The road to Muynak, once a fishing town at the shores of the Aral Lake, is so full of tire and suspension killing potholes that I thought about turning around, not only once. But the sight of rusting ships lying around in the sand is worth the trip. There is also a nice museum explaining the history of the lake: Once the third largest lake of the world, today it is almost completely dried out. Soviet irrigation projects diverted the water of its two main feeding rivers, the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya to huge cotton fields in the 1960s, causing the lake to shrink to a few % of its original size.