Part I: You Approach the End of the Earth

Just before you get to the end of the earth, which you approach in a rickety Russian jeep, you come across camels strolling in front of rusting fishing boats. But there's no water at all - the ships sit on dry land, sinking like rotting apples into the salt-desert floor.

Believe me. I've been there, to the end of the earth, so I know.

It's just outside the town of Aralsk, formerly on the coast of the Aral Sea, in western Kazakstan, Central Asia. Holy Christ. (Click here for Lonely Planet map)

It's the world's fourth biggest inland sea. In the 1950s, Soviet planners diverted, for irrigation purposes, the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya rivers that feed the lake. They planned to use the water for cotton. The cotton did ok, not great. The lake, cut off from its source, didn't do so well.

I'm actually not sure the stuff on the desert floor is salt. It acts like salt: white, crusty, salty (I didn't taste it, but you could just tell). Could be snot, I guess, or cocaine or dandruff. But both of those see more unlikely -- all that cocaine would be expensive and that much dandruff would have to come from a really, really big, dry scalp.

Anyway, even if what what was mixed with the sand is a mystery, here's something that was crystal-clear: at the end of the earth, at least in the summer, it is hot. The kind of hot where you realize you're thirsty because you get a headache, where going in the shade doesn't help much more than going in the shade helps when you're sitting inside your mom's oven, where you can't believe that people are smoking, because, well, would you inhale burning fire when you're already inhaling other burning fire?

At the edge of town you can still see a pretty blue metal fence with light-hearted orange sailboats welded between the posts. It's the blue fence that used to mark the entrance to Aralsk's beach, the one where Russian apparatchiks and the children of their mistresses probably played and built, in the Russian style, sand-memorials to the dead of World War II. A fence like you might see on Cape Cod or South Carolina, separating a pleasant public beach from the quaint beach town's main road.

But where the water used to be you've now got only garbage, rocks and used tires. And a large truck, parked, filled with three men, drunk, drinking more. Rusting cranes jut out over what once was Aralsk's busy harbor. Dilapidated warehouses sit useless just next to them.

I went willingly through the exercise of checking this place out -- courting death (spiritual, if not physical) in Central Asia, like some kind of daredevil who jumps out of a plane with only an umbrella ("Good day, old chap!") -- because I love my brother.

Well, alright, maybe not just with an "umbrella". I had sunglasses, food, water, a camera, money, a ticket back to the U.S., where I have a job, etc. I just don't like being hot and dirty.

My brother just finished a two year stint as a Peace Corps volunteer in the north of Kazakstan, in the north, near the Russian border, where he made friends with names like Sergei and Olga, who drink lots of vodka and eat "too much" horsemeat (as if that's possible). I went to visit him before he came back home to the U.S after his tour was up. We had a loving and memorable trip, full of brotherly conversations ("Where's my deodorant?") and brotherly silences, which made neither of us uncomfortable.

But when the dust blew across the now-dry sea and the camels walked around on their floppy, padded feet that look like what Sesame Street's Snuffleupagus might have got around on and drunk strangers asked me questions in the Russian I don't understand (different from the Russian I do understand, which is on cartoons where the people speak English with a Russian accent) I cried. Inside, not outside. Just like how I cried (again, inside), when the guy driving our jeep, a nice man who smoked and drank no water on a four hour drive, who knew all the twists and turns in a road that looked the same to me from start to finish, sat me down in the house of a friend of his, who lived just off the road we were driving on, gave me camel's milk and demanded that I drink it. It looked like yogurt. My brother drank it and said it tasted like yogurt, too. I said no, I don't drink camel's milk. They couldn't understand.

Think harder, friend, think harder.

I stuck to my guns and refused to drink the bowl they poured for me -- "Looks delicious, but I just finished a meal of human excrement". I mean, what's the point? I drink it, I like it, I go home. I drink it, I don't like it, I go home. I don't drink it, I go home. It's not like the drinking/not drinking decision would make a difference to me. And the people there don't give a shit. After all, me not drinking the camel's milk means more for them. I'm a bad guest, you say? Well, I bet the bad part of my guesthood has more to do with 1) me not speaking the language; 2) me smelling weird to the people there; 3) me bargaining with some poor merchant in the bazaar over 4 cents to experience "local culture"; 4) my general desire to mow down crowds of people with automatic weapons. I'm a bad guest. But that has little to do with whether or not I drink camel's milk.

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