The Lazy Cherub Enigma: Turkmenistan

Showing posts with label Turkmenistan. Show all posts

Saturday, 4 October 2014

Rage

No overland would be complete until you threw in some posttraumatic stress along with utter despair. After all, what adventure doesn’t have it’s alcoholic(s) who eventually must explode and hurl abuse at those who are kindest of all?

It was a long drive (again) to the Turkmenistan port where we needed to catch a cargo ferry over to Azerbaijan. There is no ferry schedule and no guarantee even if a boat is there it will agree to take you or the truck on it. This means you prepare to wait. It could be an hour. It could be 2 or 3 days. You could board at 8 am or be told at 3 am its time to load. What do you do? You load up with enough supplies to feed and water yourself for 3 days minimum and you wait in a dirty, run down port for your ship to come in. I hate being on the truck. It literally sucks the life out of me. There is no soul on this truck and by the time we pulled into port I had had enough of being on a soulless journey.

I got out and wandered the wreckage for a place to pee. Then I just broke down and sobbed…

Eventually I pulled myself together enough make my way back. Ken (who had been helping cook) met me half way. The moment we had hoped would never come had arrived – the full on admission that this was not the trip we had hoped for and the awareness that we had nothing left to give. I wept unabashedly “I can’t do this anymore. I just can’t. “ Being different was exacting a heavy toll on our psyche. We were tender souls on a trip where tenderness was not a virtue. Neither was humility, grace or compassion. We foolishly believed that anyone wanting to do a journey such as this would want to do it with soft eyes and a kind heart. We thought we were doing this with nomads and gypsies – people like us. We weren’t on this trip to prove how tough we were. We were on it to experience the world and enjoy it and all we asked in return was that the joy be shared and honored. As we made our way back to the truck, we had no idea that in a few short moments, we would find out exactly the kinds of travelers we were with.

Dinner was tense. The group was tired and no one had any idea when we would leave. There was a ship in port that might take us but it hat yet to be unloaded. Word was we might be able to board around 6 am. It was now 9 pm and no camp was set up. Somewhere in all of this it was decided that we would fry up the left over lentils into patties to be eaten on board the ship. This meant another hour or more before we could all even begin to unwind. In the midst of all this Ken said, “Let’s quickly throw up our tent. Even if we only get 4 or 5 hours rest its better than nothing.” It was a calculated decision based on our exhaustion and the fact that with “so many cooks” already in the “kitchen” we knew the 10 minutes to put up our tent would affect no one. Or so we thought…

As we began to set up one of the group members already well fueled with alcohol decided that right here right now would be a good time to let us know exactly what she thought of us. For the next hour she hurled abuse at us in what can only be described as a drunken rage. Ken in particular was her target as he was technically part of the “cook group” that evening and she – not being a member of it – had made up her mind that he was not doing his share. I was just an object of her wrath for being me and apparently doing “sweet bugger all the entire trip.” And so it went. As we stood at the table making lentil patties we endured slam after slam about why don’t we put up 4 more tents while we are at (we offered. No one said yes) how we had no right to eat any food prepared by the group and in no uncertain terms how “unhelpful” we were.

No one said a word the entire time. No one. Not one person in our group came to our defense. Not one person seemed to find what was happening inappropriate. We had made the decision a long time ago that we were alone but had valiantly tried to be helpful when necessary. Ken in particular took this burden on. Out of love for me he often offered to take my share of work just to spare me from the incessant need for control manifesting within the group. It broke my heart knowing that with him also at his breaking point, this was how “support” (or lack thereof) really looked.

Eventually the decision was made that no more patties need be made and we silently cleaned up. The wind by now was fierce as if nature was trying to out do the tirade in our camp. We climbed into our tent and held each other tightly. “I am glad you’re with me on this trip,” Ken whispers, “we can get through this.” He reminds me of all the beautiful things – and people – and cats! – we had seen so far. I reminded myself that no journey worth doing is ever easy. As the wind pounds our tent we fall asleep well aware we too are drunk. Drunk in Love.

The morning after the "Storm." We shall overcome! xoxo

Tuesday, 30 September 2014

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.