Turkmenistan - A Rough Start

We joined the queue to exit Kazakhstan before 7 am, and frustratingly had to wait until gone 9 am for them to open the gates. At the last moment a Kazakh car tried to barge in front of us, saying he was with the only other car in front of us, but Colin told him to do one.

Now, checking out is usually a straight forward procedure, but after being sent all over the place to get our customs clearance, we were eventually shown into what looked like the big bosses office. Three of them were pouring over our V5 document, and Colin had to keep explaining they were looking at the page you only complete when selling the vehicle. They seemed to have a bee in their bonnet that, although our papers say we are a Motor-caravan, we are a cargo truck. We told them that can't be possible as we carry no cargo (if you exclude Yorkshire tea-bags and the odd bottle of wine) and only have seats for two people.

They tried using Google translate to explain their point, but when the word 'pussy' came out of it very loudly we were all a bit startled and burst out laughing - the customs guys all looked highly embarrassed! The debate continued for quite some time, and Colin was starting to lose it with them, asking why is this relevant when we are leaving? One of the guys had a little English, and said kept saying not to worry - it's not a problem, but we wondered if that was the case why had we been held up for over an hour. They finally said we could go, and the customs guys last comment was 'you do know right hand drive vehicles are forbidden in Turkmenistan?' We responded 'we're fine - we're meeting a guide who is taking us through'. 'Good luck' were his parting words.

Once through no-mans land we pulled up to the shiny white Turkmenistan border control, but first had to stop for the most pointless COVID test - we're both sure the swab didn't touch anything inside our mouths (cost $29 each), then a man in another hut hand wrote down all our details in a ledger. Once parked up we were directed to go in one of the buildings that was a bit chaotic with refurbishment works in progress. A man took our papers, then handed them back to us telling to go back outside. We were very relieved when a man appeared saying he was our guide. Pheww - things should get easier now.

Our guide Yasmammet looked concerned - he said the tour company hadn’t told him what type of vehicle we were in, but said 'don't worry', took our papers with him and disappeared off into the building. I took this opportunity to send messages to friends and family who had sent my birthday greetings early, as we assumed once in Turkmenistan we would have no mobile data and WiFi is restricted. It was always going to be an unusual place to see in my big 6-0, but our thinking was entering on this day would mean we would be stopping at a tourist hotel in Turkmenbashy (Turkmenistan's Caspian Sea resort), so would be more likely to be able to have a celebratory drink and a bite to eat at a decent restaurant in the city.

The next few hours feel a bit of a blur with the passing of time. Yasma would appear briefly to check information from us then run off again.

He finally reappeared saying it wasn't good news. He said there was a new Head of Transport Police at this border and whereas in the past he may have been able to reach an agreement, this guy was not for budging. He said that there had been an accident involving a right hand drive vehicle recently, so the officials at this border would not want to allow a RHD vehicle in as they would be in trouble if there was another incident. Colin said he's pretty sure he’d read the accident was several years ago, not recently.

Now what? Yasma said we had two choices - the first is we turn around and head back into Kazakhstan and miss out Turkmenistan. We really didn't want to use up significant time driving huge distances back through the vast steppes of Kazakhstan to reach Uzbekistan, but Option 2 was Yasma organises a low-loader truck to transport Lolly to the border where we were exiting from into Uzbekistan in 7 days time, and we both jump in Yasma's car to do the tour as planned. We weren't keen on this either, worrying Lolly could get damaged getting her onto and off a truck and damaged further by careless driving on the terrible Turkmenistan roads. Yasma made a couple of calls and said he had a quote for $700 which sounded a lot, but we felt we didn't have much of an option. Bringing Lolly in also meant we were being charged a $400 'road tax', so we put it to Yasma that surely we shouldn't be paying this if Lolly's wheels were going to be touching tarmac. That would soften the pain of the $700 transportation fee. Yasma trotted off again and we had another long wait.  He eventually summoned us to join him in the building to start getting our visas processed – another $100 fee each.   There was a Russian group who had been waiting with us all day to get  their visas and vehicle entry approved, and they didn’t have the issue of RHD.  We all looked a bit bewildered while the seemingly random directions from window to window ensued.  There were three signs on the wall with the Customs mission  statements which made for highly amusing reading (see two of them below). We got told we were not allowed to photograph them – isn’t a mission statement supposed to be there for everyone? I wrote down the third sign which was along the lines of ‘The Activity of the State Customs Service of Turkmenistan is to provide faster and accurate information to aid transparency’.  Hmmm. I wondered where the hand-written ledgers fit into this and what were all the people behind the counters who seemed to be doing nothing but staring at a blank screen there for?

Yasma would dash past looking harassed from time to time, and asked us to pay around $250 for the COVID tests and Visa Fees.  We had to pay for everything in US$’s cash.  The cashiers didn’t seem to be able to add up (flaming accountants…) and then they said they had no change. I pointed out that people had being paying them over cash all day – how can they not have change?

Yasma then admitted defeat and said he hadn’t been able to get them to waive the road tax. The head honcho had even kicked him out of his office and was refusing to talk to him.  Apparently they were having a visit from the President the following day and weren’t interested in pesky tourists issues. That explains why everything was being fixed and painted while we were there.   So we had to pay over another $425 for road tax for a vehicle that wasn’t going on the road – you can imagine how chuffed that made us. I watched the cashiers add up the charges (which included wheel disinfecting that wasn’t done, a fuel surcharge and an admin fee). One wrote $407, then the second rechecked it and came to the same figure, but then wrote $425 as the figure to pay. I asked Yasma why they had done that and he said ‘please just pay it.’  He had definitely had enough as well. We found out that he had driven through the night from Ashgabat to get here, had arrived at 5am and managed only two hours kip in his car so he was ready to greet us at the border. He’d had nothing to eat or drink all day (other than a cup of tea and a biscuit from us) and it was now 6pm and he had a 6 hour drive ahead of him on a horrendous road to transfer us to Turkmanbashy.

Our next panic was would Lolly be safe parked up in a car park just outside the border and we had to leave the keys with someone at the border to be handed over to the truck driver when he got there in the next day or two.  We suddenly felt hugely uncomfortable about the whole situation, but there was no going back now.  We’d had to throw all our clothes and stuff into carrier bags to bring with us, as we have no luggage with us and assumed we would just getting stuff out of Lolly each day as we needed it.

As we finally pulled away from the border we looked back at Lolly wondering if we would see her in one piece again.   I think I spent the next 6 hours fighting back tears of regret.  As birthdays go, I can’t imagine one that could be worse.

The reports of the road conditions were unfortunately accurate – the road the whole way from the border to Turkmanbashy was truly horrible. They are building a new road, which sits alongside the potholed or muddy mess we were on, taunting us by letting us on for short sections before being blocked off. 

We weren’t going to be at our hotel until the early hours of the morning, so Yasma did a diversion into a small town to get some food and something to drink.  It was interesting seeing our first Turkmen town – this one had mainly Soviet blocks of flats and most of the residents worked in the oil refineries nearby.  My birthday meal was a spinach pasty and a bottle of Liptons ice tea. To be honest I couldn’t have eaten much more as my stomach was in knots worrying about Lolly.

Darkness had set in by the time we resumed the journey which is when we found out that Yasma didn’t have working dipped beam headlights on his car.  The narrow road was full of big trucks, probably delivering materials for the new road, so they weren’t appreciating Yasma driving with full beam on which meant he had to effectively drive with no headlights when there was oncoming traffic. I just sat in the back with my eyes closed praying for it to be over.  Colin worked hard in the front to make sure Yasma didn’t fall asleep.

We finally reached our hotel just before 2am.  We agreed not to have too early a start for our sightseeing later in the day, as we wanted Yasma to get properly rested.  We didn’t sleep well with the constant nagging feeling we’d not done the right thing, but we realised we needed to get over this or it would tarnish our whole enjoyment of seeing this mysterious little visited country over the next week.  

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/a868c8_4848a40ce97a4c128b0010e0da9d31b1/144p/mp4/file.mp4

Apologies that this all sounds so negative - it was a traumatic day, but I promise things are going to get better...... We also have to give Yasma a huge thank you for all his tireless work and not giving up, when we were beginning to think this wasn't meant to be.