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Traffic in Turkmenistan is a subject in its own right. To a Westerner corn-fed on traffic speed cameras and enforcement of the law, the behaviour of drivers appears anarchic, as does the variety of vehicles on the road. Private cars seem to be divided between luxury saloons, mostly BMWs and Mercedes on the one hand, and dilapidated-looking Lada, Moskvich and Volga models on the other. Occasionally you will see a battered BMW or a new Lada. Fuel is subsidised to the point of being almost free to the user (sixty litres costs one dollar) and even the poorest-looking driver shows no fear of milage or high revs. The most profitable course of action for any young man from Ashgabat is, or was until recently, to make regular visits to Dubai to import cars. My neighbour, one of several acquaintances who has done this, tells me that demand in Ashgabat is now falling as most of the people who want a car now have one: equally, the roads have become snarled and gridlocked very suddenly, over only the last two or three years, this sleepy outpost becoming not only suddenly a capital city but also the eye of a traffic storm.
The chief benefit of this increase in traffic is the ease of getting about as a passenger. Bus services are crowded and unpredictable, but anybody can hitch a ride for an agreed sum – normally 5000 manat, the price of a loaf of bread – to any destination in the city, or beyond for an agreed surcharge. This is very popular. As a result, however, pedestrians tend to line the roadsides and step out into oncoming traffic to try to stop it, and cars frequently screech to a halt without warning or indicating to pick up passengers, swerving into the kerb and stopping with their rears stuck out into the road.
To pass the driving test drivers must pass an exam in parrot-fashion knowledge of the Ruhnama, the president’s book of wisdom. This book delves into the history of the Turkmen people and links the events (sometimes improbably) into a narrative of heroic horse-mounted conquerors and poets. These can be seen in oversized, over-muscled bronze splendour at the Monument of Independence up in the new district of Berzenngi. The horse is revered as one of the gifts of the Turkmen people, horse racing is kept up every weekend at the hippodrome on the edge of the city and there is a general identification with it. This came to my attention while trying to explain the behaviour of drivers on busy dual carriageways and bypasses. They seem to race one another, ignoring any lane markings, jostling to get ahead, at breakneck speed; four or even five abreast across three lanes is common, with no regard for pedestrians or parked vehicles. When traffic lights turn green the air fills with irate horn blasts, compelling the car in front to get a move on, and there is the screech of burning rubber. Often this happens before the lights have begun to change, if somebody in the waiting traffic thinks he knows the sequence. My friend Kostya, a former UN interpreter and genius of many languages, told me that this was the horse-racing in the Turkmen blood, these men scarcely in from the desert. Just as they are unaccustomed to chairs and tables, so they don’t understand the idea of rules on the road. They would never learn to keep to lanes, to give way to anybody or anything, to accept a speed limit. They will skid to a violent stop before a red light, as there are police on most corners and the possibility of a fine, but they then start to creep forward and be practically head-on to the moving flow by the time the lights change again. Assuming the lights are working, all the bulbs are renewed and that they can be seen against the blinding daylight. One or another of these is frequenly awry. And the young Turkmen man, deprived of his horse, must burn his testosterone in the engine of some threadbare Moskvich. He gives way only to the black Mercedes of state fuctionaries, who have, in addition to eingebaute Vorfahrt (‘built-in right of way’, which, as the Germans joke, comes with every Mercedes), the right to glide or burn past any other vehicle, flaunting official green registration plates.
It was thus a while before I felt comfortable cycling in Ashgabat, and comfortable is still not the word. Since I am unable to burn rubber as they do, cars blare their horns at me for holding them up, for moving out to pass a parked car, or for presuming to be there at all. Cyclists are a rare sight in Ashgabat – the population no longer rides (as it did in the Soviet childhoods of my acquaintances here), and those who do are old men and young boys, who ride decrepit machines along the wrong side of the road and occasionally wobble out across several lanes of traffic in a sort of oblivion. Cycling is a sign of poverty; everybody aspires to a car. Sport is accepted, where it is for winning and glory, but the notion of keeping fit as a general way of life is unknown, ‘health’ being measured in terms of visible signs of prosperity, in particular in an expanding waistline.
I have more or less dropped my initial idea of a major ride across Central Asia at the end of my stay here. For one thing, getting visas and overland border crossings in or out of Turkmenistan is apparently a fraught business; then there are the large distances without shelter or water across deserts, on roads that are both narrow and very heavily used. Then there are endless police checkpoints and a deep suspicion of foreigners moving about independently. There is another reason, though, which has more to do with the suitability of the enterprise. I came here more to know the spirit of the place than to set myself up as different from it – yet becoming a long-distance cyclist only seems to increase my strangeness even further. This decision is not yet final – and I have already been able to meet people in villages by riding out to them, something that would otherwise not have happened, the bike attracting people’s attention and starting conversations. But I am trying to get away from the European explorer mentality (laden with equipment and trussed into futuristic clothing) to one of voyaging in a singular space where I am not away from one thing and visiting another but meeting in a certain spirit of knowledge. It remains to be seen how this will happen, but it is a real question at the moment. If I am to travel physically in this country, then what form will this take?
Meanwhile the desire to become fit – and to go on local runs to places of interest – has not gone away and I have ventured on a number of rides of late. One took me to the beautiful deep gorge that runs to Firusi, now Archabil, in the Kopet-Dag foothills and in terms of location, name and atmosphere in Persia rather than Turkmenia. Another took me to the village of Bagyr beside the old Parthian remains of Nisa, where I was mobbed by children in the street, and later by police, both of whom wanted to try out the bike. Growing used to the traffic-light intersections and the habits of drivers when cutting me off to pick up passengers, I now go out regularly for an hour’s exercise before the weather is too hot. The roads’ shiny, silky-smooth surface is deceptive, however, and I have punctures on perhaps one ride in three from broken glass.
For local riding, however, I was rewarded recently by a telephone conversation to an American in Alma-Ata who runs a travel company. He gave me the name of a cyclist in Ashgabat, the great Sergey, and I went to visit him at his place of work: a CD and software business that he set up himself, outside the Russian bazar. I could pick him out from the others the moment I walked in. Swarthy, with big hands and a face accustomed to the outdoors and the most sensational thighs in all the town, and a monotone conversation that linked everything to distance, time and speed. A racing bike was visible in the back of the shop along with a roller training machine. The bike looked frail when I thought of the potholes, the broken glass and the drivers. ‘Mad drivers?’ he queried me, ‘Surely not. You just have to be even more mad yourself. Then you don’t notice.’
He and I went out together the following Sunday to observe a bicycle race on a deserted stretch of road up on the hill behind the Orphans’ Refuge (where orphans are given a home and educated to become civil servants – this an initiative of the president, himself an orphan) and close to the Path of Health. Sergei was impressed with my riding and unilaterally invited me to join the race. Tired by the time we reached the start, I nevertheless participated, but was out of condition and had never raced before and so came last. The local TV channel was out to cover the event, in which a dozen youths on bikes of various types raced together –
students of the Institute of Sport and Physical Culture. For a second time the TV channel asked me to give a speech (and it was not the last time), this time on the joys of cycling, the health benefits, the delights of riding in Turkmenistan and the goodness of the team and the value of sport for international relations.
My cycling is sometimes a source of curiosity to the police. Once or twice young officers have pretended to flag me down, only to burst into helpless laughter as I caught on and laughed back. Once when really made to stop and show my papers, the guard wanted to try the bike out for himself. Often at the checkpoints bikes aren’t questioned. On one occasion Sergei and I went out on what he called a training run. As we swept through the grandiose western gate of the city, already several miles from the edge of the town, I slowed to allow the police to stop us if needed. But this did not happen: instead came six wide grins from beaming young men and a great Salam! – and a better greeting or leg-up on our way there could not have been.
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