We woke to our first proper morning in Turkmenistan with a mix of cautious curiosity about the city we’d driven all day from the port to reach, and for Katie a dose of crippling stomach pains. As Tom and Paul weren’t in such digestive turmoil we decided to check out breakfast since it was included in the room price. It was an interesting buffet of sweet and savoury dishes, with some decent pastries, average fruit juice and apparently innattentive staff who we expected to present us with hot drink options as they were missing from the buffet table. No such 5-star service was offered so we just had more fruit juice. The wallpaper in the dining room was a bit haphazard and were probably covering up not just the wall but a myriad of building and decorating accidents. There was a small TV in what was presumably the function room, though it wasn’t really seeparate from the dining room, and was showing local children’s TV, with sound and spurious lighting being provided by the DJ equipment surrounding it.
We smuggled some of the fresher bread, a bunch of grapes and some juice up to our room for the patient and decided that since there wasn’t much more we could do for Katie, two thirds of the team went out to find the bank, check on a misbehaving rear running light on the van, check out what the shop opposite where we dumped the van had to offer, and have a nose around one of the most secretive capital cities in the world. Not wanting to be weighed down by shopping or bags we decided to do so in pretty much the reverse order to that list.
Turning the corner to head south from the hotel we found a few people going about their business of rearranging cars in a car park and, if you were the police, standing on corners keeping an eye on the foreigners and reporting their every move. The sun was oppressive even at such an early hour, probably due to the fact that Ashgabat has the highest concentration of marble buildings in the world, as well as the impressively symmetrical promenade containing plenty of fountains and greenery, but hardly any shade. When we tried to walk along the sides of the promenade we were stared at by army personnel, and when we started walking towards the palace a policeman called from his street corner and waved us away. We only got so far until we weren’t sure our water supplies would sustain us and headed to the van.
Well it’s a small world after all. We had separated from the Swiss team, Marcel and Elias, as soon as we were able to leave the port the previous day, and even though they had photos of our Lonely Planet guide to hotels in Ashgabat, we thought they might end up elsewhere in the city. But upon rounding the corner to the carpark we saw that their big bright VW ambulance was parked right next to us. Curiously they seemed to have tarmac liberally splattered inside and outside their wheel arches. We suspected they may have tried to take a faster route over a new road but perhaps it was a bit too new.
While we took out the rear light cluster to take a look a German couple turned up in their van and we got chatting to them. It turns out they Ashgabat isn’t even a destination for them and they had just pulled up to get some lunch at a hidden restaurant adjacent to the carpark. They headed off and we had a little shuffle around of some things in the van that had shuffled themselves over the last few days, when the van started rocking slightly. There was no wind, there were no tremors in the ground, it was mysterious and a little unsettling until we heard a “yoo-hoo” from the front. It was the Swiss team! Elias was attacking the front of Stan using the footholds under the grill. We compared the state of our vehicles and swapped stories of our drive to Ashgabat and found out that the hotel we had been refused entry to at 10.30pm had readily admitted them at 3am. I suspect it was due to the odd number in our party and a lack of triple or quad rooms.
We agreed to meet up at the cafĂ© by the car park at 3 and went back to Katie to see how she was doing. She wasn’t doing too well by all accounts. We tentatively asked reception whether we could stay another night and with a steely determination not to miss out on such a curiosity, Katie announced she wanted to see the city and was going for a walk. The three of us took the same route as earlier, with the same police watching from the same street corners. It being later in the day, the heat was really coming into its own as even with an umbrella and a few litres of water, this second excursion was much shorter than the first.
As the hours passed, Katie seemed to be getting better and, with the offer of riding to the gas crater in the Swiss team’s air-conditioned motor, we decided to cancel our second night at the Grand Turkmen Hotel. The staff were very good and refunded our advance payment even though it was after checking out time. We meet up with the Swiss and after deciding to take a motor tour of the city, we followed the big VW all around the major streets, spying strange buildings and landmarks that seemed devoid of life. There was a large spaceship shaped sculpture that acted as a large LED thermometer telling you how close to the sun it felt like you were at any point you wished to visit.
Having done a thorough circuit of the city’s many marble-clad attractions we headed north to find the famous Darvaza Gas Crater. The crater was the result of an industrial accident when a drilling operation caused the ground to collapse. Not wanting the gas to affect the local population (not sure where they were hidden, we saw none) the engineers decided to light the gas and thought it would burn itself out eventually. I’m not sure you’d go drilling if you thought you’d only find a small amount of oil or gas, but I guess the engineers hadn’t considered this as so far the crater has been alight for more than 40 years!
As we got further from the city the road became what must be a Mecca for pothole enthusiasts, with both directions of traffic serving all over and even off the road to avoid the worst conditions. Indeed sometimes we drove with a wheel on the parallel dirt track as it was slightly easier going. We had GPS coordinates for the crater and for the point at which we needed to turn off the road to reach it. As we approached the point we spotted some guys on motorbikes yelling at us from the side of the road and when we came to a police stop even the policeman pointed out the road without any prompting, saying “Carter” and making a bowl with his hands. Both we and the Swiss had agreed to wait until 7.30 for the other team before making an attempt on the crater and that time had passed when we arrived, so we assumed they had gone. Tom revved up the engine, deftly turned the van in the road (Transits have excellent turning circles) and made our way at pace along the sandy tracks as if we were a seasoned rally team in a proper 4WD car rather than two tourists with 4 years of driving experience between them in a front wheel drive van.
The men on the motorbikes hassled us most of the way, driving dangerously close to all sides of the van and trying to persuade us to give up our attempt and hop on the back of the bike instead. We waved them off and eventually they gave up, heading back to the road to tell at more tourists. We rounded a large hill that we recalled being a good place to escape the desert winds, but didn’t see the other vehicle so we carried on to the crater on the other side. Still not seeing a big yellow ambulance we circled the yurts with more locals yelling at us to stay in theirs and while trying to find a good hard surface to stop on, we became stuck in the soft desert sand. Forward didn’t work, reverse didn’t work. We were up to our suspension in sand.
The nearest local leapt into action and after asking if we had a rope, began what would be an hour or two of suggesting the “big machine”, a 4×4 that was stood nearby. Not sure of how much they were expecting to get paid for such a service we tried for a while to use our scaffolding boards as sand ladders and deflating the tyres for more grip. The wheels kept spinning and we were going nowhere. In the end we relented and opted for the “big machine”. This turned out to be a little Jeep which was in no way a match on sand for our loaded commercial vehicle, and it took only two tries before they themselves almost got stuck. Then was the turn of the mother of all off-road vehicles. With boards under the wheels and a local at the wheel, our poor van eventually became free from its sandy prison and was turned onto the hard gravel surface that was just a foot from the site of the previous burial. As well as a small fee to the locals, a few bottles of Hogsback TEA were offered out, though in the heat of the day they had remained quite hot themselves.
With a sturdy surface to park on, we made camp with the Swiss who had turned up just after us but on the opposite side of the crater. We took a walk to the flaming hole with some of the Mongol Rally teams that had made it in their various ways and marvelled from a safe (fenced off) distance at how strange the most famous tourist spot in a country could be the site of an industrial accident. The moon shone bright that night and lit up everything in the desert, but after a long day of driving across potholes and sand, even the semi sunlight of the moon didn’t keep us from sleep.
Team Yes We Khan 