Mary

We'd been hoping we might be able to find a way into Turkmenistan, which isn't called the Hermit Kingdom for nothing: as well as being an authoritarian dictatorship with some of the lowest press freedoms in the world, they don't like tourists very much, and it's notoriously hard to get a visa. Our original plan to get a transit visa has been thwarted by them simply not issuing any for months, but a bit of searching on facebook gave us a lead for a reasonably priced tour agency, and they were able to furnish us with the coveted Letter of Invitation. Our bizarre route around Uzbekistan was entirely due to needing to thread the needle of a very short window for tourists between Independence Day and a summit of international leaders shutting the country down properly, and so we made it across the border on Friday with four days to leg it south and back out again.

6am start from Bukhara and a taxi that took us to the border. We'd expected to be the only foreigners there, so were amazed to find an Irish woman in the queue, who unfortunately had worked herself into a frenzy of anxiety before her passport had even been checked and we never found out if she made it through. Luckily for us a friendly passing guide was able to guide us around a flummoxing set of procedures, most of which involved paying for a random collection of visa fees our only Covid test of the trip, which was nothing other than expensive theatrics. And so through the crowd of very curious Turkmen women and into the car for the first leg south, which was 5 hours through the incredibly uneventful desert.

First stop Merv, and at a bus stop we pulled up and a child jumped into the car. He enthusiastically said hello, and we were about to make a joke about whether he was our guide, when he confirmed that yes, that was exactly who he was. It took us a while to get over the shock (he didn't look a day over 11) but eventually figured out that he was 15, and had passed his guiding exams the year before, before being employed part time by owner of the agency, who had been his examiner. I can see why, since he was peculiarly fluent, knowledgeable, confident and precocious, and I can barely fault his guiding skills, even if it was a bit uncanny and I rather wished that he could just have more of a childhood.

Turkmenistan is known for the marble and gold of Ashgabat and the burning gas pit of Darwaza but it has some pretty boggling history too and Merv has been inhabited from the 3rd millennium BC and was the capital city of multiple different countries, including the Great Seljuk Empire in the 11th-12th centuries, at which point it was possibly the world's largest city, until it was (like most things were) destroyed by Genghis Khan. The monuments that are preserved are more or less completely open to be walked around and over and there were no more than 5 other people there, which is astonishing considering the historical importance of it: it was an extraordinary experience to walk across the men's and women's palaces and to the top of the watchtower, with huge pieces of the site still astonishingly well preserved.

Onwards onto Mary, where we were passing out from hunger and stopped for late lunch. We were then led on a whistlestop tour of central Mary, which was our first sight of the 'grand monument' style of urbanism that Turkmenistan's post-independence leaders have enjoyed: it was an impressive spectacle, although when we asked what the purpose of the Palace was, we were told that nothing actually happens in it, and when we tried to take a photo of the flag being taken down the pole, we were told off for taking photos. We saw about 5 people on the street and then were taken to the town hotel for tea, where we killed a few hours in characteristically flamboyant gold and marble surroundings before being taken to the station for the overnight train to Ashgabat.Read more