In Turkmenistan

Another North Korea without the potential firepower?  Turkmenistan feels more like an Eritrea, a depopulated dictatorship whose people live in extreme poverty, although in the case of Turkmenistan, it has an immense fund of natural resources and national wealth based on them and held in the hands of the very few.In Eritrea, there is at least a sense of normal bustle in the capital, Asmara, the fearfulness of the people only realised with greater familiarity with their ways of life. Ashgabat, in contrast, is almost a ghost city like all the newly constructed parts of the country including the immaculate and empty new docks we only glimpsed in passing at Turkmenbashi. Bruno Macaes, author of The Dawn of Eurasia, visited the new tourist resort of Avaza,, adjacent to Turkmenbashi on the Caspian shore and easily spotted from the ferry in all its shiny whiteness. It  has 30 or 40 hotels, a congress hall and a yacht club, all echoingly empty.  Like us, Macaes was given the official story of seasonal trade and  of the free luxury stays offered to good citizens as prizes, or, in the case of the massive white and gold, deserted buildings in Ashgabat, the schools for gifted children, libraries, universities, sports grounds and an Olympic stadium no less, all filled and busy at the right times of year but now was holiday time. The Olympic stadium seemed a triumph of wishful thinking at any time of year.

If the country opened up to tourism, WOULD resort lovers choose Avaza?  Perhaps.  It would have all the sterile pleasures of  a cruise ship one imagines, perhaps of other built for purpose seaside resorts,  but, from what we saw, the Caspian seemed so terribly dead, few birds, fished out and the Kara Kum stretching inland; desert upon desert?  Lord Curzon found the Caspian dead as long ago as 1888 but there are sandy beaches and perhaps resort life doesn't rely on much in the way of natural pleasures.  Anyway it isn't happening any time soon and, from our experience of Turkmen hotels, they will need to import foreign staff first or set up a hospitality school in one of those enormous white buildings.  It is unlikely any profits from such a new venture would trickle down to the desperately reduced and desperately poor population any more than any other profits from its huge natural wealth in gas, oil and valuable minerals.  The only place we had any sense of a living, breathing community was at Merv/Mary, the modern town adjacent to the fascinating mud ruins of ancient Merv.

Foreigners in Turkmenistan are obliged to have an official guide - it has to be said that life would be difficult without at least a driver who knew his way around and we were lucky to have one on our visit to Merv who was a delightful, smiling character who produced coffee and biscuits from his boot and behaved rather like an Edwardian chauffeur taking his charges to Ascot.  Likewise our splendid and fearless driver en route to the Darwaza gas crater and the border at Konye Urgench who also cooked dinner in camp, was responsible for beer acquisition and had breakfast set up at dawn after our night in a very small tent.  The 'ministry' driver in Ashgabat was a different matter as was Artom, our disastrous 21 year old guide throughout our stay although he had essentially given up altogether by the end.

By the time we had stopped for breakfast, including 'aborigine rolls' according to the improbably translated menu, in a rather nice but entirely empty Turkmenbashi cafe, we knew Artom's life story, more or less.  We had also been exposed to the BO, far worse after 8 hours in the car in close proximity on the way to Ashgabat that day,  that became the constant background to our tour of Turkmenistan, increasing as time went on and added to by bad breath.  We did not think Artom bathed for the duration of our visit, or brushed his teeth, and he was in permanent and extremely emotional mobile contact with his long-term, older girlfriend, a baker.  The impression we had was that she was heading away from the altar as fast as possible and Artom's vision of wedded bliss and the wife at home looking after his children and the house was becoming more of a pipe dream by the day.  The likelihood of his making a career in the tourist trade in spite of his much vaunted educational qualifications, that included time spent in Germany, he said, also seemed remote given constant nose bleeds, inability to get up in the mornings and general air of despondent disinterest in his job, it was hard to tell.  By the time we had spent a couple of days in the country, he had really become no more than a thoroughly irritating passenger in the car.

Turkmenistan, nevertheless, lived up to expectations although I doubt we expected somewhere quite as surreal as Ashgabat.  Moving settlements of yurts have been replaced by mile upon mile of white marble, purportedly coming at vast cost from Vietnam, or, for the grandest government buildings, from Italy, but is this really the case?  A magazine picked up in the Turkmen embassy in London describes the scope of urban planning in Ashgabat, the new ports at Turkmenbashi, including a huge container terminal and another for car and passenger ferries, not to mention the first golf course in the country.  It also discusses plagiarism in architecture - hard to believe this is going to become an enormous issue for Turkmenistan and the facing of new buildings with 'ceramogranite' tiles rather than marble.  We had a distinct sense there was in fact a lot more ceramogranite already used in the construction of Ashgabat than the 'marble city' epithet suggests but perhaps we were looking at new phases of development where the building quality was somewhat belied by crumbly looking concrete and chipped tiles at ground level whether made of marble or ceramogranite.

The official magazine, naturally crediting President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov for his 'progressive and socially oriented policy', describes 'the magnificent architectural ensemble of Ashgabat', where the 'new residential area is a visible man-made symbol of the epoch of might and happiness.' Crikey!  The trouble is that all those 72 apartment buildings and the new 'modern cottages' and 'elite two-story (sic) houses', not to mention the 11 shopping centres, comprehensive and primary schools, playgrounds and miles of roads, are all completely empty.  One has the sense that behind all that mirrored glass, there is nothing at all, the buildings are bare and may indeed only be propped up like stage sets from the inside.  All cars must be white in Ashgabat, we saw a few on the empty roads and behind the shiny white emptiness, a few old streets of soviet housing where some life might have existed among the 'that'll do' buildings with every window at a different angle.

We stayed in a Stalinist style guest house close to the monstrous Kipchak mosque dedicated to the family of the first President for Life and insane dictator, Saparmat Niyazov, who is buried here in a purpose built mausoleum.  His family, his mother most importantly, who became an important icon of his personality cult, were killed in the 1948 Ashgabat earthquake and are commemorated by the mosque.  Niyazov abolished the death penalty in Turkmenistan and officially granted his people human rights.  That went well, with his government said to be one of the worst global violators of human rights.  His bizarre directives included the banning of dogs in Ashgabat, outlawing ballet, opera and circuses, re-naming bread after his mother, Gurbansoltan and the months of the year after Turkmen 'heroes' including also his mother.

President Berdimuhamedov has re-instated the usual months of the year but stoking of his own personality cult means that he appears in posters all over the country, with a puppy, riding a horse, Turkmenistan is of course famous for its horses, driving a fire engine or a postvan (probably) and in a multitude of different uniforms. Then there is his gold statue, also riding a horse and one up on Niyazov's.  The gold statuary in Ashgabat, gold domes for the Presidential Palace, for the detail on various extraordinary and hideous monuments to peace, unity or whatever makes the white look ever cheaper and more jerry built. The statues in particular are masterpieces of bad taste and design.  Apart from the presidents, a series of enormous heroes guard parks and monuments, all weirdly foreshortened so they are as wide as they are high with very short legs. Berdimuhamedov banned black or dark coloured cars from Ashgabat in favour of the white which he considers lucky and fits the over-riding 'lucky' decor of the city.

if the city is empty during the day, the only sign of normality, a few gardeners working in the miles of municipal garden that surround monuments, statues and the massive wedding hall with space for thousands, tens of thousands probably.  We wandered about it unhindered by anyone in and out of plastic garlanded and gilded wedding halls ready for the impossibility of  enough guests ever to fill them. Artom, who did not accompany us, was he having a day off?  Strictly against regulations but then we had the ill-tempered minder/driver instead and he didn't leave the car.  Anyway Artom, told us that he was to be married where his wife to be lived, in Merv, where the marriage hall was a considerably more human sized affair and there might have been enough people to fill it.

We ate twice in the evenings we were in Ashgabat in a quasi international restaurant where we had a row about not being allowed local beer, unsurprisingly far cheaper than imported and rather better than other choices available.  The first night with Artom we won, the second, on our own, we failed and that anyway was the night, on our return from Merv when the angry minder, had thought he could drop us at the guest house to survive on who knows what might be available from some nearby shop that assuredly did not sell alcohol.  An early to bed policy likely prevails in a city where there is no one at all, not even the day-time handful of passers by on the streets after 10pm although this does not currently appear to be an official curfew. The guest house were reluctant or unable to offer anything very much in the way of service - laundry was taken but we collected it ourselves in the end, damp and hanging from some sort of store room.  The only amenity was hot water, no telephone, television, internet - breakfast had to be demanded and was unwillingly provided.  It arrived in large quantities which we gleefully abandoned as we had to go and it was disgusting anyway.

The Grand Turkmen Hotel in downtown Ashgabat is the nearest thing to an ordinary tourist hotel although it is reputedly both expensive and bad.  We wondered, nevertheless, why were were not staying there and concluded that the plan had been to keep two strange women who had travelled extensively and been variously described as journalists, publishers, writers or otherwise problematic individuals, as far as possible in some sort of purdah  We tried the Grand Turkmen for use of their internet and met a very soviet style stone wall.  The Yyldyz Hotel, probably the best available and built recently as a sort of miniature version of the Burj al Arab in Dubai with prices to match, was the only place where there was some semblance of customer service and tourist hospitality although it too was far short of busy.  There, for US$30, the international telephone lines could be used for a couple of minutes and internet appeared to be available at a cost- for the population in general, we realised, internet was almost entirely a dream. 70% of the population or probably more, depending on how depleted numbers really are, live still anyway in impoverished villages in the countryside where there are more pressing needs.. Population stands officially at 6 million spread over 5 fellayats, districts, but is highly unlikely to be more than 5 million and may well be lower.

Oil and gas are cheap but it is hard not to wonder how far free education reaches. All children have to wear uniforms, as do teachers and government licenced taxi drivers wear green cotton trousers and jackets.  We saw few children anywhere, the excuse being summer holidays and Ramadan - observance being mixed in this former soviet state.  We flew to Merv/Mary very early in the morning from the domestic airport in Ashgabat, one of three, domestic, international and presidential, with terminal buildings shaped like great white eagles and naturally quite empty.  We finally collected Barbara's errant luggage from the international version when it arrived somehow, due to Farhad's remarkable abilities and determination, via Aeroflot and Turkmen airlines.  Never was a woman happier to see her own underwear.

Merv felt like a real place with a proper community, compared to the dystopian film set of silent Ashgabat. It is the centre of the cotton-growing area and the Zelyony market with its friendly and talkative female traders was, like most markets in a new country,  a delight, although it hardly bustled in the afternoon in spite of relatively heavy traffic in the streets outside.  The charming Russian ginger bread style church, with its topaz blue and red-tiled interior crammed with icons, is still in use but gold and white government buildings, schools, libraries, hospitals and halls have also spread from the capital. Outside the modern town, there is cultivation, camels, sheep, cattle, horses and, Artom tells us, pigs.  His father farms 200 horses nearby, with a score of pigs - Artom does not look like a farmer and it is hard not to suspect that foreign educational opportunities and jobs as guides are presently more open to the children of government officials who may also have landholdings rather than actual tillers of the soil.

Pigs, we gather, are a profitable venture, pork a high value meat.  Writing in 1903, Annette Meakin, the British traveller and writer, described 'Turkoman' Mohammedanism as very lax but the Turkoman nevertheless had a horror of pigs and believed that a man who touched one could not enter heaven without an interval of a proper number of years.  Annette also wrote the Turkoman women enjoyed greater freedom than most of their Muslim sisters, going where they liked unveiled and mixing freely with men but, 'they seldom have much pretension to good looks'.  Pork farming and eating today is clearly a Soviet leftover and we would have imagined wrongly that greater freedom for women in this apparently traditional society was also due to generations of Soviet education. Meakin wrote the better-looking among them 'were invariably descended from Persian slaves'; a century later, it would be hard to know in the mish mash of Central Asian nationalities, who might have descended from who or where but we were transfixed by the wonderful posture of the women we met, tall in their high traditional headdresses and traditionally embroidered kaftans, elegant and poised as they clipped along on high-heeled mules, at least until we all got the giggles as the headdresses were tried on us to less satisfactory effect.

Market aside, the whole point of going to Merv is to see the spectacular mud ruins of one of the oldest inhabited ancient cities in the world, dating back to the 5th century or earlier and covering a huge area in the Merv oasis. Guide books suggest that more than a little imagination is required to find any sense of what Merv, Queen of the World, must have been as a major religious and trade centre on the Silk Road but the ruins are enormously atmospheric and, empty as we saw them, and retain a remarkable majesty. Colin Thubron described 'the hugeness of the city's dereliction', 15 miles from end to end, 'a shock of desolation'. that was the remains of not one ancient city but 5, built, destroyed and, rather than overbuilt, built again, always spreading west on this perfect site where all roads led for centuries until the Mongol hordes sacked the city in 1221. Nothing that came later, lasted or measured up to the lost pre-Mongol past.

The famous shrines of Merv are the mausoleums of 2 companions of the Prophet, completely rebuilt in recent years but retaining their atmosphere of religious eminence due to a steady stream, while we were there in particular, during Ramadan, of pilgrims, best-dressed women circling the tombs and Turkmen men, sometimes in robes and traditional sheepskin hats, instead of ubiquitous jeans, paying their respects. The Mausoleum of Sultan Sanjar was restored with Turkish assistance and echoes with emptiness and the indefinable lost forever.  Outside in the garden, god may be nearer at hand in beds blooming with hollyhocks and buzzing with bees.


Near Ashgabat, we were taken to a horse farm to see the famed Turkmen horses.  One of the most depressing of our expeditions in Turkmenistan, we could not work out whether the broken down, blind or otherwise impaired horses we were shown were offered as an insult to the stupid tourist in general, us in particular, or whether we were simply expected to ooh and aah and notice nothing amiss over the tea and biscuits.  We did find one or two better animals in the stables but suspected the horses on show in the rough ring were destined for the meat trade very much sooner than later. Much later on this journey, while in Kirgyzstan, where horse meat is a regular part of the diet, my splendid guide there, Mohammed, assured me that horse meat was the greatest speciality of an excellent local restaurant and gorged himself on horse stew with extremely ill-effects the following day. Horse meat is supposed to be more digestible than mutton or beef but possibly the horse kicks back sometimes all the same. Those of us who consider the eating of horse meat only slightly  less bad than dog, are unlikely to be sympathetic.

At the UNESCO World Heritage site of Nisa, the ruined capital of the Parthian Empire between 3rd century BCE and 3rd century CE, our perambulations were somewhat blighted by an excessively loquacious Russian guide whose grasp of history was short on detail.  The natural site below the Kopet-Dag mountains is spectacular but, possibly due to a combination of the inaccurate Russian and the dreaded Artom, it was far harder to get any real sense of the place or any atmosphere comparable to that of Merv even after considerable re-building of parts of the walls.  Although the Parthians were a major Iranian power, in competition at different times with Seleucid, Scythian and Roman Empires, their culture, heavily influenced by Greece and Rome, they are best known through their artefacts found at sites like Nisa and through accounts written in neighbouring or rival empires including the Romans and the Chinese. With Greek as their official language, Parthian religious belief seems to be a mixed picture, it was easy in Nisa to believe were were seeing the fire temples and altars of the Zoroastrianism of the succeeding Sassanid empire but the spirit of these ruins had departed so long ago that for all the importance of the site, we found ourselves untouched by any great desire to know more. As Colin Thubron wrote 'the city itself had died', it was 'falling out of focus' and 'the earth was absorbing the whole city back into itself'.  So far as we were concerned, the efforts of men to reconstruct or suggest what might once have been were failed and perhaps mistaken attempts at resurrection, adding less to understanding than a museum 3D model or old-style wishful diorama.

For the drive to the Darwaza gas crater in the Kara Kum desert, one of the major and really most nonsensical tourist sites in Turkmenistan, we happily transferred from our offiical driver's gleaming white saloon car to a rough, tough, and black, Mitsubishi jeep driven with considerable verve and gung ho by Mohammed.  With Artom now largely silent and asleep except when engaged in furious shouting matches with his girl friend on the mobile, we used him only to translate Mohammed's cheery and smiling conversation.  We drove to Darwaza on increasingly rough desert roads edged by bristly mats of desert brush to stop the sand from covering the road entirely and stopped by the roadside for Mohammed to engage in the major process of choosing and bargaining for the best of his watermelons from a vendor heavily masked against the blowing sand. We stopped again in the oasis town of Erbent or Jerbent for a loo break in a concrete hut, to buy camel milk and to see this small town with its concrete and corrugated houses, yurts and livestock, all gradually being overwhelmed by the desert. As the wind was whipping the sand round the houses, there were few people to be seen.

The gas crater when we reached was, as expected, something of a disappointment with broken and singed pipes close to its rim pointing to its status as a man made curiosity.  The question as to whether it can or cannot be extinguished, the burning gas stopped so the surrounding gas fields can be properly explored is moot.  Turkmenistan hardly encourages tourism and yet this unlikely tourist draw is much advertised by every tour and travel company in the region and its very basic campsite is surreally supplied with a spotless pair of flushing loos, loo paper holders and rolls included and a shower, all fed from large plastic tanks.  The crater, admittedly more impressive burning away once darkness falls over the desert, was set on fire on purpose to burn off excess gas from the huge hole that appeared in the ground when the surface above a gas pocket collapsed under the weight of soviet prospecting machinery in the 1950s.  It was originally expected to burn for a few weeks. 

We were lucky at Darwaza, in the face of physically resent but mentally wholly absent Artom, to find an excellent English speaking guide who was looking after a friendly Japanese couple from Hiroshima and who helped Mohammed to put up and anchor against the wind, the minute bell tent that was our bedroom for the night. Mohammed cooked dinner, delicious tender barbecued chicken and lamb with aubergine and grilled tomatoes, melon for pudding and served it on one of those collapsible picnic tables with attached benches.  A great deal of beer, draught out of plain glass bottles, later and we slept soundly in our sleeping bags through a thunderstorm and most of the gale that threatened to rip the tent from the ground.  Artom remained unconscious in the car in the morning as we brushed teeth and ate porridge and fruit, until we literally moved arms and legs out of the way to get back into the car for the drive to Konye Urgench and the border. There were more birds, sparrows most of all at Darwaza and a black beetle, very large, whose defence mechanism involved lowering its head and raising its bottom with a fake sting protrusion into the air (Stink beetle/Eleodes....?) At the camp all rubbish is carefully collected and dropped in a dump near the main road presumably for occasional collection.  As we also discovered in Uzbekistan and, on the other side of the Caspian, in Azerbaijan, cleanliness and rubbish are national obsessions, litter is not dropped. Is this national pride in action or an unexpected hangover from Soviet days?  The latter is more likely.

Konye Urgench, another World Heritage site, the city dating back probably to the 5th century, is, one of the greatest sites of Turkmenistan.  A great centre of craftmanship in building where the kilns still today supply brick for historical renovations across the region, the original town declined after it was conquered by Timur in the late 14th century and abandoned when the Amu-Darya changed course suddenly and Khiva became the regional capital in 16th century while the town of Urgench was rebuilt, now on the other side of the Uzbek border a few miles away.  The remains of the old town have long disappeared into the ground but the monuments that remain are glorious, the most easily spotted in the distance the Kutlug Timur minaret with its ornate brickwork and the Turabek-Khanum mausoleum, the burial place of Kutlug Timur's queen.  Inside, one of the wonders of the region, is a tile covered dome, created using techniques and glazes, including yellow, unknown elsewhere before Timur himself began to build.  Restoration work is in hand on the Tekesh and the swayed Il Arslan mausoleums but, it appears, sympathetically literally to restore what is there, preserve a patch of shimmering turquoise tiles, rather than rebuild.  This row of monuments spread across the once city is traversed by cheerful local pilgrims and day outers who are catered for by a small group of stalls near the Turabek-Khanum mausoleum. There are other hidden monuments, a necropolis of 40 saints in one hill we were told,  that may one day shrug off their earthen shroud and see the light of day once more. Meanwhile tiny shards of colour lie on the ground, shed from these magnificent buildings and they, too small to have any value in any restoration or museum, are tiny mirrors to the past to be preserved and treasured.

From Konye Urgench we drove the short distance to the Uzbek border where village fields are fed through a canal system, crops grow and donkey carts move at donkey pace down the sides of the road. A sad goodbye to Mohammed, the pleasure of leaving Artom with a tip hint of a packet of mints in a London telephone box tin and we crossed the border on foot with a mass of small traders weighed down with bales of cotton cloth and piles of plastic buckets.  The idiiot foreign women were pushed firmly to the front of every queue with great good humour and generosity and we paid our $2 foreigner fare for the minibus drive through no mans land and out the other side into Uzbekistan hoping to find a driver and to the ping of vodafone mobiles as we reached a 'roam further' zone once again, liberated from Turkmen communication purdah.