Photos

The third and last picture from this series. Once more I have not altered the scene, not changed colours (except for the unavoidable fading through scanning).
Pictured here is the ponton-bridge crossing what once was the river Amu Darja close to the city of Urganch (near Khiwa).
The idea behind the bridge was that the pontons would float on the water so that the river could be crossed at any water level. Since the water has been taken from the river for irrigation of fields of cotton, rice and water melons (see pictures 1 and 2 as well as the boat on the ground of Lake Aral), the pontons don't float any more. Rusting and leak they lie on the river's sandy ground.
In order to still allow a crossing of the river, the pontons have been connected through small mud-ramps, one of which you can see on the left side of the picture, a LADA just driving from one ponton to the next. Since this is one of the very few roads crossing the "river" for many kilometres up- and down"stream", traffic is pretty tense for this sparsly populated region.
Again taking pictures was not allowed here since the government wants to promote tourism to amazing places such as Samarkand or Bukhara and pictures of devastated nature of course don't fit and are unwanted. So I had to be quick, another shot without looking through the view finder since two policemen were closely watching every step I took. But this picture cearly shows why Lake Aral is drying up: the bridge, built decades ago over a river that used to be so raging in spring when snow was melting in the upper reaches of the river that only on pontons it seemed to cross the floods now has become little more but ditch that is so small, you can't even see it on the picture.
By the way, on the picture I am standing in the middle of the bridge (dompare to picture 2 of the series, taken at the beginning of the bridge), just to give you an impression of just how much water is missing here!

Once more I would like you not to judge the technical part of this picture, which, I know very well, is hardly great - not even when considering being watched by police - but take it as a documentary of what the WHO calls the biggest man-made desaster, a situation that like no other shows how man is able to convert a whole landscape and climate on a sub-continent scale within only three decades!!! (please see the note on the picture of the boat on the ground of Lake Aral for further information)

Thanks for reading!