The last chapter ended in Uzbekistan where we spent a few days before crossing into Turkmenistan. We have now finished with Turkmenistan are back in Uzbekistan for a more substantial time, but this is all about one of the stranger countries I have been in.
Turkmenistan is a big desert with some irrigation and a lot of gas. The population is 5+ million and it has a president for life with a complicated name who does as he wants. When the country became independent in 1991 the existing leader changed the name of the communist party to something with “democratic” and “people” in it and set about becoming a personality cult absolute dictator, which he did until a big heat attack got him. He has left a legacy for the next guy of golden statues of himself and lots of grandiose white marble buildings all over the place. All financed by the world’s 4th largest gas reserves.
We were closely inspected at the border for illegal medicine on both the Uzbekistan side and the Turkmenistan side, and why it is done when you are leaving I do not know. When we got to the first Turkmenistan bit of the border we patiently queued for a form, which was completely in Turkmenistan language with no useful signs showing what it all meant. After considering taking a guess I went to the next counter and tried to mime our problem, which earned me a stare then “Five minutes meester”. So we waited and nearly on time in bustled a large untidy guy who turned out to be our very competent Turkmenistan guide, Oleg. He filled out the forms and herded us through the rest of the nonsense.
Petrol costs less than 50 cents a litre and our initial vehicle used plenty as it was a very large Chev with three rows of seats. Our time in Turkmenistan covered three main activities: being old stuff, playing in the Karakum Desert, and Ashgabat the capital. There are some consistent things that are everywhere, excluding the desert, and they are pictures of the boss and policemen. The Special Correspondent for Police earned his title for annoying the latter more than I did and will report in detail later. Suffice it to say that one was rarely out of sight of some creature in uniform with a big communist hat.
The old stuff covered three sights and included a bronze age city complete with ceramic kilns and shards of ceramics lying everywhere. I picked up a nice vase base that was 4500 years old, but threw it away when I remembered getting even a new carpet out of Turkmenistan requires special permission, so who knows what would happen to someone sneaking out an unwanted bit of fired clay. The other two sites had newer stuff, like the middle ages. One of them looked like long rows of clay hills, which were actually the melted down clay brick walls of a large trading city. This one was called Merv, and we stayed nearby in the city of Mary. There were lots of mausoleums and other holy buildings where pilgrims leave little offerings to signify to Allah the need for his help, like a little pile of bricks for a house, car keys, and little miniature baby carry cots. Oleg put this sort of behaviour down to bad education.
Playing in the desert took three days and was very interesting as well as sometimes trying. We were a convoy of three vehicles one of which was Oleg’s mechanical man who came with his two boys and a mate. The other was a spare vehicle. Oleg reckoned one did not mess with the desert. Early on in the first day we apparently took the wrong choice at a junction and ended up with no tracks to follow at a shepherds hut that surprisingly had a very optimistic drawing of a female on the wall. Luckily the shepherd was not out tending his flocks and was enticed into showing us the motor bike track to the next shepherd’s hut, which was six kms away. We were now in a Toyota Land Cruiser which is a lot wider than a motor bike but off we went. Our driver was a quiet guy but he did a lot of muttering in Russian while trying to follow the bike through sharply undulating sand hills with scratchy bushes all over the place. It seemed much longer than six kms but we got back to vehicle tracks and eventually to the village where we were staying in for the night.
Even though I have a clear picture of this place in my mind it is hard to describe but…….. Medieval comes to mind, but there were lots of noisy motor bikes, mobile phones and some vehicles. It had about forty mud brick flat roofed dwellings one of which had once been white, and it belonged to the richest man who was our host. There were also a few yurts and we slept in one. Before that we had to eat and luckily, from my point of view, Oleg prepared our meal which was plov. This is rice with bits of meat and veg and it was cooked in the kitchen which was three clay fire places out in front of the house in the open. Colin was being betrayed by his stomach and other parts and was not keen on staying up late and drinking vodka, which Oleg reckoned was the best way of fixing crook guts (that’s dairy farmer for diarrhoea) . Eventually we got the developing party out of the yurt so we could do our lying on the floor, but the party people only went about a step outside the door and continued noisily.
They were joined in noise making by: shepherds on popping loud motor bikes who kept zooming up the surrounding hills well after midnight; seemingly hundreds of dogs all trying to sound tougher than the others and they didn’t stop; camels that can groan extremely loudly; excited children (a huge number for a small place, but then what else is there to do) because it was holidays; and at about 2.30 the roosters started. My earplugs were locked in the car and I didn’t like my chances of getting them out without being forced to drink several big vodkas. I was not entirely sound in the stomach at this stage so I put a heavy pillow over my head and managed a few hours sleep. When I asked Colin about his night in the morning I got an unreportable response that not only covered the noise but also the delights of three treks up a hill to the very primitive and potentially dangerous toilet.
The next day was more off roading in the desert until later in the afternoon when we zoomed up a hill to a sealed road, and whacked down on a quite high concrete kerb. But we were tough and didn’t break. That evening we set up camp close to the Davaza Gas Crater also known as the Gates to Hell. At night it’s a spectacular sight with all of the bottom of the crater being covered in fire from the escaping gas. As usual Oleg had a reason why it happened that was not critical of the Soviet times, but most sources will say it developed from a Soviet gas exploration stuff up. We had a lovely quiet night and I found that a couple of small vodkas made lying on a thin sheet of rubber almost acceptable.
We were in Ashgabat for three nights and it is a very strange city. The first thing we noticed was that people pretended we were invisible and there was no eye contact or curiosity. The next thing was the streets of white marble edifices, all of which looked like someone’s idea of a Central Asia palace. We were in a flash hotel right in the middle of all of this pomposity. The third immediate sight was the police. We did lots of walking and on one solo walk I discovered that not only were there all the white marble palaces, there were also old apartment buildings being covered in pressed steel panels, powder coated white, so they looked like a marble place. Given the standard of the fixing of this covering they probably will just look messy in ten years and now they look like so many freezers lying on their sides.
In addition to all the billions spent on buildings there are more water fountains than you could shake a truck load of sticks at, like continuous ones for kilometres. And there is a huge construction site in the middle of town for some obscure Asian games in 2017 with multiple stadiums connected by an overhead railway. If you walk one block away from all the glitz you are in standard Central Asia with broken footpaths and Soviet era apartments so all the wealth being earned is staying firmly at the top. Being a fair person I have to say that locals get free gas, free education and health and as mentioned fuel is ridiculously cheap, but there is only one retailer and queues to fill a car are common.
I had one conversation with a local in Ashgabat and Colin was the same. One can only assume there are rules about talking to tourists just as it is against the law to bring a dirty car into the city. Oleg and the driver stopped outside in the country and bottled water from an irrigation ditch to comply. We did befriend, briefly, a Mexican guy when sitting around our hotel pool. Talk about an innocent abroad, he was working there for three weeks and the only info he had was google maps on his phone. So we told him to come out and eat with us in a well hidden nearby restaurant which he must have been grateful for because he paid for us both.
And now the Special Correspondent for Irrigation and Police.
Our track since the high passes of the Pamir Highway has very much been shadowing the growth of the Amu Darya River (Oxus). We have seen the vast mountain watershed that created the glacial blue beginnings of this river which is the basis of agriculture in the countries we have visited. It flattens out after Tajikistan and travels 2000kms through Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan before running into the sand short of the Aral Sea which it used to sustain. This river has been used for irrigation for hundreds of years but the Soviets in the mid 1990’s decided to expand the cotton industry in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan by irrigating the desert. By the 1980’s the inefficient flood irrigation system had reduced the flow into the Aral Sea by 90 percent and it has continued to drastically shrink.
The irrigation has created a large cotton industry but with no discernible wealth accruing to the farmers. Tractors, ploughs, and drills appear to have been made by the Mad Max film crew and cotton picking, which is happening now, is done by hand. Just like in the good ol’ days down south. In the fields here it seems all hands available are used including school children despite laws that say otherwise. Oleg the guide told us about his experiences of this slave labour with the schools being used as dormitories for teenage pickers and reckoned it wasn’t all bad. He learned to drink vodka and had the opportunity of much up close and personal contact with the opposite sex as the dormitories were quite close together. The downside was it took up two months of the year and was very hard work with the possible loss of tertiary education if you didn’t meet your quota. Hardly an economic miracle when the system doesn’t allow sufficient profits to pay for labour or afford machinery. We saw some rice farming that looked more viable and apparently the product is very good quality.
In my capacity as Police Correspondent I name the following as “The Police. Roadblocks, Baton Waving and General Stick It Up Ya Report”.
We were a little bemused while doing our first bit of travel in Uzbekistan by the occasional red baton wielding police person at road blocks, but that was nothing compared to the overbearing strictures of the Turkmenistan regime. We were stopped at regular intervals by said baton wielders who were immaculately uniformed, usually pot bellied, round faced and short. The speed limits were a maximum of 90 and 30 past guard posts so progress was slow. Oleg especially told us to be careful in Ashgabat and not piss off the police by doing things like taking photos.
The first day there we were walking through a large beautiful park and I took a photo of some roses which immediately resulted in my being yelled at by a cop person at least 50m away. I had to produce the offensive weapon and show the last few pics. Later when we were about to cross a road with no traffic we were again yelled at to use the underpass, or else. Then after coffee on our way back and about 300m away from the hotel, tired and hot, a soldier said “nyet” and we had to detour for at least 1.5kms. I used a very rude verb and a similar noun as I turned and walked away.
Dennis again. The next day I had come out of a complicated underpass and stepped onto the road to check I was going the right way and I got the official whistle and yell. I smiled at him and in the vernacular advised him to go away and do something useful. It would have been a considerable shock if he had replied in English. The description of police state surely applies to Turkmenistan. It has been interesting to see such a place but I certainly don’t want to live there.
Dennis