From burning craters to marble cities, Turkmenistan is a must-see destination. Photo / Supplied
Want to travel off the beaten track to a destination full of quirks? Turkmenistan should be top of the list, writes Joanne Karcz.
“No one fails the test,” says our guide as we tackle the border crossing from Uzbekistan into Turkmenistan. All visitors to Turkmenistan must be tested for COVID. One by one, we file into a room labelled “Sanitary Doctor”. A man in a white coat briefly shoves a stick with a cotton bud up my one nostril and then the other. He drops the stick in the round metal bin at his feet and signals the person behind me to come forward. I passed the test, such as it was.
Turkmenistan is different. Few people visit and those who do usually join a group tour or engage a private guide. Unless you speak Turkmen, it would be almost impossible to manage the border crossing without a guide.
Our guide completes an immigration form for one of our small groups. He then passes us each a blank form, written in Turkmen with instructions to copy the completed form. We comply and sign our forms, not knowing what we’ve agreed to.
A stamp in my passport, dated October 2024, identifies me as visitor number 4022.
After a long, unexplained wait at the border, we drag our suitcases across the dusty, cracked bitumen to the bus.
The only diners, we lunch in a large white hotel, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. Opposite the hotel, five gold carpet designs, each representing a region of Turkmenistan, decorate a gleaming yurt-like building. It’s a wedding palace, where couples register their marriage and hold the wedding reception.
After lunch, we exchange the bus for 4x4 vehicles. Attempting to miss the many potholes, our driver frequently swerves, often crossing on to the wrong side of the road. Unlike me, he’s unconcerned by the oncoming traffic. As I bounce and sway from side to side in the back seat, the grey-green scrub dotting the sandy Karakum desert flashes past my dusty window.
A train of chocolate brown camels appears unexpectedly, walking majestically across the desolate landscape. We stop and roll down our windows. The camels smell. Their fur is mangy, the wool falling off in clumps.
At a teahouse, a man sits cross-legged on a carpeted daybed, his slip-on shoes placed neatly on the floor beside him. He deftly slices a strip off a melon and offers it to me. Biting into the fruit, the cool, sweet juice drips through my fingers. A warm welcome to Turkmenistan.
Our accommodation for the night is a yurt near the Darvaza Crater. Also known as the Door to Hell, the crater is a 30m-deep pit about 76m across in a natural gas field. It has been burning since the 1970s. As the sun sets, the walls glow orange, the heat from the fire warms. Plumes of orange-tinted dust blow with the wind above the craggy rim.
Leaving the crater behind, the dusty journey through the desert continues. On the outskirts of Ashgabat, the capital, our 4x4 vehicle, covered in grime and dust, stops at the side of the road. We must change vehicles. Why? Because it’s illegal to drive a dirty car in Ashgabat. And there’s another thing. Not only must all cars be clean. They must be white or, at the very least, silver.
In our clean white vehicle, we drive into the city along wide multi-laned roads. Every car in the midday traffic is white. Buses are white. Small delivery vans and trucks are white.
So too are the buildings, each one clad in white marble. With over 500 white marble buildings covering over 4.5 million square metres, Ashgabat holds the Guinness World Record for having the highest concentration of white marble buildings in the world.
A 133m high flagpole, which we view from the entrance to the National Museum of History, held the Guinness record as the world’s highest flagpole for two short years. Tajikistan erected a taller one in 2010.
Turkmenistan, not to be outdone, has plans to build the world’s biggest teahouse (in reality, a meeting place for visiting dignitaries), a title currently held by a teahouse in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan.
The country holds another Guinness World Record. The white Olympic Stadium, opened in 2017 to host the Asian Olympic Council’s Asian Indoor and Martial Arts Games, holds the record for having the world’s largest horse head sculpture. The white horse head, gazes into the stadium from the curved rooftop. It represents Turkmenistan’s national emblem, the Ahal-Teke horse.
Turkmenistan celebrates the National Day of the Horse with horse races and beauty contests for horses. It is the only country that has a Ministry of Horses.
There’s also a Ministry of Carpets. Driving through the city, I notice colourful murals, several storeys high, depicting various carpet designs decorating the ends of a row of apartment buildings. Our guide tells us that only people who work for the Ministry of Carpets can buy an apartment there.
Carpets are so important in Turkmenistan that master carpet weavers are honoured on the last Sunday in May, Carpet Day. Five carpet designs appear on the national flag, they decorate our hotel reception area, are integrated into stair railings, and adorn the entrance to a large shopping centre.
We stop to photograph the Ruhnama Monument, a giant, pink-edged book with the author’s gold profile on the green face. Ruhnama (The Book of the Soul), written by the first President of Turkmenistan, was required reading in schools and universities for the time of his rule, which ended with his death in 2006. People sitting for their driver’s licence were even tested on Ruhnama.
Paging through an English version of the book at the Russian Bazaar, I read snippets of what seems like a memoir describing his early life. Ruhnama is the only thing of interest in the rather sterile market where stallholders wear uniforms, produce is neatly stacked, and few customers wander the aisles. Not at all what I expected from a Central Asian Bazaar.
Back in the bus, I notice a woman wiping the glass of the traffic lights clean. Ashgabat is spotless. Teams of women sweep paved areas with brush brooms. Others polish sentry boxes as the soldiers stand unmoving inside, staring into the distance.
At intervals along the route to our hotel are space-age-looking structures. These bus stops are airconditioned in summer and heated in winter. They each have a television installed to entertain commuters while they wait. With CCTV everywhere, there’s no likelihood of the televisions being stolen.
We pass an ornate cube-shaped building. Each side is a huge eight-pointed star enclosing an enormous silver ball. It’s the Ashgabat Wedding Palace, otherwise known as the Palace of Happiness.
I can see the Wedding Palace from my hotel window. Behind it is a sea of white buildings. A bright green fairway from the golf course abuts the main road leading away from the hotel. On the other side, newly planted trees struggle to survive in the bare desert sand.
At night the scene changes. Colourful neon lights decorate the buildings. The Wedding Palace changes colour from pale blue to gold, then red and purple.
The next morning, our guide receives a call. We’re being bumped from our hotel. Vladimir Putin is in town and needs our rooms for his entourage. “Just more quirk,” I think as I climb into our clean white car for the drive through the white marble city to our new hotel.