Darvaza

Trip Start May 06, 2006
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Trip End Jul 18, 2006


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Flag of Turkmenistan  ,
Tuesday, July 4, 2006

From there we continued on the increasingly pot-holed road to Darvaza and our campsite for the night. We probably couldn't have made it to Ashgabat that day, and camping in the desert near Darvaza gave us the opportunity to see a burning gas crater, essentially a giant flaming hole in the ground in the middle of the desert, created in the 1970s when a natural gas mine collapsed. The resulting crater was somehow set alight (my guess is Russians, vodka, and cigarettes had something to do with it), and has been flaming away ever since. It was interesting to see, and the desert was really scenic at dusk. The actual camping ranks as one of the least comfortable sleeps of my life; add stifling heat to a stomach full of apparently undigestible goat meat, and you can probably imagine what it was like.
The next day we continued on the way to Ashgabat. It felt like high 30s in the morning when we ate breakfast, and the desertscape continued until we were within a few kilometers of the capital; I DID see a camel-crossing road sign, but couldn't whip my camera out fast enough to snap a picture. At one pit stop we made, this kid who was selling coffee to passersby was pretty interested in my camera, so I turned him loose with it for a while and he took some pretty funny pictures. His dad, with his row of jerry-cans (the local filling station) wasn't too impressed, but it was cool to have some pictures of a fairly run-down place, especially given the emphasis on new construction and the Turkmen Golden Age we were bound to see in Ashgabat.
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