Turkmenistan – strange police state where you get told off for photographing a donkey and taken to a police station for photographing a presidential palace

Turkmenistan is a strange mix of some of the most remote scenery on Earth and modern, futuristic city of Ashgabat. In the countryside you get the inhospitable Karakum Desert (which means Black Desert not because of its colour but because of its harsh and bleak atmosphere) and the Turkmen still living a fully nomadic lifestyle revolving around yurts and carpet weaving. In the city of Ashgabat you get a weird futuristic landscape of modern monuments and buildings, loads of presidential palaces and government building and a police officer on every corner to make sure you don’t photograph any of that. I am not kidding. One of us got stopped by the police for photographing ... a donkey in the countryside. Another got taken to the police station and deterred for couple of hours for photographing the presidential palace in Ashgabat (pictures had to be deleted). Couple of times I got stopped by the police outside our hotel and told I couldn’t enter it via a side entrance and had to go all around the building to enter via the main entrance. Why??? Who knows... Maybe the police bosses in Turkmenistan still believe in the Soviet rule of “everyone will have a job”... Well, the police force in this country must be the biggest employer here!

One of the strangest places I visited in Turkmenistan was Darwasa Gas Crater. One night, when we were camping in the desert, a small 4 x 4 picked us up at night in complete darkness and took us to a place like I’ve never seen before: imagine a huge hole in the ground (size of a football pitch) ablaze with fire fed by natural gas vents! Truly a scary and breathtaking sight! It was hot, it was bright as day, it was like seeing what Hell must look like. And for me, an employee of oil and gas industry, it was an interesting educational experience of what can happen when gas exploration and irresponsible drilling of huge holes in the ground goes wrong. This crater was evidently created about 30 years about when a gas exploration site exploded and the government hasn’t been able to stop it since. And there’s still enough gas left in the ground to keep it going for another 30-40 years!

Next stop for me on my Big Trip will be Iran. My visa has been granted by the Iranian embassy in Ashgabat and hence I now have a “great” photo of myself in my passport wearing a black hijab. Definitely not my best look. I’m off to the land of more blue tiles, mosques and interesting presidential figures (would be great to meet the guy and discuss world politics). I can’t wait to fashion chadors or at least hijabs every day...