Kazakhstan: Aktau
Aktau is the capital of the Mangistau region of Kazakhstan and the only city of size. Located on the shores of the Caspian Sea, this is an industrial town built in the 1960s as a camp for the oil-producing industry and a port to ship the oil. There also used to be uranium mines nearby. The town was known as Shevchenko during the Soviet times, but was later renamed as Aktau. There’s hardly any attractions here, unless you wanna see drab Soviet-style architecture, brutalist monuments, or crappy shores of the Caspian littered with trash.
