AT A GLANCE
Why go?
The Ustyurt Plateau & Canyons on the edge of Komsomol'sk-na-Ustyurt are a piece of raw, almost planetary desert country where the flat steppe suddenly falls away into a wall of cliffs the locals call chinks. Stacked in pale pink, white and bluish bands, these eroded escarpments drop from a plateau that is itself the dried bed of an ancient ocean, so a walk to the rim is really a walk across tens of millions of years of seabed. It is one of the most photogenic and least crowded landscapes in Karakalpakstan.↗↗↗
There are no ticket booths, gates or scheduled attractions here: this is open desert wilderness, with a 4.8-rated reputation among the small number of visitors who make the long 4x4 run out from Nukus. Come for the layered canyons, the sweeping cliff-top views, the silence broken only by wind, and some of the darkest star skies in Uzbekistan.↗↗
The rim of a vanished sea
The Ustyurt is a vast, flat-topped table sitting between the Caspian and Aral seas, and the pin you are looking at marks where its eastern edge is cut by canyon country near the old settlement of Komsomol'sk-na-Ustyurt (today called Kubla-Ustyurt). Around the plateau the plain breaks off in steep, hard-to-climb cliffs, the chinks, which rise on the order of 100 to 350 metres and in places higher. The Turkic word behind "chink" simply means a cliff or ledge, and the formation is a product of the earth's crust being displaced and dropped, leaving a depression that once held the Aral Sea.