Turkmen(tal)istan

40 points to Gemma for another witty blog title!

Although, it was actually much less mental than we expected. Almost disappointingly so...

We got through the border no problem due to our guide and after looking round Konye-Urgench (disappointing after Bukhara and Khiva, but interesting as it was full of Turkmen pilgrims, rather than Japanese tourists with cameras outweighing body mass), we drove into the Karakum desert. There was some serious offroad dune driving, which was a bit scary, but we finally made it to Darvaza around 8pm, where we opened the beers, pitched camp and barbecued. Great fun!

The Darvaza gas craters are one of the strangest things we've seen. The result of Soviet gas exploration in the middle of the desert gone wrong, there are now three big explosion holes in the desert floor (around 30m diameter), which were leaking gas. The shepherds thought the best way to get rid of the smell was to light one, so now it burns constantly, and the other two contain bubbling water and mud. The flames are especially impressive at night, when it was hard not to imagine a gateway to hell...

We left early in the morning before the tents got too hot and set off for Ashgabat, the capital. Anyone on a tourist visa in Turkmenistan has to be accompanied at all times by an official guide, except in Ashgabat, so we had a couple of days un-guided time and dutifully spent most of it lying by the pool! We did explore the city, which was full of gold statues of the President Niyazov (the first president of Turkmenistan, who died 2 years ago) including one that comically rotates so that he is always facing the sun.

(The Presidential palace and parade ground, Ashgabat)

(Kebabs for lunch, again...)

We also visited the Sunday market, where we learned that hoisting camels around by crane does not a happy camel make!

Monday morning we were picked up by the guide and drove to Turkmenbashi, the port on the Caspian sea. We had planned to stay overnight, then catch a boat in the morning. However, there were two boats sitting in the dock being loaded up with cargo train carriages as we arrived and after hearing stories about people waiting for days for another boat to arrive, we had a quick panic, a quick supermarket sweep to buy supplies and hot-footed it to the port. Once there, we boarded the boat, purchased a super-deluxe cabin for $20 extra (got to be worth it for an en suite... And although grubby and mozzy-infested, it is so far mercifully cockroach free.) Then we waited, and waited, ate our picnic dinner (a big pot of caviar and a loaf of Turkmen flat bread... Yum!) and waited some more.

When we woke up this morning, we were still in the dock. Not ideal. But we have since made good progress across what has so far been a remarkably flat sea, and are hoping to land in Azerbaijan at around 8pm. The sailors get paid by "hour on the sea with a loaded ship", so if the queue of trucks on the Azeri side doesn't look like a full load when they get within sight of the port, they are likely to drop anchor and wait for the queue to build up. We are obviously hoping for a very large queue so that we can get off and say goodbye Central Asia, hello Caucuses!

(sitting in Turkmenbashi port)

(I see land! Approaching Baku.)

To finish up today's post, some Turkmen fun for the fact-lovers out there:
- Natural gas is free but matches are not, so many Turkmens leave their stoves burning 24 hours a day
- Internal flights cost $10 to anywhere
- Turkmens deal in 3 currencies, which are all interchangeable: old manat (14000 to the dollar), new manat (2.8 to the dollar) and USD and often give payments in a combination of the three. Never has the calculator function on our mobiles been so useful
- petrol costs 5p per litre at the pumps
- in 2003 the government confused everyone in Ashgabat by replacing all street names with a 4-digit code
- the Turkmen language has its own copywrighted alphabet, called Elipbi
..... so still just about enough mental-ness going on to keep us amused!

Gemma


(BTW - we know our map has stopped working in IE, but still seems to work in Firefox. Can anyone (Jamie) help?)