At around midnight the captain started speaking over the tanoy. Bleary eyed but excited to disembark we sat up but then heard lots of cheering, singing and clapping coming from the seating area on the floor below. Relieved as were we to disembark it seems we were not as excited at the Turkmenistanis. We were strong however as when we went to the lower deck it was merely the captain announcing that one of the Portugese the same on board has just turned 30. Bemused the Portugese man in question seemed very shy about the whole boat applauding him.
After a few minutes we decided to head to bed again as nothing seemed to be happening with regards to leaving the boat. Then what seemed like minutes later (although it was actually 3am) the knock on the door was a wake up call from a stubborn looking staff member “10 minutes downstairs for passport”.
Excited to be leaving the boat finally, we took all our stuff downstairs and waiting patiently….for another 3 hours. The 3 hours passed fairly quickly by sleeping a little and chatting with some Turkmen women.
After getting our passport we were ushered up to the main deck to get our vehicle. Thankfully the wait to get the was only an hour, a whole 4 hours less than the Black Sea crossing which filled us with confidence about a smooth entry into Turkmenistan. How wrong we were…
As the process from getting our car to driving out of the border control took a whole 8 hours we will only go into the basic details. It went a little something like this….
1. Queue to pay a fee in order to allow us to apply for the visa
2. Queue at a different counter for piece of paper which would allow us to pay for the visa
3. Queue to pay for the visa
4. Queue to actually get the visa in our passports and have our fingerprints taken.
5. Queue for the vehicle to be let in the country
6. Chat with a man about car tax and whether we needed a GPS tracker.
7. Take the form he gave us which told us the distance we would travel and therefore what tax we needed to pay and get it stamped in the room next door.
8. Get it stamped a second time in another room further along
9. Go to customs check and get sent back to get another stamp.
10. Go to another building to get a piece of paper.
11. Walk about to first building to pay $13 for the piece of paper
12. Take the paper back to the second building and swap it for another piece of paper
13. Pay 10p in local currency for the piece of paper to be written out 3 times
14. Take all papers to the border an finally be let through 🙂
We cannot say sitting in the heat for 8 hours with increasingly frustrated Mongol Rally teams who only allowed 4 weeks for their trip was fun, but we broke out the coffee machine and made coffee in the corridor of the customs building. Soon we had gathered quite the crowd of fellow teams desperate for a cup!
The road from Turkmenbashi to Ashgabat was a very modern road and easy to drive on except the constant police stops. The police were friendly enough as clearly the previous police checkpoint would radio up ahead to let the next one know we were coming. There was some confusion as to Katie’s Irish passport (Ireland? Where is that?) and Tom’s British passport as it says he was born in Paris (You are Francia?)
We arrived late into Ashgabat at around 10:30pm and it was an eery place with all the pristine white marble buildings lit up but hardly anyone about. We had been told about a curfew at 11pm and were eager to park up and check into our hotel before that time, however the hotel didn’t have any rooms for us. Seemed a little strange as there seemed to be nobody about. So instead we saw the 5 star Grand Turkmen across the road and feeling tired, hungry and filthy from the boat we decided to check in there. $160 for a triple room in a 5 star hotel didn’t seem so bad so we went for it. The room was nice enough but when we tried to order room service, turns out they didn’t have any drinks left in the hotel, only water, which we ordered litre of before falling straight to sleep.
Team Yes We Khan 