The Lazy Cherub Enigma: Marble Ghost Towns and a Ring of Fire

Another country. Another border crossing. Just when you breathe a sigh of relieve over not getting a full body cavity search it is back to the border for another fun filled adventure in bureaucratic inefficiency.

Ladies and gentlemen I bring you Turkmenistan – land of cult leader worship and where nothing you see will ever make sense to you. Ever. We begin this journey with the border. As per usual, you line up, and s-l-o-w-l-y make you way through the first check point where they guy looks at you and looks at your passport and repeats this for about 15 minutes. During this time he just keeps repeating your name and the country you are from over and over as he stares at you. Finally you are waved off and drag your bags down the road to another checkpoint. Here they collect your passports and you stand around for two hours. Who knows why – we are the only ones there so it’s not like there are throngs of arrivals at the gates. Eventually one by one we are called in to a kiosk that has a woman filling out receipts. She wants money for them. They are part of the process we paid for already to get in but since her boss isn’t around she figures she can hold us hostage for the paper work. Meanwhile the guy in the kiosk beside her is yelling out our names to come get our passport (which we can’t do unless we have these stupid pieces of paper – in triplicate – all written individually.)

Then its drag your bags down another long strength of nothingness to a building that has an x-ray machine in it. You put your bags on and the guard screams at you “DO YOU HAVE WEAPONS!?!?? OPEN YOUR BAG!!! WHAT IS THAT!?!? STOP TALKING!!” Two things they are really, really interested in is weapons and carpets. Apparently a box full of kitchen knives and an Axe are completely acceptable. But god forbid you didn’t tell them about the Leatherman tool you had in your day bag. Or the nail clippers…

LUNCHTIME! Yep – time for the place to shut down and leave us on a hot tarmac in limbo. We tried to find shade and a place to sit or lie down but that kept getting thwarted by the screaming guard who barked something unintelligible and then pointed to the many cameras watching us and then to one of the many billboard size images of their leader – Rev. Jim Jones (or his doppelganger.) After a one-hour break the oh-so-busy border patrol had to work in another 3 hours of idleness before they decided they finally had “time” to check the truck and clear it for entry. This entailed a lot of opening and closing of compartments (but no actually searching) and taking the cold beer from the fridge (they left all the warm stuff) So there you have it! Arrive at border at 9:30 get through at 3:30. Apparently, we made good time on this crossing.

Bush camp. Not much to report on this one. It was a desert. It had some bushes. Most of us were sick and just wanted to lie down and die. Once our tent was up I went to bed with no plans of eating or moving until morning. Ken came to the tent later on with some rice and a few bits of stew and said, “You should eat something.” I did. BIG MISTAKE. By midnight my body had decided it was so done with this bug that it was going to go into full evacuation mode. So I spent the next 6 hours squatting in Karakum making it literally the shittiest desert in the world. Next morning Simon delicately tells everyone that we need to leave the desert as we found it. Which was his way of saying, “Elizabeth, if you are going to have explosive diarrhea all over the Silk Road, take a shovel to bed with you and ask to borrow my lighter with a flashlight.” J

Onto Ashgabat – the capital of Turkmenistan and truly the strangest place I have ever set eyes on. There is some serious “over compensating” going on in this city. Ashgabat is very determined to be taken seriously and has decided that in order for that to happen its city needs to have a number of Guinness Records. Things like:

City with the most white marble buildings
City with the largest flagpole
City with the largest enclosed Ferris wheel
City with greatest number of fountains in public places.

The world record they SHOULD be holding is:

City where all this stuff exists but NO ONE IS THERE or ever uses it.

Seriously. Our handler took us on a half-day tour (that lasted until 5 pm – don’t ask) where we went to see all these glorious wonders. In a city of almost 800,000 we saw 20 people – 12 were us. No one – I repeat – no one was in the marble city. No people. No cars. No animals or birds. The night before Ken and I walked from our hotel in a more “normal” section of town to the Sofitel. There was no one on the streets – at all. When we got to this massive 5 star hotel there was no one there. Other than the bartender there was no people and no guests. The entire hotel was empty. But if you went to the bathroom and went back 30 seconds later, ANY evidence that a person was in there was gone. We asked our local handler why this was. He told us since we were out a night everyone was at home sleeping (at 6:30 pm). During our city tour when we asked why no one was at the sites, on the road or on the university campuses he said it was because they were all at work or in class. OK….

So after our Bio Shock sleep over we headed to another bush camp to visit the crater of fire. Leave it to Turkmenistan to take an ecological disaster and turn it into a tourist attraction (personally, I would have loved the abseiling down the ancient minaret but Odyssey had yet to build that in to the itinerary). The crater is the result of an exploratory drilling fiasco 50 years ago that resulted in a massive sinkhole that also perpetually bleeds natural gas. The result – Burning Ring of Fire for perpetuity. Or as our handler likes to put it “If it burns here we can attract lots of tourists. Its better that way for business development.” I think back to the tourist brochure in our hotel in Ashgabat where it talked about a study they did on building up their tourism economy. It states, “Extensive data has made it clear that the business tourist spends 11 times more than the knapsacker. Ashgabat will become the business tourism capital of Central Asia with hotels, casinos and places of business pleasure.”

So glad I got to see the fire crater before the Casino arrives.