Tag Turkmenbashi

Awaza Resort (New Dubai) Hotel

Having heard and read countless horror stories of the ferry situation from Turkmenbashi to Baku, we were eager to try for ourselves. Many a tried and tested traveler has waited for these infamous ferries only to give up and fly across the Caspian after several days of waiting. We were determined not to spoil the integrity of our “by land only” trip from Shanghai to the Western world by jumping on a plane now, having come so far. With a difficult path across the ocean ahead, we set off from Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan, by car to Turkmenbashi, the city on the Turkmenistan coast. The ride is a bone-jarring seven hours, which Lauren spent entirely, unconsciously asleep while Mike looked out the window at the camels and barren landscape. We rode in style in a Land Cruiser with decked out suspension and four-wheel drive. Even more importantly, we had a cooler with day-old pizzas and a recently acquired (thanks Emily) bottle of Captain Morgan and coke. The industrious driver quickly poured out a bottle of water and used his bowie knife to cut it into a cup for Lauren’s cherished Captain Coke. The driver would yell out “SIP BREAK!” between bumps and Lauren would gulp a bit down, making this the most luxurious ride so far. The trip, thanks to the Captain and the napping, went by quickly and we pulled into Turkmenbashi without incident.

Turkmenbashi is a fascinating city with brightly painted buildings that make the white marble palaces of Ashgabat seem bland. We situated ourselves in a hotel in Awaza (the ritzy new area of Turkmenbashi that the president hopes will soon

be “the Dubai of the Caspian.” There is much work to be done before this collection of hotels along the coast picks of the resort vibe that city planners hope to achieve. One is required to drive past a large lake of oil sludge and sewage that has collected over several years and reeks in a way that is indescribably bad, though I’ll try: boiled eggs, vomit and peanut butter mixed with fish rot and the smell of sweaty sandals after a long walk.

Having situated ourselves comfortably in the hotel, we ran down to the beach and jumped in the Caspian without fanfare. The water was cold and the waves were strong, but the sea snakes that had been present on our last visit to Turkmenbashi were now gone. After several hours Mike and the driver set off to find beers, and returned with a nice collection of beer and chips, which we ate after dinner, while watching TV and gazing out across the Caspian.

The following morning was D-day for our first attempt at catching the ferry. We awoke and ate breakfast at the hotel. We picked up our translator and together drove to the ferry terminal. Originally, we wanted to do this entirely without assistance, but as the stories mounted of travelers being rejected or stranded, we opted for help. Our translator inquired around the ferry terminal about when the ships that were docked would leave for Baku. Nobody could provide an answer and the window where you buy a ticket was decidedly vacant. A border guard told us that nothing would launch until the storm passed. There were, currently, very high winds but no rain or clouds in the sky. There were about six women and their various children sitting in the waiting room, all of whom looked dejected, miserable and downtrodden. One woman, who turned out to be from Ashgabat, spoke to us in English saying a ferry might be possible that afternoon.  We got no other information and decided not to sit around and wait since we had the luxury of a driver and translator.  We went back to the hotel, swam in the Caspian until we were exhausted, ate a hearty lunch and then all returned to the ferry terminal.  More had gathered in the waiting room, but there was still no information.

After two months in the arid deserts of Turkmenistan, it is time to move towards water. So we’re setting out sights on the infamous ferry to Azerbaijan from Turkmenbashi.

But as we move on across the Caspian Sea, here is a list of the top things we loved in Turkmenistan:

Merv – The ancient ruins of Merv were astonishing. The dry deserts have preserved the structures yet artifacts remain just sitting on the surface for anyone to admire. Herders push their sheep and camels through 2000 year old doorways and we luckily got to camp in the shadow of Alexander the Great’s biggest capture. Here’s more on Merv.

Darvaza – The flaming crater known as the “Gates of Hell” was a top spot for us, we loved it so much we went back a second time. Nearby, the bubbling mud crater and the languid water crater were also of endless amusement. Camping out next to a gaping, fire-filled hole in the middle of an empty desert is a strange and new experience we wont soon forget! Here’s more.

Nohur – This tiny village tucked away in the mountains between Turkmenistan and Iran houses some of the most ancient of traditions. People lived as they have for hundreds of years, and we sat on a family’s roof and listened to the call to prayer echo off the mountains. Here’s more.

Caspian Sea – Swimming with sea snakes in the Caspian and photographing rusted wreckage, walking around Turkmenbashi and exploring the surrounding area by 4×4- all fun and exciting adventures to be had along the shores of Turkmenistan. Here’s more.

Ashgabat – This city, with its glowing white marble palaces and attempt at building pine forests, will forever be the strangest place we’ve been. It is constantly amusing, and not a moment is left to boredom. Ashgabat is also home to some fun attractions like Independence Park (with a giant, glowing plunger) and the Cableway to the Iranian Border and my favorite, the Push Bazaar. Nearby is Nissa, Geokdepe and an endless dead pine-tree desert.

While there was much more that we got to see and experience, this is just a taste of why we loved Turkmenistan so much.

Camel

Last night in Nohur we slept on the floor, atop rugs and a small pad. Throughout the night we slept off and on as dogs fought in the alleys and cats cheered or booed their progress. Scurrying lizards awoke me with fresh fear for scorpion attacks and we could hear the rushing gas in the pipeline outside the window. The only bathroom was down a winding, unlit alley and was little more than a hole in the ground with a door. At 9 we were up and packing the Jeep while Damat and his wife made us a lovely potato and egg breakfast with tea.

We took pictures with the family before our departure and Damat’s wife again kissed my neck and brushed my chest with her hand as we pulled away. We bumped along the lizard valley until reaching the main road that stretches lazily across Turkmenistan, from Ashgabat to Turkmenbashi, on the Caspian sea. Though there are only two major roads in the country, it was in a state of utter disrepair, and we bounced along the spine-adjusting road with care. Now and then we would see something of interest and the car would screech to a halt for further inspection. Our first caravan of unmanned camels represented an awe-inspiring moment where I realized the silk route was more about patience and fortitude, and man challenging nature, than about commerce. The men who rode the goods through this desert were fighting a force larger than man itself, and had to face amazing hardship with bravery bordering on insanity. The desert was dune-less but equally as barren as the Taklimakan. Here and there a small bush grew, and under it lizards fought for shade as spider’s weaved their webs overhead. Surprisingly the desert is full of life. We passed so many camels that after a while, I sadly lost track. Interspersed with these were sickly looking cows and healthy looking donkeys. Goats and rams were herded by lone men, whose weather-beaten faces looked like leather. All the while, with my face pressed against the window, we sat comfortably in our air conditioned 4X4.

Comfortable is a stretch, as the road, which was paved and then touched up with blacktop, had baked in the sun so that every car going west was pushing the melting tar and gravel into ripple-like clumps. Every thirty feet there was another blown out tire resting by the road, a testament to the unreliability of the road. We had a spare, but only one, and the frequency of tires indicated that we should have brought a replacement tire for each good one already wearing down underfoot.

Despite the bumping, jarring and wavering of the road, the scenery was right out of a lunar adventure novel. At one point we stopped the car so I could attempt to pet a camel. Silly foreigner. I ran after the camel with my arms outstretched, hoping to convince the camel of my good intentions. I galloped after the camel at full sprint, yet it managed to our maneuver me and escape my petting. At another screeching halt at my bequest, I managed to feet a camel a piece of bread. The baby camel apparently disliked the flavor, for it promptly spit the piece out onto my shoe and ran off laughing. I followed it and again attempted to inflict petting upon the camel, but it resisted and ran off into the desert to look for shade.

The drive from Ashgabat to Turkmenbashi is 9 hours. At some points in the so-called ‘road’ you can travel no faster than 10 miles an hour. Thus, when we glimpsed our first of the Caspian Sea there were sighs of relief all around. The Caspian, from the west, is a sharp blue-green that contrasts so drastically with the paleness of the white desert that it at first causes one’s eyes to water. It is a truly beautiful body of water, and we followed its curves as we headed north to Turkmenbashi, eager to take a dip in its turquoise waves and wash off the camel spit.

The small and relatively untouched village of Nohur rests in an unmarked valley of the Kopet Dag Mountains, which make up the border of Iran and southern Turkmenistan. The people of Nohur dress and act conservatively, and their traditions have been able to survive Turkmenistan’s modernization because of the remoteness of their village.
Descendent from Alexander the Great, the Nohurli are surprisingly hospitable. We arrived at 6pm via 4X4; the only way to reach the town is down a long pebble road flanked by shale mountains covered in lizards. As we rounded a desolate corner, we were amazed to find a small village awaiting our arrival. Damat jumped in the back seat and smiled as he pointed up a narrow alley. The engine was gunned and we bumped along on our nearly vertical assent up the northern face of a hill in the middle of Nohur.

The roads were little more than compact dirt and rocks where water had once drained from the hills, yet a village had found this method of road making suitable to their needs. Large adobe houses sat firmly on their wooden beams (though where the wood came from was a mystery is this desert landscape). Children and elders dashed in front of the 4X4 to look at our pale faces as we pushed them to the glass to return their eager stares. Finally, with Damat pointing out the window and whispering the village’s secrets in Russian, we stopped at his hill-side home.

Damat introduced us to his wife and granddaughter. His wife, an elderly woman with all gold teeth and sun-damaged skin, grasped my shoulders firmly and planted three or four wet kisses on my neck before running her calloused hands across my chest and smiling at me. I stood shocked for a moment before I could smile back—chest rubbing was not a normal Turkmen greeting, this must be native to Nohur. Damat, thankfully, just shook my hand, and his granddaughter simply hid behind his leg and peeked out from time to time to look at my reddish hair or my white fingernails. She was a beautifully, frail child of about eight, dressed in bright colored western clothes that contrasted sharply with her grandmother’s traditional dress and headscarf.

They settled us into a small, empty room and set up a tarp on the floor. They piled bread, butter, home-made cheese and other treats on the tarp and poured us each a hefty cup of tea. Damat sat cross-legged on the floor and began to talk adamantly, using gestures as much as any homesick Italian. We ascertained that he wanted to show us around town in the morning. Since we already had onward travel plans he agreed to take us on tour of the area tonight. He jumped up and yelled for his granddaughter, and we were off.

We bumped along a dirt road that looked little used and likely to peter-out into a rock drop off, but Damat continued to point out the window and insist we crawl forward, no matter how much the Jeep leaned to one side. Though we were threatening to topple over, Damat insisted we continue to the city’s graveyard. The graves cannot be explained as we did not understand Damat’s gesturing, but suffice to say that each headstone had a ram or gazelle’s hors firmly tied to the peak, giving the cemetery a warrior-like feel.

We bumped along the road at a 40 degree tilt to the right until we reached a lone house on the hill, we got out and walked up the steep steps to find one of the oldest surviving trees in Central Asia, which is covered in bits of cloth representing villager’s wishes (mostly for a male child). The steep steps led further up the hillside so we traversed them to find a small cave claiming to be the resting place of Kyz Bibi. Legend has it that when an invading force was nearing this unfortunate woman prayed that the mountain would swallow her up rather than allow her honor to be challenged. The mountain obliged and the tiny cave that remains is testament to Kyz Bibi’s bravery.

We continued on our Nohur journey deep into the ravine and then urged the Jeep forward and onto a flat plateau. After 12k we disembarked in a small ravine filled with cows, toads and lizards and marched down the hill following Damat and his granddaughter. They led us through the brush to a clearing made entirely of rock. Damat grinned as he led us right to the edge of the rock plateau and pointed over the edge. “This is easily a 100 foot drop-off” I thought as Damat held his granddaughter’s hand so she could lean way over the edge to catch a glimpse of the waterfall. I snuck a peek as well, the water was pouring out of mountain seemingly conjured from out of nowhere. A small trickle of water ran across the top of the plateau, but this was hardly enough to feed the waterfall. Damat, though easily in his seventies, quickly scaled down the side of the rock face for a better view, with all of us skeptically in his wake. The view was dangerously beautiful, for as you looked around you started to waver from awe and could easily “ooh” and “awe” your way off the edge. We sat for a while, the lizards scurrying in the background, and listened to the falls.

Back at the house Damat’s wife had prepared plov and tomato salad for dinner. Damat waved her away good naturedly and steered us to a house nearby that was his son’s. Inside a frail but beautiful girl, his daughter-in-law, was weaving silk. The loom stretched from one wall to the other, and required amazing dexterity as she pumped the loom with her feet and passed the shuttle with her able hands. The silk takes several days to make, but they wanted only $20 per piece, which is about 6 feet long. We watched her work for several minutes and then easily coughed up the money for a fine piece of blue silk.

Back at Damat’s house, his wife had set the tarp out on the roof of the house so we could watch the sun finish setting. We all took our places on the floor around the tarp and began to eat. “What is that thing?” I yelped before I could control the urgency in my voice. Mike looked over and caught a quick glimpse, “it’s a scorpion!” We sat silently looking around, our heads rotating like an owls. I grabbed my notepad and quickly sketched a scorpion and showed it to Damat, who leaped up with an agility that shocked me, and ran to the spot. The critter was long gone, but Damat informed us that they were very bad, and we should be careful. We sat on the roof into the late evening as the sun gave way to the moon and a blanket of stars filled the sky. Nohur’s lights came on one by one as we watched, and soon the whole valley was specked with soft yellow bulbs. Late into the evening a chanting rose from the valley, the last call to prayer. We watched the stars circle the mosque as the moon dipped behind a hill, and listened to the chanting prayers of a devout village, a hidden village, as it prayed its way to sleep.

Ashgabat

From Ashgabat there is a cable car into the mountains that make up the southern border of Turkmenistan with Iran. For 2 Minat (75 cents) once can ride the 3.5k cable car dangling over precarious rock gorges and pits of gazelle bones. The cable car, which cost an estimated US $20 million to construct, takes less than ten minutes to complete. At the summit there are several points that overlook the white city of Ashgabat. From this vantage point the pine tree forests that are being cultivated in the desert sands seems even more unreal, like planting pine trees on the moon. If you were to face towards Iran, you could see small shacks extending across the ridge line where Turkmen guards kept watch. There were no roads to these shacks and I was reminded of the movie Dances with Wolves, where the lone soldier was posted in the wild. These guards, we pondered, must do week long shifts in order to warrant the strenuous and dangerous hike from where the road ends to their precarious perches along the ridge line.

Strange climbing clothes

When looking north, the Kopet Dag mountain range, which constitutes the major land mark of the Turkmen-Iranian border, is also the perfect place to view the Health Walk. This structure is, perhaps, the most famous of Turkmenbashi’s pet projects. The health walk is a concrete staircase extending from the outskirts of Ashgabat, up the Kopet Dag mountains and then along the border before cutting sharply west and ending on the highest summit overlooking the city. The walk is 37k, although now they have built a more manageable 8k extension. Turkmenbashi insisted that in order to keep his ministers and parliament members honest they should do the health walk once a year. They, and thousands of other civil servants, school children and others, would set off in suits and ties as Niyazov waved. He would then jump in a helicopter and meet the exasperated climbers when they arrived. From the cableway you have a panoramic view of this idiosyncratic project, which looks like a white Great Wall spanning the desert. Keep in mind that average temperatures reach into the 100s daily, so the health walk is more of a health risk than anything else.

Perhaps keeping in line with Niyazov’s wishes that everyone dress in their finest to scale the Health Walk and cable way, two women who ascended as we did were dressed in skin-tight skirts and see-through shirts. These ladies were a marked contrasted to the normally modest and conservative Turkmen women.

Niyazov Gold

Laid out in 1993, two years after the Turkmen claimed independence from the Russians after the fall of the Soviet Union, Independence Park is a testament to the strangeness of the country. The park is 2km long and 1km wide, the center is entirely planted in non-native pine trees, a passion of the former President’s. The pines require constant watering, difficult in the harsh desert climate that is native to the area. Locals say the plan is that the trees will alter the climate, thus bringing coolness to Ashgabat. This is unlikely to occur as the trees continue to die. The entire circumference of the park you will pass a small fountain the size of a bus every twenty feet. Each waterfall has a leaping plaster dolphin in the center jumping through the fountain’s spurts of water. It is fair to say there are over 100 fountains in the park, a park which rests, I will remind you, in the middle of the desert. If you ever wondered where the Aral Sea went, this is your answer. Canals built to fuel the dolphin fountains in Ashgabat have contributed largely to the Aral Sea’s demise.

While the interior is dying a pine-tree-in-the-desert-death, the outskirts of Independence Park, are here to stay. Along the western side runs Ruhnama Park, a small homage to the former President Niyazov’s book of sayings and revision of Turkmen history. The Ruhnama, it is said, will guarantee your way into heaven should you read it three times through. The people we have met so far, have not completed that arduous task. In the center of the park sits a giant sculpture of the Ruhnama in all its pink-green glory. The book sits atop a giant fountain on a metal track. In favorable weather (of which there is none) the book can open along the track, displaying a TV screen inside. Around the giant Ruhnama sit a plethora of flag poles bearing the Turkmen flag, and an array of small pavilions and water fountains.

At the southern end of the park rests Independence monument, which locals fondly call ‘The Plunger.’ This giant monument doubles as a flag holder and a base for 8 smaller waterfalls. The monument reaches 118m, significant because Turkmenistan gained independence on 27 Oct, 1991. 27 +91 =118. Along all eight sides neon strobe lights have been installed pointing upward so that in the evening from nearly everywhere in the area, one can see a giant, neon, wet plunger sitting in the middle of a dying pine forest. We were bold enough to venture for a closer look, and discovered that the entire area around the plunger is guarded by large, bronze statues of famous Turkmen with weapons or books.

Across the park, on the northern side, sits a monumental achievement locals call 5 legs, for it is a five-sided structure. Naturally all five sides double as raging waterfalls. Inside the monument is a mall called Altyn Asyr, or Golden Age. You can take an elevator to the 6th floor for an amazing panoramic view of the neon park, where a beer will help put your aching mind to rest- there need not be logic in Independence park.

The highlight of the park, however, is along the western side past the giant Ruhnama statue and before the neon, 118m plunger. Here a pure gold statue of Niyazov himself stands with his arms outstretched, a cape billowing in the wind behind him. Two unfortunate guards stand post, without moving or blinking, 24 hours a day. This golden monument sits atop a waterfall, the waterfall is surrounded by five-headed eagles also made of gold.