Date Established: 1939
Address: 1 Alimbetov, Aralsk
Website: https://barsakelmes.kz/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/barsakelmes39/
Phone: +7 724 33 22231, +7 72433 21201
Email: barsakelmes_39@mail.ru
The name Barsakelmes has inspired fear and wonder in all those who hear it, for it translates from Kazakh as “The Land of No Return” (literally, “If you go, you won’t come back”). It was once a remote island in the Aral Sea, and there were countless legends about fishermen who crashed on its shores, or about nomads who wandered to the island over the ice, got stranded and starved.
Such tales are no more, as the island of Barsakelmes is no longer an island. Starting in the 1960s, the waters of the Aral Sea started to recede, and by the late 1990s the island had become a peninsula; by the summer of 2009, the surrounding water was gone entirely.
Yet the former islands foreboding insularity also made it a natural sanctuary for wildlife. After hunting grounds were set up here in the 1920s for yellow ground squirrels, Barsakelmes Island was made into one of Kazakhstan’s first nature reserves in 1939. In the 1950s, Turkmen kulans were introduced to the island. A species of wild ass, kulans resemble miniature horses and can run up to 70 km an hour. When new land passages opened up in the 1990s and the island suffered a drought, the kulans left for a nearby habitat.
In 2005, the territory of the park increased tenfold, with expansion of the island reserve into the dried seabed and the addition of a separate new zone, twice as large, called Kaskakulan — it was here that the kulans had fled, finding wells amongst the saxaul trees. In 2020, the reserve acquired a small new territory called “The Delta” that lies at the mouth of the Syr Darya River on the part of the lake now called the Kishi Aral, or Small Aral Sea.
The Barsakelmes Nature Reserve was founded to protect the kulan, and kulans remain the focus of conservation efforts. Other species include saiga antelopes, known for its bizarre snout and a nearly catastrophic die-out in 2016.
As with any nature reserve in Kazakhstan, nature conservation is a higher priority than tourism, and tourists may only enter the Barsakelmes Reserve with prior approval and accompanied by park staff. The reserve offers two official tour routes, “Cape Butakov” and “On the Track of the Kulan,” and other places of interest not included in these routes can be visited by special request.
The “Cape Butakov” tour begins from the village of Karateren, 175 km and a 2.5 hour drive from the reserve’s headquarters in Aralsk. From Karateren, rangers guide visitors to the Kerderi archaeological site on the dry bed of the Aral Sea, then to the former island of Barsakelmes, where they stop at the ranger station before heading to a monument to the Russian explorer Aleksei Butakov and his eponymous cape, from which the Big Aral Sea can be seen. The 274 km tour from Karateren and back is designed to take around 11 hours, and is best done from April to June, though it can also be arranged from mid August to the end of October.
The tour called “On the Track of the Kulan” begins from the village of Zhanakurylys, 145 km and 2.25 hours from Aralsk. The tour first stops for a walk along a series of lakes called Akkol, 10 km from Zhanakurylys, before continuing to a local pilgrimage site, the tower-like mausoleum of Begim-Ana. From there, the route leads to the former island of Kaskakulan, where three wells attract a large population of Turkmen kulans. After visiting some sand dunes near Kaskakulan, the itinerary passes through some saxaul forests on the former islands of Uzynkayir, Tokpan, and Akhat before concluding at the town of Karateren.
The Syr Darya Delta area that was added to the reserve in 2020 does not, at the moment, have any developed tours. If there is particular interest, a visit may be arranged through the reserve’s HQ.
Getting to Barsakelmes Nature Reserve means first getting to the city of Aralsk, a former fishing port that’s now miles from the sea. It is here that tourists can find the headquarters of the reserve, where they must submit their passports and pay fees for entering the park, in addition to transportation and guiding services. Though the sights in the park are geographically closer to Aiteke Bi, a sizable center on the Syr Darya Delta, at the moment this city cannot feasibly be used as a transport hub for visiting the reserve, as all tourists are required to complete entry requirements in Aralsk itself.
Most visitors coming from afar will reach Aralsk and Barsakelmes by train, as the closest airport is in Kyzylorda, 450 km away. Daily trains from Almaty to Atyrau and Aktobe stop at the Aralsk train station, which is anachronistically known as Aral Tenizi, or the Aral Sea station, despite the current distance from the sea. For those keen on sticking to asphalt, buses do regularly run from Kyzylorda, the provincial capital, to Aralsk.
