The fires of the gas crater were still blazing merrily away in the morning, jut as they had uncontrollably for almost fifty years since an industrial accident set in motion by the Soviets had ignited them. Every so often, when the wind blew in the right direction, you got a heavy waft of fumes like you’d just lit the biggest camp stove in the world. Sleeping too close to this chemical nightmare can make you extremely disoriented and ill, hence our camp was set quite a way back.
At first light, we gathered ourselves for a quick breakfast on the sands before the teams we’d camped with made their separate ways north across the Karakum Desert. This was a bleak and bone-dry place, the most inhospitable terrain and the hottest area in Central Asia, where temperatures can reach 50C. Thankfully the storm and winds which had kept us adrift on the Caspian had cleared the hot weather of a week before and cooled temperatures to a balmy 35C. Bizarrely, it was hotter in London that day. Many British and Russian travellers who had come this way in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had described it as hell to get across and even now, with a road, of sorts, it proved challenging.
The intense heat of the summer days and rigid cold of the winter nights had pockmarked the road with potholes, bumps, ridges, cracks and pits, making for a rollercoaster ride. Rather than travelling straight down the road, many miles must have been added by the constant swerving to and fro to avoid the worst dips. You would commonly find yourself on the opposite side of the road just to get by, or an unofficial side of the road which had quietly replaced the now unusable road itself. The Portuguese team in their little cars had to go slowly or else risk being all but swallowed up by some of the bigger craters in the tarmac but we passed them in our van at a brisker pace, Stan able to cope better with the rugged terrain. Whenever we passed a team or they us, we would pause to check they were alright. It was great to have that sense of security out there where hardly anyone else was about.
Eventually, we won the fight, the dunes slipped away and the ground became flatter and slightly greener as we entered northern Turkmenistan. As green as it looked, the main product of the fields did appear to be dust as thick clouds puffed their way across the road from the backs of desperate tractors. We kept having to wind the windows up hastily before they reached us or else face a choking miasma of earth. Unfortunately, just a few minutes with the van sealed sent temperatures soaring and we sweated our way up a dreadful road, zig-zagging dispiritingly slowly down a lane to essentially nowhere. Even the road gave up soon enough and we were spinning the wheels furiously on powdered dirt, that clearly hadn’t encountered rain for years. Like a silent predator in some science fiction film, a billowing plume outpaced us from the side, catching Paul completely unawares. “No!” he gasped, vainly pressing the window button, but it was far too late. Impenetrable orange dirt, almost Martian-like, thrust its way in, cloaking our sight to inches and layering itself across every surface. Much coughing followed. This was as close as you could get to driving on Mars.
Redirecting ourselves onto something that could pass for a main road, we travelled through the town of Konye-Urgench, a dusty place that was once the seat of the Khorezm Empire, in a time that barely anyone knows anything about and perhaps is the only dustier subject than the forgotten ruins it’s left behind. We pushed on to the border town of Dashogus, a place you need a special permit to enter as a foreigner, excepting if you are in the unique position of transiting through Turkmenistan in your own car in a few short days as, rather conveniently, we were. Why do you need a special permit? Probably to give the settlement some sort of attraction to outsiders because in all honesty, it was a dull place with nothing exceptional about it and as such, extremely disappointing. Hoping to put this strange and slightly tiresome country behind us by the end of the day, we didn’t stop and made straight for the border.
The process of getting out of Turkmenistan was a lot simpler and less fraught with bald-inducing frustration than the 8 hour entry farce that we had gone through a few days earlier (see our blog post on that). We were merely required to fill out a slip of paper and have a brief and friendly chat with the young border guards in an office dominated by a portrait of the beaming President Berdyhamedov, the ex-President’s dentist. “Oh, you went to UEA (the University of East Anglia). My mate went there!” Really? I thought. Am I really having this conversation here, on the Turkmenistan\Uzbekistan border? In fact, what am I even doing here? “Did you enjoy Turkmenistan? What were your impressions?” I was asked. “Oh, err it was very…good” I replied, not wanting to be arrested or detained any longer in the country than was necessary. They were happy with that and wished us a fortuitous onward journey. One even gave Paul a friendly piece of advice. “You know, if you get any trouble from the guards here and they ask you for any fees in dollars, you can just say ‘No’. Or” and he leant in close to whisper, “better yet, F–k off!” Oh, right. Thanks then. Can’t really imagine myself saying that to an armed border guard of any country, to be honest. Still, he had a mate at UEA, so must be trustworthy.
So, we left Turkmenistan and walked into…a no man’s land. A gulf separating Turkmenistan from Uzbekistan, a place between places, choked by weeds and governed by no-one, only existing so the two didn’t rub uncomfortably up against one another. It was peppered with watchtowers; silent, brooding reminders that if you didn’t stick to the path and instead fancied a dalliance down a side lane you’d most likely be shot to ribbons in seconds, “F–k off!” or no “F–k off!” We stuck to the path and were rewarded a few minutes later by a gate declaring “Uzbekistan”. Our phones beeped, our signal was restored, our visas were stamped and we were back in the world.
Immediately, you could see the difference. The people were out on the streets here, the land was green and cultivated (thanks to the water that should have fed into the infamously dried-up Aral Sea being diverted here, instead) children were playing in the streets, advertisements reappeared, bicycles zipped up and down the road, there was a bustle of life being lived. It was refreshing and the Uzbeks were incredibly endearing as a result.
The roads were barely any better, though and swarmed with tiny, comical Daewoo minivans, an absolute favourite throughout the country. They could squeeze through any gap, no matter how challenging. Navigating through them, we came to the mud-baked walls of Khiva, (Shee-va) once seat of a khanate and the most spectacularly well-preserved medieval city anywhere in the Islamic world. This was a notorious slave-trading hub in centuries past, where thousands of Russians and Europeans, captured traversing the route through the Karakum we had just taken, were rounded up by the Turkmen and delivered. Until the Russians were rankled enough by this to send an army to quash the city and subsume it within their own empire in the nineteenth century, many people spent their whole lives in bondage here.
We booked a room in a family-friendly guesthouse within the walls, a wonderfully welcoming place, making for a much better experience than a lifetime of serfdom, or half a week in Turkmenistan, for that matter.
Team Yes We Khan 