Kazakhstan: Close Encounters with Camels on the Aral Sea Bed

I never thought they could get so huge. At the zoo when I was four, camels seemed big, but I was only three-feet tall. Everything was big then.

At the bottom of the Aral Sea, in what is now a desert of salt and dust, they're still enormous. In springtime, their wild winter manes spiked and crusty with another season of dirt, the Bactrian ungulates appear and sound something more like Chewbacca with four legs on steroids a million miles from a barbershop.

Named for a former province of the Persian Empire, Bactrian Camels were the workhorses -- so to speak -- of the Silk Road.

Our Kazakhstan correspondent Joanna Lillis and I spent three days searching for fishermen in the Aral Sea bed in early April. It was chilly then, too early to catch much on the icy puddles that remain of the former inland sea. That early in the season, fishermen retain their winter camouflage as camel herders.

For those three days we trundled around the desert in a speeding UAZ jeep, our guide Temirbolat somehow oriented -- as far as we knew -- despite the endless lunar scrub landscape. Temirbolat had it in his blood: a steppe nomad in a steel Soviet jeep. He would silently navigate the looping desert tracks with nothing to define the landscape other than a slowly arcing sun. Maybe he could smell the stars beyond the bright blue sky.

Approaching packs of camels, sometimes tended by a solitary, weathered horseman, I was surprised their wooly humps were so floppy, bouncing left and right as they hopped frightened from our vehicle. Those two humps, between which we children would sit powerless at the zoo, lay prostrate and gloomy after another harsh winter on the steppe at the bottom of the sea.

We stopped to ask directions of one herder in his lone homestead just as he was to go fetch water on the back of an impressive male specimen.

The 1000-pound beast batted his long eyelashes. I thought we were off to a good start.

But domesticated is a term that should be used lightly. Domesticated animals shouldn't make such noises. The deep groaning ascends into a terrifying assertive blast, like a command grunted through fist-sized nostrils, with an arsenal of regurgitated cud to back up the demand.

At my cautious approach, his lips trapped in a permanent smile, the green frothy paste turned poised to spit at my face. He preened, twisting that muscular neck. Hollering, he stamped his feet and puckered for an explosion.

I was the first to retreat. The shrieking continued. Green slime spewed across the steppe.

Then, with a silent demonstration of control, the lone cowboy -- er, camelboy -- mounted and set off to find his invisible source of water.