Ashgabat

Ultimately the group were nice about it, when we discovered we were 200km from the correct border crossing. One of my bigger travel mistakes. Cold and in the middle of nowhere, right up at the northern tip of Uzbekistan, a gruff border official made clear the border was closed. It took several hours, another marathon stint in a gas-powered Chevrolet and a couple of episodes of the Rest is History to get ourselves to the right location. With the sun high in the Uzbek sky, we started what would be a 150-minute border crossing. Our paperwork was in order, the flu had come and gone and our dollars were crispy, so ultimately it went according to plan. The border was chaotic, but when they were confident we weren’t attempting to smuggle crack or drones into the country, we received a privileged service befitting the hundreds of dollars we were parting with. Guided by a well built Turkmen we stepped foot into a country with a 1/100 Freedom House score and paid above market price for Pringles.

Ashgabat is an extraordinary and bizarre city. The building material of choice is white marble and it is bright. The city was largely destroyed in the 1940s (Earthquake, not Hitler) and that provided a blank canvas for the post-Soviet vision you can see today. Our tour guide Andy, a petite Turkmen with a wry smile, went to great lengths to stress the marble was real and either Italian or French. I would have inspected more closely, but I’d forgotten my sunglasses.

Andy was very proud of Turkmenistan’s many records. For example: the largest Ministry of Education building in the world that is shaped like an actual book. He said he was most proud of Turkmenistan’s record levels of natural gas, but I could tell from his cheeky grin that he relished explaining that this is the largest indoor ferris wheel in the world. Does anyone use it? Of course not, the view is heavily restricted and it’s more expensive than plov for 4, but it’s there, and that is enough in Turkmenistan.

Andy was less proud of how many things weren’t working. He would attempt to move us in a hurry past the out of order signs, but in the perfect city, it was hard not to notice the dark and the gloomy. Dark and gloomy are particularly noticeable when two well-built gentlemen with ear pieces appear and follow you, watch you have dinner, and follow you into your hotel at the end of the evening. I didn’t ask Andy about that, I couldn’t bear the thought that he was in on it. It isn’t difficult to sense that all may not be well in Turkmenistan. The most well known tourist attraction, 'The Door to Hell’, is a flame in the desert that hasn’t been extinguished since the Soviet military accidentally lit a huge underground gas field in 1971. In a move UNESCO might consider painful, the flame will be extinguished this year, and the gas extracted for sale.

Brazil has Christ the Redeemer and Turkmenistan has Magtymguly Pyragy Cultural Park Complex (see above). Anything that requires ‘more than 1,000 tons of bronze’ is good in my book. The views are sensational and the stairs would kill even the most ambitious asthmatics. The photo can’t capture the silence that existed around me as I took it. Indeed there was something hauntingly quiet about our entire time in Ashgabat. No car horns, no sirens, no shouting. With our phones rendered useless by internet restrictions that Andy assured us were for our own protection, we could briefly enjoy a sense of profound peace and quiet.

Our time in Central Asia was drawing to a close and this enormous mosque gave us the space to reflect on the journey we had made. It reminded me that you don’t always have to have a nice time on holiday and that a $1000 house on Lake Como might offer better value for money than a Turkmenistan visa. Istanbul was once again our pathway out of the region and in the rejuvenating steam of its hammams we attempted to sweat out the legacy of plov from within our bodies. What were we thinking? The plov would be with us forever.