How come I have to write about another day in the car? I always get the shit ones. Helen gets to write about Ashgabat - possibly the weirdest city on the planet - and I have to write about another 5 hour trip along a hot desert road!

 

We drove all day, stopping only for melons and a spot of lunch under a tree. And then we went to an ancient city called Merv... or was it Mary? I get Merv and Mary mixed up... Wait, let me check the book... Ah yes, Mary was the town where we stayed the night. Nearby Merv, was the big patch of desert with ruins from a long time ago.

 

I may as well quote the book for the history bit:

 

“The oldest of the five Merv cities is Erk Kala, an Achaemenid city thought to date from the 6th century BC. Today its a big earthen doughnut abut 600m across... Merv was known as Margush in Alexander the Great’s time. Under the Persian Sassanians, it was a melting pot of religious creeds with Christians, Buddhists and Zoroastrians cohabiting peacefully. As a centre of power, culture and civilization, Merv reached its greatest heights during the peak of the silk route in the 11th and 12th centuries, when the Seljuk Turks made it their capital and the greatest city in the Islamic world”.... blah, blah, blah.... 1218 Jenghiz Khan asks for the city’s most beautiful girls but the Turks kill the Khan’s messengers... Three years later Jenghiz sends Tolui, his most brutal son. Tolui butchers everyone. Each Mongol fighter had orders to decapitate 400 civilians, with swords and axes the slaughter roughly 1 million people. They also burn Merv to the ground... The best building to see now is the ‘Mausoleum of Sultan Sanjar’  This guy supposedly escaped from jail in Khiva, went home to Merv, found it destroyed and promptly died of a broken heart.

 

And so on. Best to look at the pictures for an idea of the place.

 

Erm... that’s it for Turkmenistan. Not really that much to say about a country that had so much mystery attached to it before we got there. I guess it’s partly because we flew through in 5 days and didn’t really stop anywhere to get a sense of the people. But its also partly because there’s not really a lot to the country. Its mostly desert, there are only three main towns and only 4 million people - not a lot for a place of its size. What else to say...? Politics I suppose. I just read an article in the paper (I’m writing this in Bishkek where we have such luxuries as newspapers) that the new guy, Berdimukhamedov, just let out another batch of political prisoners and made sure that the rest of the world saw him do it. But at the same time he had another handful people put in jail for pretty spurious, politically motivated, reasons. So perhaps the place isn’t changing as fast as everyone had hoped it might.

 

Looking back, it would have been fine to travel through on a transit visa without a guide. It would have been much cheaper and we may have met a few more locals - if any had dared to come out in the 50 degree heat that is. Having said that, the air conditioned cars and hotels felt pretty good at the time. And it was good to talk and get to know our guide Alan over the course of the week. I even enjoyed his extra long lectures about Islam; his lessons at the mosque on how to wash at the tap, prey on the carpet, live by the Koran.... I never told him that at the time though. I just crudely argued an atheist’s position and asked him instead why there was no such thing as a bad melon in Central Asia.

 

JL