Moynaq & the Aral Sea Expedition

You arrive in Tashkent, where our driver meets you and transfers you to your hotel; check-in is from 14:00. The day is free to rest before the early flight west. Your guide will call at the hotel to brief you on the expedition, the desert conditions and what to pack for the night in the yurt camp — layers, a torch and sunglasses matter more here than anywhere else in the country. If you have energy, an evening walk around Amir Timur Square is a gentle introduction to the capital. Overnight in Tashkent.

Morning transfer to the domestic terminal for the flight to Nukus (810 km, about 1 hour 40 minutes), capital of the autonomous republic of Karakalpakstan. On arrival you go straight to the Savitsky Karakalpakstan Art Museum, which holds the world's second largest collection of Russian avant-garde art alongside a fine display of Karakalpak applied arts. Afterwards you drive around the centre — the statue of the poet Berdakh, the City Hall, the Drama Theatre — then out to the Mizdakhan Necropolis and the Gyaur-Kala Fortress near Khojeyli.

At 09:00 you leave Nukus for Moynaq (220 km, about 3 hours). Here you walk out onto what was the seabed to the cemetery of ships, where a dozen trawlers lie half-buried in sand, and visit the Moynaq Regional Studies Museum with its photographs of the working port. Lunch is at a local guesthouse. You then continue by 4x4 onto the boundless Ustyurt Plateau, stopping to photograph the canyons and collapsed cliffs of the old shoreline, and reach the yurt camp by the Aral in the late afternoon. Camp dinner and overnight in a yurt.

An early start to photograph sunrise over the water. After breakfast you visit the 13th-century settlement of Kurgancha-Kala, then the small Soviet-era village of Kubla-Ustyurt, where an abandoned runway sits oddly in the landscape. You pass the ruins of a lighthouse and the deserted village of Urga on the way to Lake Sudochie, a nesting ground for enormous numbers of migratory birds, then continue through Kungrad district back to Nukus. In the evening you fly to Tashkent and transfer to your hotel.

You check out at noon with free time until your transfer. If the schedule allows, your guide can take you to Chorsu Bazaar or to the State Museum of Applied Arts, a soft landing after four days of desert. Your driver then transfers you to Tashkent International Airport for your onward flight. This is the end of your Moynaq and the Aral Sea Expedition with Naseem's Travel.