Nukus

Reading time 3 minutes.

We arrived in Nukus on the 1st of November after taking the night train from Bukhara. We had a private cabin for two in first class, which was well worth paying twice the price of the third class. Yandex Go, the regional Uber app, had launched recently in the summer, so we had to wait a bit longer for a ride outside the train station.

Karakalpakstan

When we arrived at the guest house, we realized the owner did not speak Uzbek, nor English. He was speaking Karakalpak and Russian, and was physically different from the Uzbek we had seen so far. If we had done our homework, we would have known we were in Karakalpakstan, an autonomous republic of two million inhabitants accounting for 36% of the size of Uzbekistan. Our host, in his words, had only a basic understanding of the Uzbek language. He was very talkative, so we used Google Translate extensively during the stay.

Nukus is the capital city of Karakalpakstan, and as such has massive official buildings and large squares. It does not have old historical parts like other cities we are visiting in Uzbekistan. It was a really quiet town with clean and large streets. As many other towns in Uzbekistan, we found an old amusement park in the central area.

Mizdakhan Necropolis

The Mizdakhan necropolis is one of the main touristic attractions near Nukus (20 km, 30 minutes by car). Our host (the wife) found a taxi driver within minutes who drove us there, walked us around, and brought us back to the hotel for 70 soms (5.22). He was a pretty good guide, even if we communicated only using online translation tools.

Then, he offered to drive us to a Karakalpak restaurant very close to the hotel. We invited him for lunch, he accepted. We had some skewers, which are typical from the region.

We came back to this restaurant in the evening without realizing it was the same restaurant as they recommended earlier.We just followed the reviews online. We had the specialty recommended by the taxi driver. It took some time to prepare, but it was worth it. And the dish was huge! Two cute little girls kept giggling when staring at us from afar. A musician customer played the guitar and sang beautifully. He sat on the table next to us, his back towards us.

Savitsky Art Museum

The Savitsky Art Museum is the main thing to do inside Nukus. It is a shame one of the section was closed. It took us two hours to go around the two floors of the exhibition. And we went very slowly. Although I am not versed in painting, I enjoyed the representation of the Karalpak land and culture, the sensitivity of Russian and Uzbek artists, and the depiction of Uzbekistan. The museum has mostly paintings, however, there are also sculptures, clothes, and ancient objects.

Aral Sea

To be honest, we had no idea about the activities in and around Nukus when we got there. We decided to visit it because some blogs mentioned it as an interesting addition to more popular cities.

Two-day or three-day trip to the Aral Sea, stopping by the city of Moynak, is perhaps the main reason tourists travel to Nukus. These trips include transport to Moynak with normal taxis, and then a ride to the yurt camp with four-wheeler.

Moynak is a popular destination at a three-hour drive from Nukus. It was a thriving harbor on the Aral Sea. Now, it is popular for the ship cemetery and the Aral Sea museum.

We haven’t been to the Aral Sea because we were tired, a bit sick, and the videos we saw were not convincing enough to pay 450-500 euros (approximately the price for 2 people for 2 days one night). It was low season, so we could not find people to share the trip and the cost.