Turkmenistan

So, on the ferry from Baku, and a twelve hour crossing to Turkmenistan on a sea (or lake, depending on your point of view - I'm of the view that the Caspian is a lake, despite the fact that it's slightly saline, as it doesn't link up to the earth's main body of water) that was like a mill pond. Well, the crossing was twelve hours, we anchored off the coast about 2am, with the expectation in my head that we'd dock when it was light. Twenty four hours later and we were still there, and since I had no idea when we would actually dock, I was eking out my limited rations of one banana and one packet of biscuits (it's 11am, that means I'm allowed one third of a banana and two biscuits etc). Luckily we docked around 5am, a hassle free customs check and I was in Turkmenistan, with four days to cross it before my transit visa expired (the delay meant I'd lost a day from my set five days).

Into the port town of Turkmenbashi then, and a bus straight to the capital, Ashgabat (after a very nice lad I'd met on the ship changed some dollars for me to enable me to pay for the bus ticket). Before I say anything about Ashgabat, it's probably worth putting down some brief background on Turkmenistan and its recently departed megalomaniac leader - when the USSR collapsed and its states became independent, the incumbent Communist Party leaders invariably became the head of state and kept on ruling (this is true for pretty much all of the Central Asian republics. In Turkmenistan's case, this was a guy named Saparmurat Niyazov, and he ruled for fifteen years until his death in 2006. He renamed himself 'Turkmenbashi', meaning leader of the Turkmen, and over the next decade or so indulged in a personality cult, renaming months of the year after his dead brother and mother, building statues of himself everywhere, and spending the country's vast oil revenues on grandiose buildings and similar projects.

Anyway, a day in Ashgabat, and it's a weird place - this is where Turkmenbashi spent most of the oil money, building tens, if not hundreds of new buildings, all in white marble, none of which blend in with their surroundings and just look completely out of place. There's various governmental buildings like this in the central area, as well as a 4km strip of virtually identical buildings, all on a vast scale, stretching out of town. The rest of the town is single storey though, so the new buildings stick out a lot - it actually reminded me a little of the outskirts of Dubai, which had a similar feeling of brand new buildings, all isolated from each other. Maybe it's an inherent difficulty in building new cities in desert locations, it's all flat and dry with seemingly endless space to expand, so everything gets built too far apart, and there's little feeling of a cohesive whole.

Wandered around the city then for a day, did part of the 37km Walk of Health, another one of Turkmenbashi's ridiculous ideas - this time a massive concrete walkway leading out of the city and up to and around a nearby mountain, for no real reason, except to make civil servants walk it on one day every year. The piece de resistance in the city though is the statue of Turkmenbashi on top of the Arch of Neutrality - for a megalomaniac leader to build a golden statue of himself on top of the tallest structure in the capital isn't that unusual, but for him to then insist that the statue revolves constantly so that he's always facing the sun shows a level of megalomania that you almost have to respect.

From Ashgabat it was on towards Turkmenabat, the border town with Uzbekistan, with a stop to visit the ancient city of Merv on the way. Merv used to be a major city on the Silk Road, standing as it does on the route from Iran through to Central Asia. Indeed, during it's highest period, under the Seljuk Turks in the 11th century or so, it was considered one of the four chief cities of Islam, along with Cairo, Damascus and Baghad. By now there's very little remaining, mainly just the mud outer walls of the five cities that occupied the spot at different times, along with remnants of some of the mud brick buildings. It was easy to stand atop the walls though, and imagine it in its heyday with caravans and traders coming into the city walls with their various goods to sell.

After that it was just a night in Turkmenabat, where I stayed in a bit of a dosshouse, and got horribly drunk on vodka with a couple of Turkmen - I thought I'd got away with only half a bottle of vodka when one of the guys left, and the other guy who was sharing my room disappeared, so I quickly got into bed, only for my room mate to reappear with another half bottle. Since there was no way he was going to let me sleep I figured the quickest approach was to do numerous toasts until that bottle was also empty - needless to say the following day wasn't one of my better ones, border crossing days are usually a bit tedious to say the least, and particularly so when you're seriously hungover.

So that was Turkmenistan, it wasn't actually as strange as I expected. I had an image in my head of somewhere like North Korea (or at least what I imagine North Korea to be, run down, miserable, suffering population), but in fact it wasn't that different to other central Asian countries and cities, if you ignore the weird Turkmenbashi stuff.