Ahal Hotel Ashgabat

We arrived in the bizarre city of Ashgabad, a glass and marble showpiece in the middle of the desert. Disney World without Mickey Mouse, Vegas without the casino's. Acres of pristine parks, huge tree-lined boulevards, fountains everywhere. Countless amazing new buildings of mirrored glass and marble, a mixture of banks, apartments and government departments. Almost all appeared to be deserted and empty. Huge posters of the ...

... They took me with 2 delightful midwives from the clinic (hardly older than me) for a massive and very tasty lunch at the foot of a huge crag bellow Ghazor Khan castle, which we then hiked up to, and afterwards we picked fruit (we must have picked 10kg of cherrys) and all had a picnic of watermelon and fruit and seeds by a small river. When we got back to their house, they had invited me to stay, we ...

... cramps so badly every time i moved I just wanted to cry. There was no shade and they even had to take down the tarpaulin from the truck - our only shade - as a freak gust twisted it like a windmill. I lay prostrate on one of the seats for 6 hours willing myself to sleep. I even sold hot beers and Pepsis to people - they were so desparate for something other than water. Apparently axle grease isn't as addictive as I first thought. At 9pm just after the sun had gone ...

... The production of frozen glasses for the beer got us all in. Everyone tries all information sources to find when we may move, including asking the dodgy winch man who came to fix our toilet last night uninvited, because he met Dianne earlier, and found out which cabin she was in. When the door was answered by Murray, he suddenly needed to fix our toilet. There is some sort of announcement in Russian at 3.45pm, and we ...

Salam, auf dem Weg von Ashgabat nach Mary haben wir noch zwei kurze Stops gehabt, der erste war in Anau, wo ein altes Mausoleum stand, welches leider 1948 bei dem Erdbeben zerstoert wurde. In dem Mausoleum ist ein Sufi-Prediger begraben, und daher ist das Grab noch heute Pilgerziel. Anau ist im Prinzip auch eine recht alte Stadt, aber uebrig geblieben ist nicht viel... Gruss Ralf

... Ehren von Turkmenbashi natuerlich. Fotopermits kosten extra und sind ziemlich teuer (Eintritt war schon teuer genug, US$10 im Nationalmuseum und US$12 im Carpet Museum, US$20 wenn man Fotos machen will zusaetzlich...). An einigen Tagen der Woche gibt es ausserdem den groessten Basar Zentralasiens, den Tolkuchka Basar ausserhalb von Ashgabat in der Wueste (zum Glueck hat der Praesident ihn nie gesehen, sonst haette er ihn wohl ...

... Due to the vastness of the region, we had to drive for a few hours to the various ruins (some were reconstructed). Another, may be even more, interesting site is Gonur Depe, some 40 miles away. In November, Russian-Greek archaeologist Viktor Saranidi, will try to convince, at a conference, archaeologists from all over the world that the site that he has been excavating for some 35 years is the 5th ancient center of civilization (the other 4 known ones are Egypt ...

... would their methods or technologies necessarily be modern while everything else was decaying and decrepit in these ex-communist wastelands. Almost everywhere we went people, even those who seemed to be moderately successful in the post-communist system, seemed nostalgic for Soviet times when they didn't have to work to get paid. To its credit, Ashgabat is was one of the few spots in central Asia that actually looks changed since Soviet times ...

... Turkmenbashi himself. You can't miss him - he's on every building, every street corner, every street name. Even, most bizarrly, a golden statue of Turkmenbashi that, get this, revolves so that its constantly facing the sun.... He's everywhere! Saparmy Niyazov (his real name)was originally the General Secretary of the Communist ...

... in helping to buy wheelchiars for people in T-stan, please forward this information to them. This is procedure for donating from the peace corps website: - Go to www.peacecorps.gov - From the menu on the left hand side of the screen, click "Donate Now" - From the "Choose a Region" area on this page select "Eastern Europe and Central Asia" - Scroll down through the projects until you get to Turkmenistan, to the ...