Plane overhead/ People getting on train | Music | 00:00 |
| GRIFFITHS: Sometimes you've got to go a long way to find good news. | 00:21 |
Train/bus journey | Music | 00:26 |
| GRIFFITHS: Five and a half thousand kilometres from Moscow. And all because of an extraordinary twist to a haunting tale about the death of the Aral Sea six years ago. | 00:36 |
| Now there's a very different story to tell -- when I get there. | 00:52 |
Timur driving to home town | TIMUR: Here is my native town where I was born and graduated from primary school. | 01:05 |
| GRIFFITHS: My guide to the Aral Sea's new story is Timur Amanov, who grew up in Kazakhstan watching it all go wrong. | 01:11 |
| TIMUR: It has become very tough to live and work in this town. | 01:20 |
| Many people have begun to leave. This is what our family did. We moved to a different city. | 01:25 |
Aralsk | Music | 01:34 |
| GRIFFITHS: Timur's childhood memories of the port town of Aralsk in the 1970s are happy ones. | 01:44 |
Timur and Emma on dried up seabed | TIMUR: Right now, we are standing in the place that was once the bottom of the harbour. You see there are seashells everywhere. | 02:04 |
| There was a sea here, with a depth of more than nine or twelve metres. | 02:12 |
| Music | 02:19 |
| TIMUR: There was a pier over there see? Where the crane is now, and we used to jump off there into the water. | 02:24 |
Aralsk | Music | 02:34 |
| GRIFFITHS: What Timur didn't know was that the old Soviet authorities were deliberately draining the Aral Sea to feed cotton crops. He was watching his home town die - along with the Aral Sea itself . Aralsk was left high and dry. | 02:40 |
Dried up harbour | TIMUR: Once, the sea was here, it was a fishing harbour. People went fishing on these ships, then took the fish to Aralsk harbour for processing. And now the sea is gone and the ships have turned into the ships of the desert. | 03:05 |
| Music | 03:29 |
Painting of Aralsk | MUSABAYEV: This is the former harbour of Aralsk. | 03:41 |
Musabayev pointing to painting | GRIFFITHS: Nazhmeddin Musabayev is the mayor of Aralsk. | 03:46 |
| MUSABAYEV: There is the shipyard. Here is the harbour, and the ships. We used to play here and swim. And this place, this small restaurant, called "Float", was everyone's favourite place. | 03:50 |
Detail of painting showing restaurant | GRIFFITHS: Surprisingly, "Float" - the old restaurant - can still be found at the dried-up waterfront. | 04:07 |
Emma and Timur at old restaurant | It's not quite what it was -- but you get the idea. | 04:15 |
| TIMUR: I remember ships floating here in the days of my childhood. I remember seagulls, the sun shining, green water. | 04:23 |
Timur | The sea was the only beautiful thing in this town. And the place where we are sitting now was sea, too. | 04:32 |
Timur pours vodka | Timur: This is Russian vodka. Please let's drink for the return of the sea, okay? Emma: For the return of the sea. | 04:40 |
Rushing water in dam | GRIFFITHS: And here's the good news. | 04:59 |
| In what's got to be one of the world's greatest environmental recoveries, the Aral Sea is coming back to life. | 05:03 |
| TIMUR: Look at how the water is flowing into the sea. It looks like champagne, like foam. Because the dam has been built here, this place has turned into the central point of well-being in the region. | 05:15 |
| GRIFFITHS: It's just a dam, and a low one at that, thirteen kilometres long, and a hundred million dollars -- but look what's happened. | 05:36 |
Map Aral Sea | The Kok-Aral Dam cuts across the northern part of the Aral Sea in Kazakhstan that's fed by the Syr-Darya River. Down south, in the part that belongs to Uzbekistan, nothing's been done to save the sea, but up here, the water level's shot up by more than three metres - | 05:54 |
Fishermen haul in net | astonishing everyone by bringing back life where no one expected it. | 06:15 |
| Local officials reckon it's the eighth wonder of the world. | 06:22 |
Timur | TIMUR: You see, people are so happy because lately, plenty of fish have appeared here. They would not have caught so many fish two years ago. | 06:28 |
Ermakhanov in boat | GRIFFITHS: No one could be more surprised or delighted than marine scientist Zaulkhan Ermakhanov. Salinity's plummeting; fish stocks are soaring. | 06:41 |
| ERMAKHANOV: We don't want to lose our Aral. We want the Aral to live. | 07:00 |
Ermakhanov | So we will never let such a catastrophe happen again. | 07:07 |
Water well/Donkey rolling in dust | GRIFFITHS: The story's not over yet. Someone has to find another 150 million dollars before places like Karateren become seaside villages again. | 07:17 |
Shinazarov. Super: | SHINAZAROV: If the sea really comes back there will be jobs not only for my children but for the entire world. | 07:29 |
| GRIFFITHS: That'll be phase two -- another dam, another four metres of water. | 07:39 |
Men fixing house | But people are starting to come back -- even fixing up old homes -- and if the water's not rising here yet, hope certainly is. | 07:46 |
| SHINAZAROV: If the sea comes back to where it was, life will change for the better. | 08:01 |
Shinazarov | The air will become clean, the water will become clean, the fishery will start working again, and the ships might come back. | 08:06 |
| GRIFFITHS: With a bit of imagination, you can almost smell it -- a future that brings fresh water, and cool sea breezes. | 08:17 |
Villagers dance | Music | 08:31 |
| GRIFFITHS: Little ones who don't know what the sea looks like might learn to splash like in its shallows. | 08:38 |
| It's a lovely thought. At last, a real reason to celebrate. | 08:47 |
| Music | 08:53 |
Credits: | Reporter: Emma Griffiths Camera: Louie Eroglu Editor: Simon Brynjolffssen Moscow producer: Olga Pavlova Producer: Peter George Production Company: ABC Australia, Foreign Correspondent | 09:21 |