Yesterday we went to the Singing Dunes (Поющие Барханы). An adventurous day it was.

In total we were in the car from about 8 hours. For every minute of those eight hours, I was gripping handles on both sides, quite certain that it was the last day of my life. Kulyash admitted to me today that it was the first time she had driven outside of Almaty. However, for being inexperienced, she is also extremely aggressive and inattentive, which was made only more frightening on a drive consisting of many tight corners close to cliffs.

Driving here is the craziest I’ve ever seen. Kulyash tells me that there is no exam, just a fee to get your license. In addition, Kazakhstan’s economy recently grew very rapidly, and one of the results is that suddenly many people could afford to buy nice new cars. Many of these people picked big ones. Most drivers are new (less that 5 years). Last week,  I got quite a laugh watching a middle aged business man attempt and fail numerous times to parallel park his shiny new SUV in central Almaty. I am sure I will rant later about the driving here and related issues, so I should move on.

The Singing Dunes are deep within the Altyn-Emel National Park, also near the border with China. We passed Lake Kapchagai on the drive, which is a large artificial lake formed in the late 1960s for hydroelectric power. Now it’s a popular summer destination.

When Kulyash found out that admission for me would be 5500 tenge ($35) as a foreigner, she was determined to get me in for local/CIS price (1000 tenge), which is around $6.50. I protested that lying about my citizenship was probably not a good idea. She told me to pretend to be asleep and if the guard spoke to me, to speak without an accent.  For a further discount, she told the guard that I was 15, and the daughter of the other woman we were travelling with, Gulmira from the office. Neither of these things are at all believable, and the day grew awkward when they informed us that we had a guide to join us, who would help us get to and from the dunes.  Luckily my weird answers to her basic small-talk questions were enough to get her avoid conversation with me.

After entering the park we stopped at a pond with a bunch of fish. I did not understand the importance of these fish, but the most important one looked very dead to me. Then we stopped at a small spring, located in a very beautiful clearing of tall reed-like plants. It felt like a little room on a tropical island, and we returned later to eat lunch there.  Our last stop was a set of three big rocks. My understanding is that they believe that there was once a very important kazan (big pot) on these rocks.

Finally we reached the dunes. They were magnificent!!  Here I am at the base:

We were the only ones there! The dunes don’t exactly sing, but they do sort of vibrate, especially when moving rapidly and towards the top.

The dunes were very hard to climb, but eventually we made it to the very top. For a long time the peak seemed to be getting only further and further away.

And here’s the last photo my camera took before sand was lodged in some very important part of it and it died. Here is Guilmira sliding down the dune.

On the way back we stopped at the guide’s friend’s house in Basshi (the village where the office is located). We picked aport apples in their garden, so now we have two more bags! Only a few adventures later, including both a speeding ticket and running out of gas just outside of Kapchagai, we made it home.

Read this post in English

[fr] Le chant des dunes, des sphères célestes, des sirènes, on a envie d’en savoir davantage… Alors commence un voyage à la poursuite d’un premier lien. Les images évocatrices ne manquent pas, capturées par les voyageurs, les “sandboarders”, les scientifiques ou les amoureux de la nature.

Pour en savoir plus sur le phénomène des dunes chantantes, suivez ce lien vers le site en français de Pascal Hersen, du Laboratoire de Physique Statistique de l’École normale supérieure de Paris, comprenant aussi un fichier Quicktime déposant dans votre oreille le dévalement des grains de sable le long de la face d’avalanche de la dune. Les résultats publiés correspondent aux travaux de l’équipe du laboratoire, associée aux recherches de Pascal Hersen, pendant la rédaction de sa thèse de doctorat de physique (2001-2004).

“Certaines dunes ont la propriété bien étrange d’émettre du son. Ce phénomène totalement subjuguant, est en réalité tout a fait connu : on retrouve des témoignages de chant de dunes, dans les écrits de Marco Polo par exemple, ou encore dans les mémoires de Lord Curzon. Au final, c’est une cinquantaine de dunes chantantes qui ont été recensées dans le monde, principalement en Chine et en Amérique.

Le son est émis lorsqu’une avalanche se déclenche dans la face la plus pentue de la dune (appelée de ce fait face d’avalanche), et il dure jusqu’à ce que l’avalanche atteigne le pied de la dune. La puissance sonore est réellement impressionnante, à tel point qu’on a souvent l’impression qu’un avion passe dans le ciel.”

En explorant les liens des pages de Pascal Hersen, on rencontre plusieurs sites scientifiques, des laboratoires, organismes, articles sur les dunes, etc. Par exemple :

- sur la recherche scientifique en France :
Des expériences et modélisations. Ainsi, voyez l’Érosion en cellule de Hele-Shaw, Équipe “Instabilités hydrodynamiques et Turbulence”, UMR 7608 CNRS – Université Paris 6 – Université Paris 11. D. Doppler, T. Loiseleux, P. Gondret, M. Rabaud.

- sur la recherche scientifique au Japon, le site bilingue de Miwa Shigeo, en anglais et en japonais, sur les micro-coquillages [Micro shells / Bisyogai], dont une rubrique consacrée au “sable musical” [鳴き砂 / Musical Sand] : localisation des dunes dans le monde (Chine, Thaïlande, Japon, Chili, États-Unis, Mongolie…), correspondance avec des amateurs et des spécialistes, informations générales et curiosités, et même d’anciennes légendes. Mise à jour du 19 août 2008 : le site http://homepage2.nifty.com/singingsand/ n’est plus accessible.

On trouve aussi sur ce site des détails sur une montagne de sable des plus impressionnantes, la dune la plus haute d’Amérique du Sud : El Medanoso, au Chili, dont une photographie ouvre ce billet. Elle est due à un spécialiste de sandboard, dont voici le site.

Suivre ici d’autres photographies sur El Medanoso.

Le déclencheur de cette promenade sur le web est la lecture dans le train Paris-Toulouse de cet article :
Nadia Hamam, Pourquoi les dunes chantent-elles, TGV magazine, décembre [2006] – janvier 2007, p. 24.
Merci à la journaliste pour l’incitation à la curiosité.
La photographie illustrant la revue provient d’un laboratoire de la NASA, le Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), California Institute of Technology, mais le nombre d’images archivées sur le site rend le repérage difficile. La voici cependant, minuscule témoin d’un autre voyage.

Mise à jour du 19 octobre 2007 : lire sous ce lien la légende d’O-Sayo et de la plage qui pleure, conte traditionnel japonais de la région d’Ishikawa.

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[en] Singing dunes, they tell you, and the celestial spheres, the sirens, you would like to know more about it… Then you begin your webtravel from a first link. Evocative images sure, captured by travellers, “sandboarders”, scientists or those who cherish nature.

Should you like to know a little more about “singing” dunes, please follow this link to the English pages of Pascal Hersen, presenting the main results of his study on barchan dunes during his PhD (2001-2004).

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