Almalyk, Tashkent Region, Uzbekistan
The Almalyk open pit mine looks like the moon crater: 4 km long, 2 km wide and more than 550 m deep. I went on a quiet Tuesday afternoon, and I couldn't look away.
It's dark outside, and I'm in the back seat of a taxi. We've just left Tashkent Central Station, and it's past midnight. My friend, who lives and works in a small industrial city called Almalyk, is chatting with the driver, a man she knows, who came to pick us up. There are barely any lights on the road. I try to see through the window where we're heading, but we still have at least 1 hour and 10 minutes to go.
"And who is this lady?" the driver asks. "My friend, visiting me," my friend replies.
Somewhere on the way, a sharp, unpleasant smell pierced the car, like being back in a high school chemistry class. My friend and the driver both knew it: the metallurgical plant releases gases into the air, and it happens often. So, before I'd even seen Almalyk, I'd smelled it.
After about an hour we enter a very small city. On the right, next to the road, stands a good old Soviet-style monument with the letters of the city's name, so tall they could be read from top to bottom. The city is so small that it has one main street: Amir Temur Avenue. Almalyk, or Olmaliq in Uzbek, means "apple grove", after the wild apple trees that once grew in the valley.
We stop at an old four-story building that looks like it was lifted out of Eastern Europe. The driver helps me with my suitcase and says it's pretty heavy. I tell him it's only 20 kilos. He says it feels like way more. And there's no lift, so my 21 kg saga suitcase and I have to get to the third floor. On the ground floor, I unzip it, take out all my clothes, put them in a separate bag and carry everything up in 2 rounds. Being completely exhausted after a long trip, we showered, and we drop dead.
The Registration Game
I thought I could sleep in the next morning, because my friend had to go to work. But there was a catch.
In Uzbekistan, a tourist is supposed to have a small slip of paper everywhere they stay, proving their registration. The government wants to know where you slept (luckily not with who 😂). It felt like a national game for tourists: collect all the slips, and leave the country without a fine. Hotels make it easy, because they enter your details into the system for you. A private flat is harder.
My friend rents her flat, so the landlady had to be involved. She came the next morning. She explained that my passport has both letters and numbers, and the system doesn't accept letters. Which I found weird, because the hotels had no problem. So the 3 of us, my friend, the landlady and I, drove to the local authority to ask if I needed to be registered at all.
The building we arrived to, tried to look modern from the outside, but inside it felt like old Eastern Europe: uneven steps, bare white tiles on the walls, no decoration. The corridor was shaped like an L, with 5 or 6 doors in total, a lot of people of all ages and barely any seats. We queued at the first door, where the manager sat.
When we finally managed to enter to a manager's office, my friend explained to him that I was a foreign visitor and we wanted to know whether I can be registered at her place? He looked bossy, and not exactly like George Clooney. While they spoke in Uzbek, I wandered around his office and looked at the shelves. On one of them was a photo in a golden frame: him, in uniform, shaking hands with the Uzbek president, Shavkat Mirziyoyev. A man proud of his job, clearly.
At some point he turned to me and asked, "Do you speak English?" I answered in Russian: "Можно по-русски." It turned out that his English is about as good as his Russian, which is to say barely there. His verdict, after all that: my friend was right. For up to 3 days, a tourist doesn't need registration at a private address, and I would stay only 2 nights before leaving for my next destination, Fergana valley. We'd spent more than an hour on it. Then my friend went to work, and I rested, did some laundry, and got ready for what I'd come for.
To the Edge of Almalyk Open Pit Mine
Almalyk is a very small city, and the open pit mine (kalmakyr) is the one point of interest. Around 2 pm I took a taxi. The ride took about 10 minutes, and the driver dropped me at the checkpoint. I asked where to go for the viewpoint, and they simply showed me the direction. Nobody asked me a single question: the viewpoint is open to the public.
It was very dusty. My throat felt itchy, so I put a lolly in my mouth, just to keep producing saliva and swallowing. The dust wasn't the only thing in the air. It was the same sharp smell from the first night, the smelter's emissions. The air in Almalyk is heavy, and I can only imagine what that does to the people who live here.
After walking for about 10 minutes, I got to the viewpoint, and there it was: a huge crater. It felt like standing on the moon. It's 4 km long and 2 km wide, and more than 550 m deep, which is more than 1.5 Eiffel Towers upside down. I'd never seen anything like it. The sun was covered by dust, so everything looked blurry, like the world without my glasses, smoke and haze, not exactly a typical nature escape.
Inside the pit, trains were pushing loaded wagons up and down. I counted 15 wagons, full of huge stones. Lorries drove back and forth too. The pit is cut in circles, like a spiral, and each level has a track for the lorries.
There was a board in Uzbek, English and Russian. From it I learned that the construction work started in 1954, and that the first stage was put into operation on 1 July 1959, so it's been dug for more than 60 years. It said the ore is rich in copper (the main element here), silver, gold and other rare metals. I also saw a small bust of the man, Nasledov B., the founder of the deposit.
I stayed about an hour. It was Tuesday, and it was so peaceful and so quiet, and I couldn't take my eyes off it, even with the smoke. I took a few selfies, and the haze made me look even better: the background was blurred, and I was sharp. What else do I need for a successful selfie? 😂
The Local Driver Story
When I walked back to the checkpoint and called a taxi, the same driver who'd brought me came to pick me up. On the way back we chatted. He asked if I'd heard any detonations. 🤨 I had no idea what he meant. He said that in the old days they used to blast twice a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays, and that they still do it now, but he doesn't know the schedule anymore. "Well, today is Tuesday," I replied but I hadn't heard anything. My friend later confirmed that they still blast, as part of the ongoing excavation process, and that they sound an alarm first to warn everyone around, because it's hard on your ears. I just happened to miss it. What a pity...
When he was about 10, he told me, he and the other kids used to come to the pit to play and to experience the blasts, because everything shook: the windows, the walls, everything jumped. And he told me the city grew because of that place. According to him Almalyk would be 60 years old in 2027.
He dropped me at a coffee place called Safia, and I sat for a while with a coffee and a pleasant unexpected cat company.
A Town Around a Hole
The main street of Almalyk runs slightly uphill, and the local supermarket is called Korzinka (translated as Basket). At the start of Amir Temur Avenue there's the "lower Korzinka", and a bit further up, the "upper Korzinka". I should admit, I love the residents' creativity 😆.
Walking through the city, I felt like I'd travelled back in time. I didn't grow up in the Soviet Union, but in the post-Soviet years, and I remember the bazaars, the new shops with their bling-bling ads, and bread baked on the street, wild and bold, a mix of tradition and trying to look modern.
The whole city runs thanks to the metallurgical combine. Every building belongs to it, supports it or administers it. There's even a huge building like an opera house from the good old Soviet days, the Metallurg palace of culture, dedicated to the people who mine and build for the city, and a stadium, with football matches. In front of the palace of culture there's a fountain. It wasn't working. That evening, walking with my friend, there was a football match. We didn't see it, but I loved that a small city, lives its own life only thanks to one pit. It felt like the pit was a forest, and everything around it grew like mushrooms.
Just like in Tashkent, there are a lot of beautiful parks, but the lights are never on. That evening, around 8 pm, my friend and I walked past one, and it was completely dark. The lamps were there. They just weren't on. It felt a little sad. We joked that in Uzbekistan, every small city works to keep Tashkent, the capital, running with water and electricity.
Next to that theatre was a park for children, and something was off. It was closed. My friend, who's lived here for about 3 months, said it has been closed the whole time. The funny part: all the figures, bears and other animals, were covered in plastic. It looked like they had the money, built everything, and then someone, somewhere high up, never got paid, so the poor park never saw an opening day. It looked like a horror film, a park in plastic bags and nobody around, like Armageddon came and I'm the only one left. It's called Bolajon park, and I couldn't find out why it's closed.
The Price of a Ring
My stay in Almalyk was short. Walking those streets reminded me how simple life can be, compared with Tashkent. You live in a city that puts bread on your table because of one factory, and the same factory slowly takes something from you: the constant smoke, the lack of fresh air, the emissions. I can only imagine what it's like to work as an engineer in that pit.
I never thought that something as simple as a gold or silver ring on my finger comes from a pit like that. Tons and tons of rock are dug up to get a tiny amount of metal. By one estimate I found, the ore here holds about 0.5 grams of gold per ton. That means a plain 4-gram gold ring takes roughly 6 to 8 tons of rock, before any losses. And so many people, so much effort, and so many people breathing all of it in, to make one small ring.
