For a while, Turkmenistan seemed destined to wrest from North Korea the accolade of having the world’s most bizarre leader. Fifteen years after the implosion of the Soviet Union saw the local communist party chief, Saparmurat Niyazov, become the first president of independent Turkmenistan, he had decreed that he should be known as Turkmenbashi (“Leader of Turkmen”), that the days of the week be renamed after members of his family, banned the playing of music in cars and commissioned a mammoth gold statue of himself that rotated throughout the day so that he always faced the sun.
These eccentricities were financed by Turkmenistan having the world’s fourth-biggest reserves of natural gas, allowing the capital, Ashgabat, to be rebuilt as a modern city of wide boulevards and towers clad in dazzling white marble that were doubly famous because they were unsullied by occupants.
In 2006, just as Niyazov was hitting his stride as one of the world’s truly eccentric leaders, he died of a heart attack, leaving moot the question of what strange new edicts he might have announced next. His successor, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow, has proved rather less colourful, but even so, anyone visiting Turkmenistan will find the echoes of Turkmenbashi’s presence everywhere.
Nothing captures this quite like taking the Turkmenbashi Cableway, a 3.5-kilometre cable-car route from the edge of modern Ashgabat and high into the Topen Dag range that separates Turkmenistan from Iran. We try to take a taxi to the cableway’s lower station, but after being stopped twice by the police for no apparent reason, our driver shrugs apologetically and explains that he can take us no farther. We walk the final couple of kilometres to the cableway station, using a branch of Turkmenbashi’s health walkway, a paved and floodlit route that threads through the foothills for 32km. This is on a weekend afternoon, when the weather is sunny and pleasant, but despite being on the edge of a city of a million people, there’s not a soul to be seen.
We almost turn back, thinking that the cableway must be shut, but arrive at the lower station to the surprise of half a dozen workers who had been idling around. For two Turkmenistan manat (about Dh2.50) each, they crank the engine into life, open the cable car’s doors and we head along to the top station, at an altitude of about 1,300 metres. As soon as we get out, another worker at the top turns the engine back off again.
In the distance to the north is the Karakum Desert, a vast and nearly unpopulated zone of low dunes and scrub that typifies most of Turkmenistan. Immediately below us, even from this distance it’s clear that Ashgabat is split into two utterly distinct sections. To the north is the low-rise city built with all the dreariness that the Soviets could muster after a devastating earthquake levelled it in 1948, killing more than 100,000 people. In the south is the modern city created by Turkmenbashi, with those dazzlingly white marble-clad tower blocks – not the most obvious architectural choice for a known seismically active area – separated by areas of parkland and broad boulevards.
When we return to the top station to head back down, the cableway workers kick the engines into life and then, as we exit the cable car at the bottom, the engine is turned off once more and the US$20 million (Dh73.5m) cable car that we had had entirely to ourselves returns to its torpor. This sets the tone for the day. We wander down the hill, cross a six-lane motorway that’s entirely bereft of traffic and into the glossy, marble-clad new part of town, where there are golden statues of Turkmenbashi but almost no people. The marble towers that were famously unoccupied in Turkmenbashi’s day now seem to be at least partially occupied, but there’s nobody on the streets.
There’s a palpable change in mood as we cross back into the Soviet-era northern part of Ashgabat. Despite neither the buildings nor the roads having apparently received any maintenance since the demise of the Soviet Union, it’s distinctly more lively, with people walking the tree-lined streets, chatting with their neighbours or visiting vine-covered open-air cafes selling shashlik, the ubiquitous central Asian barbecued meat. The new town feels like a sterile mausoleum by comparison.
The bizarre factor is also present in another of Turkmenistan’s other main attractions, albeit one that is credited to the Soviets rather than Turkmenbashi. The official name – the Darvaza gas crater – hardly does justice to this geological oddity, located 260km north of Ashgabat. As soon as you see it, it becomes immediately obvious why it’s universally known by another moniker: the Gates of Hell.
Back in the Soviet era, a prospecting team looking for gas drilled into a nondescript basin in the middle of the desert, only for the ground to collapse and the drilling rig to plunge into the hole. There was so much gas around that they thought it was too dangerous to extract it, so they lit the gas, thinking that it would burn out in a couple of days. This was more than 40 years ago and it’s still burning as strong as ever. Nothing can quite capture the experience of walking up to the crater and feeling waves of heat emerging. Somewhere in the back of my head, I could hear a voice saying: “Mr Frodo, throw in the ring.”
The crater becomes increasingly photogenic as afternoon transitions through dusk and into night, but the locals insist that the fumes are harmful, so the campsites – sleeping under the stars on carpets – are a few hundred metres back.
Driving back south the next morning, we stop at two less-impressive craters of similar origin, one filled with boiling water and the other with boiling mud. The latter of these has flames emerging, which our driver explains is from someone throwing a cigarette into it last year, igniting the gas within.
Hot water of a more appealing kind is available at Kow Ata. Deep inside a cave, there’s a milky-blue pool kept at a perfect 36°C by a sulphur hot spring. It makes for a sublimely relaxing dip.
Outside, a network of shashlik stalls and tree-sheltered tapchans, the central Asian equivalent of a majlis, is the ideal place to relax even more and contemplate the mix of eccentricities and geological oddities that make Turkmenistan such a compelling place to visit.
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