Barbeque

From: Baku, Azerbaijan

After our second night in Nukus, we headed from the Turkmen border. Before we left, we made a substitution to the traveling trio: James doubled back to Kyrgyzstan to meet his wife, and Thierry, a Dutch traveler I had met in Almaty, joined Michael and me.

We were all a bit nervous about the border crossing; both Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan are police states with corrupt border officials, and you never know what sorts of "charges" the cops might cook up for the unwary traveler. Uzbekistan, in particular, has extremely draconian and inflexible rules: if your customs declaration is off by a dollar, or if you're missing even one hotel registration chit (which we were, thanks to the CNG incident) you could be forced to pay hundreds of dollars. I'd heard at least three horror stories of fines in the $500 range for trivial paperwork problems.

Our luck held up, however, and the crossing was painless, if slow. And there we were at last: Turkmenistan, most remote of the five regional Republics, the North Korea of Central Asia, former home of the "glorious" Saparmyrat Turkmenbashi. It's worth mentioning a quick word about Turkmenbashi, the "Father of the Turkmen People" and Turkmenistan's first post-independence leader. Much of what is alluring or worth seeing in this country is in some way related to him and his absurd beliefs and actions. You can read about him here -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saparmurat_Niyazov -- but you'll also get a pretty good sense for the big guy's absurdities through the next couple of blog posts.

ne of the unfortunate quirks about Turkmen tourist laws is that visitors are required to hire an (expensive) Turkmen guide for their entire stay in the country. Still, it can be nice to have someone to show you around. Our first guide was a very nice ex-military chap called Makhsat, who took us on a two-day trip south to the capital.

Our first stop in the country was Konye-Urgench, which contains the scattered ruins of a powerful thirteenth-century city-state: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konya-Urgench. The city was abandoned when its water source diverted, around the same time that the city was sacked by Timur (mentioned in earlier post about Samarqand). The monuments left, however, are very impressive, and show an architectural style very different from that of Uzbek cities.



Next we headed on a long drive into the Karakum (Blacksand) Desert. The desert is immense, hundreds of miles in both length and width. It makes a spectacular drive, with terrain ranging from harsh scrubland to duney areas where camels march across the road, oblivious to cars.

Here, camels marching across the road, oblivious to cars:


By nightfall, we reached the former town of Darvaza, which means 'Gates' in Turkmen. Several years ago, President Turkmenbashi visited the village and was upset that the low-income desert community didn't seem to meet the standards of his widely-touted 'Turkmen Golden Age,' a period of prosperity which began, unsurprisingly, when he assumed power. After his visit, he had Darvaza bulldozed and the residents displaced (to where, no one is really sure). So there isn't much left of the place now, just a few tea-houses and yurt camps. One of the yurts was ours for the night.

Rather than simply 'Gates,' the town of Darvaza could be more appropriately called the 'Gates of Hell'; a few miles behind the yurt camps, past a ridge of sand dunes, is the Gas Crater. The crater is, hands down, the most hell-like and spectacular thing I've seen this trip.

In the 1970s, Soviet engineers built a natural gas rig on the site of the current crater. Turkmenistan is extremely rich in natural gas, and the rig was one of several drain-the-earth style investments in the area. One day, the ground underneath the rig gave way and the rig collapsed into the pit, exploding into flame as sparks ignited the hundreds of open gas jets. The rig, and everyone on it, was quickly burned to a crisp. The giant crater left by the collapse is connected to almost limitless underground gas reserves, and has been burning for over 30 years, with no end in sight. The result is truly impressive, a flaming pit over 150 feet wide and over 100 feet deep. Here are a few shots:





We sat by the edge of the crater and watched the sunset. As it got darker, the crater became even more spectacular. Later, while we were heading back to the camp, our ancient Soviet minivan got its front wheel trapped deep in the sand. It took a while to get out. First we tried to the traditional Turkmen approach: keep flooring the engine harder until the sand gives up. It didn't. Michael, who grew up in Botswana and knew a thing or two about stuck tires, devised a plan to put plastic and strawgrass under the wheel and push the car out. That plan worked, but it had been an hour of trying by that point, and we were all hungry for dinner by the time we got back to the yurt.

Our guide woke us up early the next morning, since there were still a few hundred kilometres to go until Ashgabat. To break the trip, we stopped in the town of Jerbent, a desert village which had not been destroyed by Turkmenbashi.

The town had a couple of little wicker tea-stands, some pens for sick baby camels, and some houses and yurts. I noticed a disused corek (Turkmen bread) oven sitting in the middle of the village. Turkmen treat this national bread as holy, and they never set it upside down, feed it to animals, or sweep away its crumbs. The tandoor-like ovens used to make it are never destroyed, but are instead left to fall apart over time.

A boy with an ill camel (they tie them up so they don't tire themselves out in the desert):


Children around the abandoned oven:


I also made sure to check out the local gas station. Since the early 90s, the Turkmen government has used highly subsidized petrol and free natural gas to buy the support of the population, quite relevant given the government's widespread repression of free speech and laughable human-rights record. Turns out, at this station at least, that regular unleaded sells for $0.23 / L (around $1.00 a gallon). I asked a couple of people just to double-check, and they actually complained that the prices had gone up several times since the new leader came to power. Quite the energy crisis!

We drove south for a long time until we reached Ashgabat, the capital. As we passed through the colossal marble gates of the city, we left the desert behind and entered a bizarre world of marble and gold. More on that next time...

PS. I forgot to share a funny anecdote about the more bizarre side of traveling in a police state. Fifteen minutes after we crossed into Turkmenistan, we went to the Konye-Urgench bazaar to stock up on critical supplies such as wafer cookies and Coke. Michael and Thierry, in separate parts of the market, were taking pictures of vendors and their produce. They were each apprehended by the cops and taken (separately) for interrogation in a cafe, where the cops sat them down and demanded a Vegetable-Photography Fine so they could pay for their meal.