Mistakes were made.
Turkmenistan: North of Iran; East of the Caspian Sea; democracy status - marginally better than North Korea. Colquhoun country fact: electricity, gas, and water is completely free to all residents until 2030. As a result people supposedly leave gas hobs running permanently to save on the cost of matches.
'Not sure how accurate the news that the Dictator has signed for Real Madrid is...'
When we finally got out of Iran we entered one of the strangest places I have ever been. Turkmenistan isn't a big country by any means so it hasn't taken us long to come completely across it. This hasn't stopped it sucking a lot of our dollars out of us though, starting as soon as we got in. In classic border office fashion the Turkmenistan office had many many booths which you had to visit in no obvious order handing in various slips of paper, all incomprehensible, and receiving numerous stamps for your troubles.
One of these booths was simply labelled BANK. This though was unlike any other bank I've ever been to and it's one I'm not hoping to visit again. After visiting certain other booths you were sent to the BANK with a slip of paper. In exchange for this you received a calculator shoved in your face with a value on it for you to pay in dollars. Although each of us receiving a slightly different charge for the same things was a pretty big clue, the real giveaway that the bank clerks were cutting a little off the top was the receipts we got back showing significantly less than we paid. Any questions as to why the sudden increases though and they would simply ignore you for 10 minutes and then ask you again for the same amount.
Annoying as this was we were still happy to eventually get through as it had been 30 hours since we had arrived at the Iranian side of the border - making it our longest border crossing to date. It was already going dark but we powered along the 100km or so to Ashgabat; the capital. There are no hostels in Turkmenistan so we quickly searched out the cheapest hotel in the city and headed there. When we arrived we dashed into a small restaurant next to the hotel before it closed for some dinner.
As we got there they were just shutting up because there is a nationwide curfew at 11pm. Unimaginable in the UK but everywhere has to close at this time and apart from travelling between places everyone has to be indoors. We struck lucky massively going to this particular restaurant as one of the locals in there happened to be studying in New York so spoke very good English. He helped us order and his friend who also spoke a little English insisted on buying us each a beer. This was our first beer for a week, since Iran is completely alcohol free, and it tasted brilliant.
After the great meal the hotel was less impressive. It was the cheapest in the city but I'm pretty sure I stayed in huts in Honduras that were nicer than the rooms there. The whole place looked ready to fall down at any moment and water dripped from ceilings in a multitude of places. Still, it was a place to sleep so we weren't too fussed.
Yesterday was a very mixed day. We headed out from the hotel in the morning in search of Manat; the Turkmen currency. Having heard there were only 4 cash points in the whole country we think this was a slight exaggeration, but it's true there really aren't many. After finding one at a large and much more expensive hotel than ours there came the dilemma of how much to withdraw. The problem for most of us was serious underestimation of the costs of this trip and hence dollars were running out for a lot of people. This led to what turned out to be a very unwise decision by some people to take out hundreds of dollars worth of Manat, which they then planned to take to an exchange office and change for dollars. Now in almost every other country in the world this would be fine, but we had managed to find the one where it wasn't. Although exchange offices advertise rates at which they sell dollars, they don't actually sell dollars. Nowhere in the whole country exchanges Manat for anything else at all. It is a currency which stands alone and any dollars that they take they just hoard from what we can tell. After traipsing round many banks trying to get rid of them, a few of us managed to offload a couple of hundred dollars worth in a definitely dodgy deal with a bloke in a car park but other than that we are all flush with Manat. Luckily I felt a bit wary of taking a lot of random currency out so I took out just a little less than 100 dollars worth. But still, if anyone is planning a trip to Turkmenistan I've just started a foreign exchange office with very good rates on Manat.
Following all this faff it was pretty late before we set off North from Ashgabat towards the Door to Hell. Roughly 40 years ago a drilling rig was installed in the middle of the desert to extract natural gas from one of Turkmenistan's huge reserves of the stuff. Due to some extremely poor planning the ground beneath the rig collapsed when they started drilling and fell into an 70m crater. At this point the natural gas beneath the surface ignited and a huge fiery crater was all that remained. So as not to embarrass the government the whole incident was initially covered up and the crater was left with the thought that it would just burn out pretty quickly. 40 or so years later and whoever made that prediction looks pretty stupid now, but the crater has become an obscure sort of tourist attraction.
'The only interesting thing in the desert apart from the crater'
There isn't much in Turkmenistan to see but this was the one thing that had really made us all want to come here so we didn't mind driving into the night to get there. The first bit was easy but the last 6km is off-road across the desert to the crater. Arriving in the dark we looked at this and thought that we at least had to give it a shot as unsuitable as our cars are. After letting the tyres down and reviewing the Jeremy Clarkson bible for tips such as "SPEEEEEED" and "POWERRRR" we set off. Looking back at it power is not something any of the cars have so for all the speed we threw at it we were sadly defeated by a long, steep, and sandy hill. Instead we had to leave the cars and pay some locals to ferry us to the crater in their far more suitable 4x4's with low range gearboxes and massive tyres.
Trying to put the actual crater into perspective is fairly impossible in words and photos, it really is something you have to see in person to truly appreciate. One massive jet of flame erupts from the centre of the pit, but the most amazing part is all the small fires burning from gas leaking out as close as 10 feet from the surface. When the wind blows across the crater towards you the heat is unbearable.
'Pictures just don't do it justice'
'It's quite big'
Anyway, this is really long. Sorry. We drove to the border today. Nothing really happened. We are camping in a random field. Uzbekistan tomorrow. Done.
'Actually not a bad campsite'
