Uzbekistan and the Jewels of the Silk Road

There is not really very much for me to write about Uzbekistan. Any book ever written about Central Asia, from Marco Polo to the Lonely Planet, will tell you about those marvellous ancient cities along the Silk Road, such as Bukhara and Samarkand, and their treasures of history, culture and architecture. What could I possibly add to what has already been written about places such as the Kalyan minaret and mosque, the Mir-i-Arab medressa and the Ark in Bukhara or the Registan, the Shah-i-Zinda and the Gur-e-Amir in Samarkand? All I can tell you is that all you’ve ever read about how marvellous, otherworldly, majestic, awe-inspiring and beautiful these places are, all of that is true,

Instead I will just tell a little bit about the practicalities of travelling.

After arriving in Bukhara and attempting to navigate the narrow streets of the old neighbourhoods, our ambulance emitted a strange and unsettling noise from the rear right wheel. Driving seemed to work well enough, but this was certainly a thing that should not be left unexamined. Luckily, a detour when driving out of the old neighbourhoods lead us straight past a car mechanic’s garage. I stopped the car in front of the garage and tried to interest the people there in taking a look at the problem. But they already had customers and were not very interested in any annoying foreigners interrupting the normal flow of their day. And from a quick glance, there seemed to be nothing wrong with our car either. (We had managed to drive it all the way up to the garage, hadn’t we?) So we waited them out. If we didn’t leave, they would eventually have to take some interest in us in order to get rid of us blocking the entrance to their garage. Not a very subtle or civilized mode of communication from our side, but a very efficient one when the necessary language skills are lacking.

So eventually one of the mechanics went out to take a look and with a stroke of luck an especially nasty noise was heard just when I tried to follow his hand gestures to reverse away from blocking his garage. Then he realized that we indeed had a problem for which we needed his professional help, and suddenly took a real interest in us. He also seemed to have a good idea about what could be wrong.

The problem turned out to be that the actual break disc for the hand brake had disintegrated and now mostly resembled a jigsaw puzzle of broken shards, which randomly reorganized themselves during movement, breaking the wheel and emitting the nasty noise. (Please use the comments section to speculate about what could have caused this.)

The ambulance has an automatic gearbox and the hand break is not essential for normal operation, so the mechanic swiftly proceeded to just remove everything that was broken and then verified that this breakage hadn’t damaged anything else. So not much later we again had a fully working car, save for lacking hand brake on the rear right wheel now.

With the ambulance fit again, we managed to successfully navigate into the old neighbourhoods to park it there and then proceed on foot.

Thomas was exhausted and parked himself at a shady café with internet access, while Rico and I walked on to find a suitable place to spend the night. Bukhara is quite the tourist destination and all of the many guest houses in the old neighbourhoods seemed to be fully occupied. When we’re finally at one of the last and hardest-to-find ones and get the answer that all beds are already taken, luck strikes again:

The lady who runs this guest house walks in through the door behind us and upon hearing the words “no beds” promptly suggests that we might sleep on the roof if we like.

It could not have been better. In this climate, at this time of year, sleeping on the roof is the most sensible thing to do, and indeed exactly what the owner does herself. We heartily agree to this suggestion and she promises to get some good mattresses, pillows and blankets up on the roof for us. And at night, the view of the Kalyan minaret above the roofs of the old neighbourhoods of Bukhara under a clear and starry sky is indeed a sight to be tucked in by.

With the problem of where to stay thus solved, Rico and I go out for sightseeing while Thomas chooses to remain at the café and the internet. Rico takes a million photos, but not a single one of them will ever be able to convey the full marvel of this place, for that is impossible.

Eventually we arrive at the Ark, the old city-within-the-city complex that once was the home and workplace of the emir but now lies largely in ruins after being bombed by the Bolsheviks when they crushed the power of the last emir. But Uzbekistan is independent now and getting prosperous again, so restoration works have begun to excavate the bombed buildings and renovate the entire complex to its former glory. Unfortunately, this means that it’s all sealed off by police for any visitors.

While contemplating this dilemma, a man shows up, asks us whether we speak German, and then promptly offers to help us bribe a police officer to be let in anyway. This seems like a very good offer, we gladly accept his help, and he calls someone on his mobile phone. A short while later, one of the police officers on guard duty lets us in and behind a dark corner gets 30.000 Uzbekistani sum (with a value of around 15 USD) in cash from us and we’re free to walk around the excavation site.

The view, from atop the pile of rubble left from the bombings, is simply breathtaking and we spent a long time overlooking Bukhara at late sunset before we walked down to take a closer look at the buildings still standing. When we came down, the facilitator was there together with a German couple he had found just like he found us and he then proceeded to give us all a guided tour of those buildings in the Ark that survived the bombings. He was a good guide and spoke German well, and being totally alone at the place added to the ambiance. Being received by the emir here in the olden days must have been the experience of a lifetime.

With Bukhara giving us such a welcome to Uzbekistan, it wasn’t easy for Samarkand to impress when we arrived there the next day. Following the enthusiastic recommendations of Ivan Dervišević, we checked in at famous and popular Furkat guest house (in the old neighbourhoods just next to the Registan), a lovely and familiar place that could have been taken directly out of a movie by either Jean-Pierre Jeunet or Emir Kusturica (depending on which angle they filmed from), and had a great stay in this ancient city from fairytales and legends.

The Two Faces of Turkmenistan

After seeing the grim totalitarian face of Turkmenistan, while crossing the border and visiting the capital, we were quite unprepared for what would come next. There had been signs, I can see that now, at the border crossing in the form of the friendly soldiers, the jovial chief of police, the helpful immigrations officer, the nice lady who offered us grapes while waiting, and in the capital in the form of the talkative döner kebab boys or the girl who together with her mother walked up to us to do some polite conversation in excellent school English. But even if we would have immediately noticed every single one of these signs, there had been nothing that could have prepared us for exactly how Janus-faced Turkmenistan would show itself to be.

As soon as we had left the capital, Turkmenistan turned its head around completely, hid the grim totalitarian face from our view and showed instead its other face, one of such exceptional friendliness, helpfulness and hospitality as I have ever encountered before.

The byzantine bureaucracy ensures that very few tourists ever come to Turkmenistan, so that alone made us a novelty item wherever we walked, and as if that would not have been enough, driving a 6 m long bright yellow ambulance (the only yellow vehicle in the entire country) guaranteed us to also attract attention wherever we drove. Wherever we walked, people walked up to us to greet us, shake our hands and ask permission to take photos with us, and wherever we drove, people would honk and wave and smile. This is the first time I’ve encountered the locals taking more photos of the tourists than vice versa.

Driving out of Ashgabat towards the city of Mary was easy on good roads, and after half the distance we stopped at a road-side chaikhana to celebrate the good progress with some tea and snacks. There we met some other cars from the Mongol Rally and chatted a bit with the other ralliers, exchanging stories about the journey so far and rumors about what might lay ahead. Then we sat down and were immediately surrounded by the boys working at the chaikhana and all their friends, who wanted to know everything about who we were, where we came from, about our ambulance, and everything else. They were also very curious to know whether Turkmen tea is the best in the world (it might well be) and whether we now felt welcome in Turkmenistan (as welcome as it’s possible to feel).

So we spent far too much time there (it’s easier to both drive and navigate if arriving at the destination before sunset) before we got back on the road again. The next unexpected thing to happen then came a couple of hours later when we were overtaken by a car in which the front passenger through his open window signalled with impossible-to-misunderstand hand gestures that he wanted us to pull over so that we could shake hands and take photos together. With such an invitation, we obviously had to pull over.

The driver of that car turned out to be Хыдыров Аман (sounds kind of like Jedirovaman; an awesome name, like Batman), who runs a furniture retail shop in Ashgabat and handed over his business card on which he had written his own title in English, in capital bold letters, as: BOSS. A short message, sent through our SPOT satellite transceiver, that we had “met The Boss” created much confusion and a discussion on Facebook about whether Bruce Springsteen was on tour in Turkmenistan. The Boss introduced us to all his minions (his large Japanese car was full of them), we shook hands, took photos, and conversed as much as our limited shared vocabulary of English and Russian would allow us.

After nightfall, we eventually reached the city of Mary and checked in at an old Soviet era hotel, not far from the railway station. Thomas was not feeling well and fell asleep as soon as he reached his bed, while Rico and I went out to get something to eat. After the sterile night streets of Ashgabat we didn’t really hope to find anything, but we were most pleasantly surprised to find the area around the railway station bustling with life; drivers of shared taxicabs shouting out destinations, vendors hawking food and drinks, people walking, talking, eating and drinking.

Three guys were grilling the local version of şişkebab over a large open wood fire and the scent was irresistible. We bought two plates of kebabs, bread and salad and two large bottles of the good local beer, Zip. A man at a standing table made space for us at his table, and despite us not having any spoken language in common he wished us welcome to his city by sharing the last of his small bottle of the local vodka with us.

Without further delays, we arrived in Turkmenabat (the last city before the border) in the afternoon the next day and checked in at an old Soviet era hotel (this time newly renovated to look exactly like before, but kind of newer, in a strange and most charming way) and walked out to eat and see the town.

Passing by a large statue of the dictator, painted in brownish “gold” paint, reminded us temporarily of that other face of Turkmenistan, but when walking further that was quickly forgotten. We got a good meal at a Russian restaurant. Some girls selling vodka and Russian champagne at the closing bazaar were greatly amused to take photos with us when we walked through. I bought new sunglasses. A nice afternoon stroll.

Then once again a guy stops us to ask to shake hands and take photos, but this time it’s different: Ylham Akbajev turns out to be studying the German language, and is overjoyed to be able to practice his language skills with us. Together with his friend, we walk a few blocks away to a bar to drink some beers and chat more. There, Rico’s impressive camera equipment provides the next connection: Ylham, together with his brother Rozik, runs a small photography studio here in Turkmenabat!

We walk to the photography studio, meet the brother and their friends, and then spend the next hours playing around in the studio. The Akbajev brothers are true masters of kitsch and in their studio they have all accessories one might possibly need for a really good portrait, everything from a guitar to nicely bound books with classic Russian poetry.

After posing for various portraits, Rozik realizes that this is a golden opportunity for advertising, the big professional video camera appears and all of a sudden I find myself the main character of a video advertisement, heartily endorsing this photography studio, in Swedish. Everybody is greatly entertained and we drink innumerable cups of tea together.

Now the next surprise walks through the door. The brothers have made new posters for a local pop singer, and with impeccable timing she walks in to collect them right when we are there. The pop singer is greatly embarrassed to have her picture taken without wearing make-up, but lets herself be persuaded to do it anyway and poses with us. Embarrassed without make-up she, of course, is cuter than ever.

This is a thing that should be told about the women in Turkmenistan: I have rarely seen so beautiful and so beautifully dressed women, both younger and older, anywhere else in the world. Those ethereal beauties from mysterious deserts in the east, that always appear in fairy tales, we now know where they come from in real life.

When the pop singer has left with her new posters, Ylham talks about his desire to find any kind of job in Germany, in order to learn the German language properly. Organizing such a thing is, however, far from easy when living in Turkmenistan. If anyone who reads this has any potential leads or connections that might help him out, please get in touch. His friend tells us that he himself has managed to get admitted as a foreign student at university in The Netherlands. From the döner kebab boys who went to Turkey to these guys, most young people we meet seem to have a desire to get out of Turkmenistan; not for the rest of their lives, but definitely to get to know the outside world.

The photography studio needs to work the next morning, but we don’t, so we wish each other good night and good bye and when they go home we go back to that bar where we were before.

Rustan is the owner of this bar and nightclub. He is delighted to have us as his guests, and in this small bar in a side-street in Turkmenabat we are quite certainly the first European guests ever. He smiles with all his gold teeth and explains how his parents once opened the place that he now has modernized and runs quite successfully.

Some of the other guests are at first quite apprehensive of our presence. They believe that we might be Germans, and the last time anyone they know of met Germans was when their ancestors were sent by Stalin to fight the second World War. But as soon as it has been cleared up who we are and where we come from, the ice is broken, beer and vodka starts flowing and Rustan’s new and powerful sound system pumps out Turkish and Indian hits. Soon we’re at the dance floor, and after a few songs we’re joined by the girls as well, who after a short initial shyness form a group dancing next to us guys.

This is another thing that should be told about the women in Turkmenistan: While the country officially is Muslim, women take part in daily life as they would in a modern secular city like Istanbul, and not as I would have pictured a provincial town in a backwater country. This journey is not good for my prejudices, they die faster than I can count them,

The partying continues until the closing hour prescribed by the police, at which the music is turned off, the lights on, and the partying continues longer still. When we finally leave, Rustan refuses to accept any money for what we’ve drunk during the night. In the end, we pay with hearty handshakes and a pack of exotic Swiss Parisienne cigarettes.

The next morning we got a quite extraordinary demonstration of Turkmen helpfulness: At a petrol station, I had tried to ask if they had any equipment for checking and adjusting tyre pressure. While doing this, I had imitated the sound of a compressor and for that been shown to the shop next door. The guy in there did indeed have several compressors, but not for pressurizing tyres but for spray-painting cars. He did however understand what we were looking for and volunteered his help to find not only a tyre shop but also the way out of the city onto the right road towards Turkmenabat.

(Our tyres turned out to be perfectly fine, but had just felt unusually soggy in the unusual heat.)

Getting out of the city and onto the right road would indeed have been difficult without help, but sitting in the passenger seat our new guardian angel gives me turn-by-turn directions and when we‘ve eventually reached the city limits he takes a taxicab back to his shop while a nice lady who’s heading towards the same road as we need to find instructs me to follow her car.

Close to the border, at a desolate road through the desert, we take a break to study the map and after that break the car is impossible to start again. (7,185 km after leaving Zürich, a pretty decent distance until the first break-down, I’d say.) We have brought both the Haynes and Chilton repair manuals, but after a while it becomes pretty clear that whatever’s wrong, it’s nothing that we’ll be able to repair road-side in the middle of the desert.

Eventually, help arrives in the form of Dmitry, a Russian war veteran from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, nowadays a petroleum man working for the Chinese (who import enormous amounts of natural gas through a pipeline that begins in Turkmenabat), who drives up to us in his gigantic Toyota Hilux (turbo diesel, 4×4, crew cab, last year’s model, shining white), together with his son and the son’s friend.

Dmitry, born and raised in Turkmenistan, is a man of action, he solves problems and gets things done. He investigates our engine, electrical system and starter motor at length, but must eventually draw the sad conclusion that is isn’t as easy as us being useless but that there indeed is a problem that can’t be repaired road-side in the middle of the desert.

The ambulance needs to be towed. When outfitting the ambulance earlier this year, we bought a tow cable of such excellent quality and clever design that it now when we desperately need to use it, is utterly impossible to find. We start unloading and unpacking our cargo, and the amazing tow cable hides itself even further away. Dmitry drives off together with Thomas to find a tow cable somewhere else, while leaving his son and the son’s friend with Rico and me in the desert.

We never found the amazing tow cable, we packed and loaded our cargo again, took some photos showing us stranded on this desolate road in this desolate desert, and waited. Before leaving Turkmenabat that morning, we stocked up on supplies at the bazaar and then also bought a big melon. The melons of Turkmenistan are said to be the best in the world, second only to the melons of Afghanistan. So together with the two Russian boys, we feasted on the melon (which indeed was absolutely fantastic), in what little shade the ambulance provided us in the scorching desert sun, until Dmitry returned with Thomas and a borrowed tow cable.

Really wanting to avoid towing, Dmitry made one final attempt at finding the problem himself and while he was digging around the engine an old Opel Vectra suddenly appeared out of the desert and pulled over next to us. Inside it were four (maybe five; I couldn’t see the driver) very drunk Turkmen men, all of them in an excellent mood. They shouted a question to me about whether we were Russians and I pointed to Dmitry who shouted some Russian greeting back to them. This seemed to make them immensely happy and they shouted something back about how much they loved Russians, pushed an unopened bottle of locally produced vodka into my hand, and then disappeared into the desert again as suddenly as they had appeared. Surreal.

The desolate desert road goes through a hilly landscape, with slopes as steep as 12%, and the ambulance is around 3 tonnes heavy when fully loaded. With Dmitry driving the Hilux and me steering the ambulance at the other end of the tow cable, I get a wholly new appreciation for power steering and power brakes. This thing is seriously heavy. The Hilux, however, has enormous power reserves and never even hesitates when pulling its new cargo up the steepest slopes.

In the first village we reached, we stopped outside of a small convenience store and a car was sent to fetch a man explained to be “махина мастер” (“car master”), a description that soon came to be used as a name, as if Master had been this man’s proper name.

Master arrived, together with his assistant, and showed himself to be that kind of man who is so good at what he does that one can feel it in the air and everybody around him immediately trusts that he knows exactly what he’s doing. It took him less than a minute to figure out what was wrong and what needed to be done, and then he proceeded with the strenuous work to remove the starter motor from its exceedingly inaccessible location behind the engine on the Volvo 965.

When removed, he disassembled the starter motor and could show us the gears that were supposed to transfer power from the starter motor to the engine, but now were utterly broken. A complicated contraption, made in Germany, that needed to be replaced. Master went away in search for spare parts.

The guy who had fetched Master in his car, an Opel Astra, proudly pointed out that his car was of German quality, implying that such a thing as our problem wouldn’t happen to him. I could not help retorting that our starter motor had been built by Bosch and it therefore wasn’t unlikely that Opel used the same one. Hilarity ensued when Master returned with the spare part, explaining that he had been able to find it because it’s also used by Opel.

Dmitry’s wife had been calling him, wondering why father and son hadn’t come home for dinner yet, so they now left us with a promise to drive by again later at night to verify that we were still not there then. We thanked them profoundly, they waved it away as being nothing, and then drove off in the gigantic Toyota.

With the spare part at hand, Master and his assistant pretty quickly put everything together again and with proud confidence he urged me to try starting the engine. It started flawlessly, of course. I did a few more stops and starts. Everything perfect. Master asked for 30 USD for his work and for the spare part. We happily paid, said goodbye to everyone who by this time had become involved and then drove away towards the border.

Shortly before the border, shortly before sunset, we met another Mongol Rally car, heading in the opposite direction. They could tell us that the border had been closed for the night but that they and yet another Rally car had decided to camp along the canal (part of the large irrigation system through the desert for the Turkmenistan cotton fields) near the border, and that they were now just going for supplies. We gave them directions to the small convenience store we had just left and decided to camp with them to cross the border in the morning.

At the border the next morning, Turkmenistan once again turned its head around to show the face of the totalitarian state with its byzantine bureaucracy. When entering the country, the official who filled out the document known as the big green form had for some unexplained reason in this document entered our last day in the country five days before our visas expired. Not understanding this document (in Turkmen) anyway, I had not noticed this, but now it became apparent that this document had been used to calculate the road tax and vehicle insurance fees. Because of this, the approximately 800 m we had driven on Turkmenistan public roads this morning, from our camping site to the border crossing, had been illegal, as they had been driven without paid road tax and without valid vehicle insurance.

The man wearing the uniform of the totalitarian state and given the task to execute its orders was however a very nice person, and explained that if we would just fill out a new form, valid from this morning, and pay taxes and fees, we could then just pretend as if we had never driven those 800 m illegally. So some paperwork and 35 USD in cash for taxes and fees later, we were ready to exit Turkmenistan legally and with all papers in order.

While doing this paperwork, I met an Englishman named Mark Wright (www.thewrightwayeast.co.uk) who was about to cross the border on his bicycle. He had been cycling from London and was heading for Hong Kong. I exclaimed that this was a fun coincidence, as I have a friend in Hong Kong, Aron Åkesson, who is really into cycling. Cards were exchanged and Mark and Aron were put in touch with each other. (Let’s see if they actually get to cycle together in Hong Kong.)

The Turkmenistan border officials then did more paperwork and vehicle inspections (but, luckily for our sanity, not anywhere near as much for exiting as for entering the country) and as we now had learnt to know some Turkmens, we noticed that most of them here were wearing uniforms that required them to do stupid and annoying things, but that most of them were really nice people under the uniforms, trying to make jokes and small talk to make the ridiculous procedures pass more pleasantly.

With that, Turkmenistan showed a smiling face when we were waved goodbye and after a friendly handshake and wishes for a pleasant journey from the last border guard, drove on into Uzbekistan.

Dictatorship Theme Park Ashgabat

There is no way denying it: A major reason for us to go to Turkmenistan was a desire to experience this textbook totalitarian state with its all-powerful dictator, byzantine bureaucracy, ridiculous uniforms, monumental portraits, golden statues and, most of all, the zaniest of capitals, Ashgabat.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, President for Life Saparmurat Niyazov (one of few men in history who have managed to hold on to that title until their natural death), used the newly independent country’s vast natural resources to finance the realization of his many personal eccentricities, most visibly transforming the capital into something that the Lonely Planet very accurately describes as a hybrid between “Las Vegas and Pyongyang”. After visiting Ashgabat ourselves, we wholeheartedly agree with this description and have started referring to the city as Pyong Vegas. Today, power rests with Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow, who has loosened the grip a little bit (by for example allowing himself to be re-elected with only 97% of the vote, instead of assuming the presidential title for life) but generally seems content with continuing the legacy of his predecessor, adding monumental photographic portraits of himself next to the golden statues of his predecessor, and so forth.

The drive from Türkmenbaşy (formerly known as Krasnovodsk, but renamed by the dictator in honour of himself) was strenuous, with only the sight of camels roaming the desert on both sides of the road adding some pleasure to the journey, and we arrived in Ashgabat long after sunset. Walking out at night into this city that is supposed to have a million inhabitants was eerie, seeing the wide well-lit streets and the pompous parks wholly devoid of people. Uniformed police and security guards were everywhere, but during an almost hour-long walk we encountered less than five normal citizens. The sights of the illuminated white marble palaces and golden statues lining the streets were spectacular, though. Seeing that there would be impossible to find anything to eat in the city, we returned to the pompous luxury hotel at which we were staying and when ordering a hamburger from room service, I could not help identifying myself with Misha Vainberg, the anti-hero in Gary Shteyngart’s novel Absurdistan.

Next morning we walked out to see the insanity in broad daylight, and despite very high expectations, we were not disappointed. The park at Independence Square, around which the central government buildings are located, is quite beautiful and especially the earthquake memorial but also the Soviet war memorial are true pieces of art. Apart from the police and guards, we were the only people in the park. Judging from the behaviour of the police and guards, it seems as if the official buildings are extremely fragile, to the point that they would fall apart immediately by the click of a camera or the gravitational pull of a tourist standing still. We were allowed to walk around the park and look at the buildings across the street, but outside the Ministry of Fairness we paused for a moment upon which a uniformed guard momentarily materialized and with impossible-to-misunderstand hand gestures explained that it was essential that we moved away immediately.

After nearly overdosing on white marble and gold (with golden flag poles topping the list of things that I had never before thought of making out of gold), and the special Turkmen yellow-brownish “gold colour” used for statues and other items not deemed important enough to be clad with real gold or even real metal, we took refuge in the Russian market bazaar where there were real normal citizens to be found.

The number of real normal citizens in the bazaar made our previous experiences in Ashgabat even eerier, for the number of real normal citizens here meant that these people actually lived here but were just not allowed to walk on the sidewalks or in the parks or anywhere at night. Two young guys grilled great döner kebab in the bazaar, and while eating we stood and chatted a bit with them. One of them, Özmir, told us that he had previously worked abroad, grilling döner kebab in Istanbul, Ankara and Antalya. After living in those cities, it must be very strange to be back home and obey the rules of life in Ashgabat.

Me and Özmir

Having so seen the city center, we picked up our trusty ambulance to try finding the Monument to Neutrality. The previous dictator, Niyazov, had ordered a 12 m tall gold-plated statue of himself to be built, and during his lifetime it was perched on top of the 75 m tall Neutrality Arch at the Independence Square in central Ashgabat. (It was then also mounted on a motorized platform that turned the statue to always face the sun.) After his death, the arch was torn down and the statue moved to the outskirts of the city, where it today is perched on top of the 95 m tall Monument to Neutrality. We had to see this before leaving Ashgabat.

Driving out of the city, it took less than half an hour to spot the statue in the distance, on top of its enormous tripod. (If anyone else wants to find it: Drive along the southern ring road around Ashgabat, and you’ll see it not very far south of that road. Once you’ve seen it from the road, it’s easy to figure out how to drive to get there.)

This statue is the pièce de résistance of Dictatorship Theme Park Ashgabat. It’s gold-plated. It’s 12 m tall. It’s at the top of a 95 m tall monument. There is large Las Vegas style fountain under the monument. Inside the monument there is a viewing platform, from which one can see this artificial city (including enormous uninhabited for show apartment complexes) rise out of the middle of the desert, and a museum of Fabergé style decorative items made out of precious metals and stones to celebrate the greatness of the nation and its leader.

Overdose. Time to leave Pyong Vegas and try to find the real Turkmenistan.

€5,000

Today, we surpassed €5,000 donated in total (through http://mongolia.to/donate, http://mongolia.to/t-shirt and cash donations) for the ambulance itself, the mine clearing work in Tajikistan and the Lotus Children’s Centre in Mongolia.

This is wondeful! Please continue contributing, and spread the word to your friends!

Across the Caspian Sea

The distance between Baku and Türkmenbaşy is around 240 km in a straight line. From arriving at the gates of the Turkmenistan embassy in Baku to exiting through the gates of the port at Türkmenbaşy, 50 hours passed; an average speed of slightly less than 5 km/h. This speed is about ⅓ of the top speed of a domestic chicken. (In our defence, it is also 100 times faster than the top speed of a garden snail.)

The big rush to the Turkmenistan embassy started Monday morning. As soon as we came around to see the correct gate, it was obvious that we were now in the right place at the right time. The street in front of the embassy gate was filled with Mongol Rally people and the local facilitator Ishmael ran around collecting passports and paperwork, noting people’s names on lists, taking polls on who was attempting to get onto which boat, and handing paperwork and passports back. In this bustle, a girl suddenly grabs my attention to ask the questions “Did you say ‘ambulance’? Are you from Sweden?” and upon me answering in the affirmative following up with yet one more question: “Do you know Ben King, from New Zealand?”. Yes, I do know Ben King. We were neighbours once, some ten years ago, when he came to Lund University as a foreign exchange student. He had seen me post about this journey and told this girl, Charlie (who’s sister apparently is married to Ben’s brother), to keep an eye open for me and give me his greetings when she found me. (Small world.)

A few hours later we then found ourselves at the correct dock in the harbour, with the ambulance stocked up with enough bread, cheese and water to manage several days’ potential waiting in a good mood. As far as I could see, all vehicles on the dock were either heavy commercial vehicles or participants in the Mongol Rally. There seemed to be no terminal for normal passenger cars and we ralliers loaded from the cargo dock. Sven Hedin once loaded his railroad carriage, that had been given to his disposal by the Czar of Russia, onto the ferryboat in this harbour. We didn’t have any railroad carriage from the czar, but a 6 m long bright yellow Volvo ambulance isn’t that bad either. It cost a small fortune (715 USD in total) and took a few hours to get all six metres of it together with the three of us onboard, and I jealously thought about getting the shipping paid for by the czar.

All in all, Monday passed by pretty smoothly, we were aboard the ferryboat before nightfall and the engines started warming up around midnight. As long as we were still in harbour we had internet access through the local GSM network (incredibly slow, but working almost all the time) and Rico passed the time by making the video Ambulance Tetris 3D, showing the reorganizing of cargo in Tbilisi. It took a few hours to upload that video to YouTube, but we now had oceans of time and passed most of it eating our bread and cheese, drinking some wine we had brought onboard and talking to the other ralliers and to the Azerbaijani crew. Some of the younger crew members took great pleasure in the break our presence offered, in what would otherwise have been quite dull routine.

Tuesday afternoon the shores of Turkmenistan finally came into clear view and everyone got their hopes up, started packing up their things and getting ready. But when we were in sight of the harbour, the captain let drop anchor in order to wait for the ship, currently occupying the dock we were heading for, to finish loading and then leave the harbour. With dusk approaching, the anchor was eventually hoisted and hopes went up again. By now, a light breeze had begun to blow, cooling off the hot deck and getting everybody in good spirits as the ship navigated into the harbour.

But docking failed. Quote from a crew member: “Captain is woman. Can not park.” Unfavourable wind conditions were blamed for the failure, and the ship pulled back out of the harbour to anchor overnight at the old anchoring spot again. We feasted on bread and tuna in olive oil, grateful that we had been pessimistic when stocking up on provisions.

At this point in time, the passenger deck on which all ralliers were quartered had no more working toilets, and people started getting really uncomfortable. Having previously made friends with the Azerbaijani crew now paid off greatly, as I was invited down to crew quarters where they had a working toilet (which was fabulously appreciated by yours truly), good tea and an old black-&-white TV on which we watched Arnold Schwarzenegger in Total Recall, dubbed into Russian (which was almost equally appreciated).

Wednesday morning the ferryboat finally made port, and sometime after 10 o’clock we could walk ashore to begin the gargantuan task of getting let into Turkmenistan. Our passports had been collected already when we boarded the ship and they were now given directly to the local authorities, and sometime around 11 o’clock we were able to hand over our Letters of Invitation, that we had obtained before starting the journey, to apply for Turkmenistan visas. The following hours were mostly waiting, with some short interruptions for filling out customs declaration forms and listening to new rumours. The sun was scorching and we sat in the dust in the shade of some old gazebos between the railroad and the port buildings.

Sometime around 17 o’clock things started moving, and what followed was a truly mind-boggling series of bureaucratic twists and turns. Our passports and Letters of Invitation had been matched up which each other and put in a big heap, with a clerk working his way through the heap, gluing visas into the passports and stamping them with the first required stamp. After this, the passports were handed back to us together with invoices for the visa and immigration fees, which were to be paid, in cash, in US dollars, at the cashier’s counter. For this, receipts were received with which the passports could be handed back to the visa stamp counter to be put in the heap of passports that were to be stamped with the second required stamp. After being stamped, they were handed back again upon which we were able to proceed with the rest of the paperwork. During this time, the customs declaration forms had been stamped (three stamps each) and handed back out, and with passport, twice stamped visa, thrice stamped customs declaration forms plus vehicle registration documents, it was now possible to apply for the small and big green form. The purpose of the small green form is still unclear to me (but it was said that it was necessary) but the big green form was needed to go to the counter at which a man calculated the various vehicle related fees that would need to be paid to be granted transit permission through the country.

With the invoice created by help of the big green form, I could now go back to the cashier’s counter and pay, in cash, in US dollars, the calculated fees and get a receipt. Equipped with this receipt together with the big green form and the passport with the twice stamped visa, it is then possible to go to the next house to visit the port authority and from them get the invoice for use of the harbour. This invoice should then be taken around the building to the port authority cashier’s desk.

Here the smooth system broke down. The port authorities in Baku had on the ship loading documents mixed up the names of us team members (despite asking for confirmation of this particular point on three different occasions) and erroneously listed Rico as the legal owner of the car. This error had then been transferred to the invoice, but when I came to pick up the invoice (as the legal owner of the car) my passport number had been written onto it and the poor woman at the port authority cashier’s desk now had a document upon which name and passport number didn’t match up. I realized what had happened and showed her the document from the port authority in Baku together with the vehicle registration documents to show that an error had been made. She had a hard time understanding how the port authority in Baku could possibly have made an error in this document, but eventually walked through the building back to the people who had written the invoice and got it corrected somehow. Then she required, in cash, in local Turkmen currency, a sum equivalent to 1½ US dollar. This must be paid in local currency and could not be paid in any foreign currency, which posed a slight problem for us as it’s illegal to bring Turkmen currency out of Turkmenistan so we could not have acquired it before reaching the border crossing and we had not yet been allowed into the country to acquire it there.

So I walked back to the immigration and customs authorities cashier’s counter to ask if the lady there might be able to exchange a few US dollars for local Turkmen manat. This was utterly impossible, as she was out of local banknotes. But after a bit of discussion and questions about any advice on how we otherwise might be able to pay the port fees, she eventually decided that she would be able to exchange 5 USD after all, after getting some banknotes from a safe in the back of her office. With this money, I could go back to the port authority cashier’s counter and pay the port fees. With this receipt, it was now possible to go back to immigration and customs and hand over the newly acquired receipt together with passport with visa with two stamps and customs declaration forms with three stamps and vehicle registration documents and the big green form to a counter whose function and purpose I never managed to decipher. After that, they sent me to another office to meet someone they referred to as “doctor”, who stamped some of my papers (by this time I had lost track of which and why) while a military man made gestures implying that the lady referred to as “doctor” was an attractive woman and that he wanted me to agree with him on this. A few uneasy smiles later, I was sent to the police office to get the last required document.

In the police office, the big-hat man himself was out for tea and the office was instead guarded by a young conscript border patrol soldier, with whom I had made some attempts at friendly contact during the day. With his boss now out of sight, I managed to buy his official uniform belt buckle from him, for the price of my own plain American belt buckle (which he had previously shown that he coveted) plus 12 USD cash behind the back. A bargain! My new belt buckle is exceptionally shiny and decorated with wreaths, crescent moons, stars and stuff. Awesome!

With the new belt buckle safely tucked away in a deep pocket, I was now holding my trousers up with my left hand when the big-hat man suddenly returned from tea. But he seemed to not notice, was friendly and in a jovial mood, and I was soon out on the parking lot with all required documents under my arm, ready for the final required vehicle inspection before being allowed into the country.

So on Wednesday night, some 13 hours after we had handed over the first documents to the immigration authorities (and a few hundred US dollars in fees and taxes later) and some 50 hours after we had first lined up outside the Turkmenistan embassy in Baku, we could now drive legally and with all papers in order, through the gates into Turkmenistan.

Pit Stop Azerbaijan

After visiting Georgia, it was time for us to head for Asia proper and (as those of you who read our reasoning about The Route knew already in January) this is something we want to do by crossing the Caspian Sea on the ferryboat from Baku to Türkmenbaşy (Krasnovodsk), the truly classic way to begin any journey through Central Asia.

Nowadays Baku is in the independent nation of Azerbaijan and Krasnovodsk has been renamed to Türkmenbaşy in the independent nation of Turkmenistan, and for neither of these two nations is it possible to obtain a tourist visa while staying in Switzerland. Therefore the first step in crossing the Caspian was to obtain a Letter of Invitation from the Turkmenistan embassy in London and the second step was to apply for a visa to Azerbaijan at the embassy in Tbilisi.

The visa to Azerbaijan was to be applied for through a local travel agent. A taxi driver loitering outside the embassy recommended us a guy named Giorgi Gogorishvili at Medea Travel, just around the corner from the embassy, and this turned out to be good advice. Giorgi, who ran the agency together with his brother, was as efficient as he was friendly. The embassy then took three days to process our applications, and on Thursday afternoon Giorgi promptly called us with the good news that he had just picked up our passports at the embassy, with visas in them. So we made haste to gather our belongings and leave the Tbilisi guest house, driving the by now familiar road to the Tbilisi embassy quarters, pick up the passports and then to immediately drive on towards the Azerbaijani border.

The Turkmenistan embassy in Baku does not publish any official opening hours, neither on their door nor on any website or any other place where anyone we know of has been able to find them. But we had found persistent rumors on the internet that they should be open Mondays and Fridays, possibly until noon and maybe also a couple of hours in the afternoon. So it being Thursday afternoon when we got our Azerbaijan visas, we set out for reaching Baku and the embassy before Friday noon. The drive to the border went smoothly and apart from a close encounter with a suicidal cow, traffic was low and road conditions good, and we managed to reach the border at bit after 18 o’clock. Then the waiting started. When we arrived at the border, there was already a sizable queue of vehicles in front of us, but as slow as we moved forwards the queue grew even faster behind us. We quickly learned that leaving any more than ½ metre space in front of you meant that a car with Azerbaijani plates immediately would drive around the queue and squeeze in before you, so as slow as the queue was moving, it required constant vigilance to not be left standing still. Waiting there, we encountered a number of other vehicles from the Mongol Rally and swapped stories about our travel adventures so far, and rumors about how to get through to Turkmenistan.

At around midnight, we finally reached the actual Azerbaijan border inspections. The staff was generally friendly and helpful (a man wearing the most impressive-looking Soviet style gigantic officer’s hat — we were in big-hat country now — even showed his appreciation for our ambulance with the exclamation “Nice car!”), and after little more than an hour of paperwork and inspections and some 75 USD paid in various taxes and fees, we and our ambulance were let in into Azerbaijan. Here we found ourselves on a highway of not exactly outstanding quality in the pitch dark of the barren remoteness far from any cities. Driving all the way to Baku would take at least 5 hours in daylight if traffic remained low, but quite a few more hours in this darkness. So we headed for the closest bigger populated area, Gazakh, around an hour away, to try finding some food and a couple of hours of sleep.

We found a motel just by the highway somewhere near Gazakh, where it turned out to be possible in the middle of the night to eat some chicken and lamb in broth with potatoes, drink tea and sleep for two hours before getting going again at 5 o’clock, to be on the road before sunrise to not miss even a minute of daylight driving. But with daylight also came heavier traffic, progress was slow, and it was already noon when we finally reached the outskirts of Baku, driving past the first oil rigs. So we set our hope to that rumor about the embassy also being open a couple of hours on Friday afternoon and proceeded to attempt to find the embassy at once.

Friday noon traffic in Baku beats any city traffic I’ve ever encountered anywhere before in every possible way. There are more cars, bigger cars (enormous Toyota Land Cruiser Prada being especially popular) and smaller cars (incredible amounts of tiny Soviet era relics), more tightly packed and attempting higher speeds, than anywhere else, and all drivers seemed to be driven not primarily by any urge to get ahead themselves but more importantly to make sure that no-one else gets in front of them — even if that means that they’ll have to get stuck themselves. There also seems to be a widespread belief that honking and aggressive hand-gestures are able to invoke the magic powers required to change Newton’s laws of space and matter. Coming from the chaotic but friendly and forward-moving Tbilisi city traffic to this was a shock. The embassy had, of course, also been moved recently, a significant distance away, so by the time we finally found it, it was late afternoon and any rumors of afternoon opening hours appeared to be nothing by rumours. The embassy security guard instructed us to return “tomorrow”, and considering that several Azerbaijani institutions (including banks and some government branches) indeed work Saturdays this didn’t seem entirely improbable. (Of course “tomorrow” in the end turned out to be just a more complicating way of expressing “on Monday”.)

Now we found ourselves thoroughly exhausted, so we drove down to the waterfront and sat down in front of a brand new luxury hotel skyscraper to get some overly expensive drinks and sturgeon kebabs while calming our nerves with the stunning view of the Caspian Sea.

Flame Towers

Most of Saturday was spent taking care of the car, getting it in shape for the upcoming journey through the deserts of Turkmenistan, and Azerbaijan being an oil country all such things as petrol and engine oil were wonderfully inexpensive. Then we met up with Anar Aliev, whom I had gotten in touch with through CouchSurfing, where he had found our itinerary and sent a message offering his help in Baku. He took us to a simple and good value-for-money guest house, near the Montin Bazaar, where we could stay for the upcoming unknown number of nights we’d need to stay until we would be able to get onboard the ferryboat across the sea. The owner of the guest house was a hospitable old man who as a boy once upon a time had learned some German at school, and still remembered one or two jokes and could invite us to eat with the words “Frühstück. Gut. Tee.”. This was indeed exactly the kind of place we needed. Anar himself had once lived for many years in Germany and spoke good German, so we went out in the area around the guest house to eat and drink and talk for the rest of the day. Then Anar had things he needed to do so with a short summary of the geography of Baku night-life, he sent us away on our own to forget bureaucracy and border-crossings for a while by learning to know the bars of downtown Baku.

Khanim Javadova, journalist at BBC Azerbaijan

Sunday was a slow day. There was absolutely nothing that we needed to do and it was late in the afternoon when we finally left the guest house at all. But when we did, it was to meet some of the local tech community. Just as in Tbilisi, Ihar had in advance introduced us to some of his friends in Baku, and we had been in touch with Amid Quliyev and Turan Rustamli who both had been awaiting our arrival. So this Sunday evening, Amid picked us up at the guest house and we drove the ambulance downtown to there be joined by their friends Shaiq, Sadiq, Ilqar, Rashad and Orxan, and their friend Khanim Javadova, journalist at BBC Azerbaijan, who from them had heard about our ambulance and our journey and now had come to do an interview. This was a most pleasurable evening; we talked, drank tea, talked more, walked around the old town and walked around the new waterfront developments, took photos and found shared experiences and passions. À propos something completely different, Turan happened to mention a calculator app for Chrome that he had written and was as pleased as surprised when I could reply that I actually knew this app and used it myself.

Come Monday morning and the big rush to the Turkmenistan embassy. The embassy is indeed open this day. Time to leave Baku and attempt crossing the Caspian Sea.

It grieves me a bit that there never was any time in Baku to visit the Nobel Brothers Museum at the Villa Petrolea. I had written to the museum in advance and enquired about opening hours, which sadly didn’t include weekends and both Friday and Monday ended up being far too busy for us to squeeze in any museum visits. The Nobel brothers are, as far as I know, the only people to ever beat John D. Rockefeller and his Standard Oil company in competition, by transporting oil from their oil fields in Baku through pipelines across land to the port of Batumi (which we drove through last week on our first day in Georgia), where it was loaded on ships across the Black Sea to Europe, and this efficient supply line making it possible for them to still make a profit while undercutting Standard Oil on price in Europe. When younger brother Alfred Nobel passed away and donated his fortune to found the Nobel Prize, some 12% of his wealth was in the form of stock in his brothers’ Caspian Sea oil company, Branobel.

Corruption in Baku or How I met the seagulls from “Finding Nemo”

My twin brother, (yes, identical) is extremely fond of mimicking the seagulls from this Pixar classic.

I have however in the capital of Azerbaijan, Baku, met his match; let me introduce you to one of Baku’s finest: Fat Freddy.

See those awesome sunglasses he is wearing, yeah... they used to belong to me.

Here is how it happened; we came to Baku Friday 27^th, we then tried to find the Turkmenistan embassy, otherwise known as the “lost grail”. They had moved from their original location and relocated to a anonymous house no one had ever seen. But we went searching, and asked for help along the way, and thatch how we met Fat Freddy,,. He was absolutely delighted to see us, and said he knew exactly where it was. When he saw into the back of the ambulance,  he almost lost his mind and was transformed into the seagulls from finding Nemo! He tried to take everything from from my cellphone to the led flashlights, in the end he got away with my sunglasses and then proceeded to the front of the car, where Fredrik almost had to arm wrestle him for our SPOT-tracker, and ended up with buying him off with a packet of my cigarettes... Whopdidoo.. And he led us in the wrong direction to. Bitter..who..me..?

But except for that, everyone, INCLUDING the police have been super nice to us all the way :)