely talked about in Azerbaijan. When we asked our host what people in Azerbaijan thought about climate change, he said “’tis not a topic, actually,” although he said it was more of an issue in Turkey (Turkey and Azerbaijan speak almost the same language, Azerbaijanis watch Turkish television, and the two countries are very close diplomatically). Others agreed that it wasn’t an issue that people talked about – and, perhaps as revealing, they didn’t seem to know much about the basics of climate change.
We spoke to two professors in Azerbaijan about climate change and water issues. The main takeaway from these conversations were that the country currently suffers from both too much and too little water, a problem that climate change will exacerbate. The Kura River runs through the country, draining large portions of Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan. In the winter and spring, flooding is not uncommon, as there are few dams on the river to regulate the flows from snowmelt in the mountains and rain in the lowlands. In the summer, the water dwindles until there is very little flowing through the rivers – we saw this in the nearly dry tributaries as we rode through the Kura Valley in early July. This is a serious problem, as about half of Azerbaijan’s population relies on agriculture, which is dependent on irrigation. Already, the timing of water availability has shifted, with more water in the spring due to earlier snowmelt and rivers drying up earlier in the year. People are noticing the change, he said, but don’t know what is causing it. This change in the hydrograph is projected to continue and worsen with climate change.
One of the most interesting things we learned from these interviews was that an important reservoir – the Sarsang – is in Nagorno-Karabakh, the portion of Azerbaijan currently under Armenian control. We were told that water is being released from the reservoir in the spring, when it is not needed and causes flooding, and then held during the summer, denying people of water needed for irrigation. As a result, Azerbaijan has lost 120,000 hectares of productive land due to a politically caused water shortage.
We also talked a bit about Azerbaijan’s energy supply and use. Ninety percent of the country’s energy comes from fossil fuels (although ironically, long before we saw our first oil well, we saw a few wind turbines and solar farm). As the economy grows, people are using more energy, most of which comes from natural gas. There is a plan to install more alternative, sustainable energy sources, including small hydropower plants on the rivers, but people understandably question why the country should invest in renewables when oil and gas are so cheap.
As with Turkey, we were left with more questions than answers. People in Georgia and Azerbaijan are not very well informed about climate change, which, given its likely impact on agriculture in both countries, seems like a problem. But we also aren’t sure what people should do with this heightened awareness. Georgia’s domestic energy production comes from hydropower, and their population is quite small. Azerbaijan has huge fossil fuel resources, and how can we say “ you shouldn’t develop that?” Perhaps efforts are best put into adaptation, with the hope that some of Azerbaijan’s oil can stay in the ground longer – and fetch a higher price – if the rest of the world agrees to slow down its pace of consumption
A Comparison: Ride for Climate Asia vs. Latin America
July 13th, 2014 by DavidI’m writing from Baku, which Lindsey and I have reached after two months and 3,442 km of biking (2,136 miles). In these two months, we’ve stayed at the homes of 16 different individuals/families – of Turkish, American, Kurdish, Georgian, Dagestani, and Azerbaijani nationality. We picked up a significant amount of Turkish (which is fortunately very similar to Azerbaijani), although our Georgian and Russian (and Dagestani) are fairly limited to “hello” and “thank you.”
One question people have asked me, and one question I ask myself, is how does this journey compare to my last one, from California to Argentina – a 16,000-mile 17-month solo ride across 16 countries. The obvious difference is that I am riding with Lindsey, and that this trip is partially our honeymoon – it’s something that we’ve talked about doing together ever since our Eastern Europe trip. This trip is about bicycle adventure, and it is about climate change, but first and foremost, it is a trip Lindsey and I are taking together.
Riding across Latin America, I often found that I preferred riding alone because it was easier for people to invite me into their homes, and I met more people as a result. Riding as a couple, though, appears to make it no less difficult to meet people – and I sometimes think it makes it easier. Moreover, because we don’t speak the language here, having a partner makes communication a bit easier (we can divide up the tasks of looking up words in the dictionary – and Lindsey is better at language than I am, which makes it easier for me…).
In general, there is more diversity in this region of the world. Yes, there’s incredible diversity within Latin America, especially among the countless indigenous peoples. But the entire region (with the exception of a few small countries) is made up of Catholic, Spanish (or Portuguese, which is very similar to Spanish) speaking countries, all of which were once colonies of Spain or Portugal.
Here, in Western Asia (or far-Eastern Europe, depending on who you ask), we’ve already encountered numerous languages, including Turkish, Kurdish, Georgian, Svaneti (spoken in the mountains of Georgia), Azerbaijani, and Dagestani. Many people also try to talk to us in German, because they think we’re from Germany, or Russian, because that was the “lingua franca” of the former Soviet Union, and most older people in former Soviet Republics speak Russian. As a result, although we’ve been invited into people’s homes almost as frequently as I was in Latin America, our conversations have been very limited. Almost every family calls a friend or family member who speaks English, and hands us the phone to translate. Unfortunately, this rarely works well; the person on the phone usually doesn’t speak well enough for a good conversation. We’ve also, remarkably, had access to Google Translate in a number of situations, which works better than the friend-on-the-phone method. It has worked well enough to ask people whether they think winters are warmer or colder than they used to be. (Most say warmer.)
The diversity in language reflects diverse cultures. We biked through two Muslim countries (Turkey and Azerbaijan) and one Christian (Georgia, which was the second country to convert to Christianity, in 337 AD). Traveling in a Muslim country is very different than a Christian one – especially in villages, where all women wear headscarves, and where social norms discourage men and women from talking to each other. It was strange for us, for example, to stay with families where a man would invite us in and his wife would cook us dinner, but we would never talk to her and she wouldn’t eat with us.
We’ve also learned about the many conflicts over borders and sovereignty, and learned of forced migrations and wars we had never heard of before. The past century has been tough on the region. In the aftermath of World War I, Greeks were forcibly removed from Turkey (mostly in the west), and Armenians were violently expelled (mostly from the eastern part of the country). The nation of Armenia, with its land much reduced, went to war with neighboring Azerbaijan. Just a few years later, the USSR invaded Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia, bringing a temporary end to border disputes. As the USSR collapsed, Armenia and Azerbaijan fought again, and some 800,000 or so Azerbaijanis were displaced from the disputed territory. Many Armenians were also forced to leave their homes. In Georgia, violent struggles have been fought over two provinces, with Russia effectively taking control over them. (I wanted to take a route through the mountains from Svaneti to Tbilisi, but we were unable because the road goes through the break-away province of South Ossetia, whose border is closed and which is controlled by the Russian army). There are many conflicts I’ve left out here – these are just the ones that we learned about through our conversations and reading as we traveled, and my summary here is very simplified. These histories have highlighted just how much more complicated the world is than is suggested by the lines on a map.
The outreach component of this trip is very different from my last one, partially because of the language barrier. On my last trip, I did all I could to draw attention to climate change, giving nearly 100 talks at schools and community centers. Here in Asia, we don’t speak any of the languages, making outreach much more difficult. We’re not seeking out reporters or giving as many talks. Instead, we’re focusing mostly on talking to both experts and everyday people about what climate change means for the regions we bike through. We see this as more of a learning and sharing expedition than a strict awareness-raising one.
With regards to climate change, my most important realizations from the trip through Latin America were about poverty. Staying with people in the countryside who lived at the subsistence level forced me to think about the relationship between poverty and climate change in new ways.
On this trip, in Western Asia, we’ve encountered less abject poverty than I did in Latin America. Turkey has a booming economy, and most of the time we asked ourselves about economic growth and climate change. The country is going to nearly double its electrical power production in the next ten years, and it is building infrastructure that will be there for decades. The rate of economic growth will change as we travel east to nations much poorer than those of Latin America, but for now, it is a big difference.
Climate change is also a lower priority here, it seems, than in Latin America. According to a 2010 poll by Gallup, Latin Americans are some of the most concerned about climate change of any people in the world – according to the survey, of people who had heard about climate change, more than 80 percent in most countries thought it was a serious threat to their or their family’s livelihood. Here in Turkey and the Caucasus, the figure is less than 50 percent for the countries we’ve passed through so far. And, as we’ve found from talking to environmentalists, the issue doesn’t seem to get significant attention from either environmental advocates or government agencies.
Despite this, when we have asked people if the climate is changing, the response has been more unanimous than I experienced in Latin America. Especially in Turkey, most people we’ve talked to say that it is getting warmer, and that there is less snow than there used to be.
Finally, I feel like less of an activist than when I set out from California on my original Ride for Climate. I think that is part of the inevitable process of aging. Maybe I’m less idealistic, but the world also feels more complicated, and I’m actually less sure of what I can say to make a difference. This is partially because the past five years of being a climate advocate have been extremely frustrating, from Copenhagen to the widening partisan divide on climate change in the U.S.
I also believe that the hard work of taking action on climate change begins at the local level. We aren’t going to make a big difference by simply writing about the issue on our website while traveling across far-away places, or even giving a series of presentations here or at home. Big differences are made by people who build social movements, and work for sustained amounts of time within communities and organizations – long adventures can inspire and raise some awareness, but what we need now is action and movement building.
We hope that sharing what we learn on this trip – through this blog, through videos, and through presentations when we return to the U.S. – will help encourage this action. But we also understand that it is a very small part of what needs to happen.
We will now get on a boat and cross the Caspian Sea. We have not yet seen the boat we will take, but it will be a cargo ship that should take 20 or more hours to motor across the inland sea. Then our journey will continue in the Central Asian countries of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan.