Back to Ashgabat Dragoman page in main blog
Although we sit beside it like a seaside town by the sea, the desert seems far away. Nobody of this city would think of going to see it – rather, they would build anything to hide its awful extent, its barrenness and extremes of heat and cold. Yet it beckons somehow, like something underground, as though its hot sand concealed some rare knowledge or treasure. This is likely to be romanticised dreaming, but perhaps that is the currency in which we are dealing.
When two colleagues arrived on a short visit, our official minders gave in and allowed us a few short trips out of Ashgabat to see something of the country. One of these was a weekend away to Mary in order to see ancient Merv and even more ancient Margush. Another was a day trip up the north road from Ashgabat, that leads ultimately to Dashoguz with a turning to Konye-Urgench, once the centre of fabled Khorezm. All strictly off-limits to us, needless to say. Nevertheless, we were able to cover half the distance, ending up in the middle of the Kara-kum desert. Having entrusted ourselves to a tourist agency, we were taken to a tourist stop – a yurt where we were given lunch and allowed to explore the village of Bahardok (or Bohurdak; vowels seem quite moveable). The trip itself had the high-spirited feel of a Young Pioneers outing: a minibus crammed to bursting with excited travellers who talked at the tops of their voices throughout an entire, long day on the road, passed round oranges and sausage and frequently broke into song. Some of these songs were familiar to me; most of them recreated the socialist y0uth spirit of these people’s childhoods. A bubble of social conscience and international friendship, with the confidence and certainty of rightness and a bright future, forgotten in the present, yet remembered here, making its way along a ribbon of tarmac into the Black Sands.
On reaching Bahardok we could alight at last in the Turkmen hinterland, removed from the city. Some sixty practically uninhabited miles from Ashgabat; a long sprawl of a village built on a level stretch of ground once used as an airfield. High rusty water towers and dun-coloured low brick buildings for adminstration and shops. Here and there, fruit trees, vivid green in their first flush of spring, not yet seared or dusty. Fences of wire and concrete, enclosures made of up-ended saxaul branches to form a dense, high fence. These branches were bleached by the sun to a silvery sheen and have fantastical, mesmerising forms. Building a good fence must surely call for a degree of skill similar to that of dry-stone walling. They evoke an earlier time, or no time, being free of manufactured materials and not forced into geometric regularity. And the backdrop to all this – dunes of soft golden-coloured sand. We were led into a compound that included our hosts’ house – probably with big, cool rooms without furniture, in which the family would sit on rugs on the floor. We did not see inside.
Another low building contained a kitchen. We were received in a yurt, of which there are a good number across the country. Yurts are common all over Central Asia and can shelter against both heat and cold; a yurt can be dismantled and moved in a nomadic group, and rebuilt in two or three days.
At last – the sand running through my fingers. So fine… soft… clean… not the coarse sand of a seaside beach but far finer, like dust. Where you cannot ablute with water, so the Islamic tradition, ablute with sand. This sand could surely approach water in that sense of being cleansing. In apparent opposition to water by nature, being dry and parching, solid and in particles, yet it cleans like water and it moves constantly, in a very fluid way. In my hands it runs like silk, and it pours like a viscous fluid, its grains flashing in rapid, almost frictionless motion and then suddenly congealing with intuitive predictability. I imagine that even in the broiling summer a handful of this sand, scooped from below the surface, would feel cool and refreshing.
Looking closely, it is not entirely golden but contains black particles, like pepper mixed with salt. These black particles are the Black Sands – the literal meaning of Karakum. A stiff breeze was blowing and sand swirled about our ankles. Over the ridges of the dunes a golden plume of airborne sand poured, moving the crest steadily ahead of the wind. Left alone, nothing would retain the same configuration for long. The villagers had tried to stabilise the dunes by setting a grid of saxaul branches into them, creating a sort of net, or miniature groynes, to catch the sand and prevent it being carried away. Patches of this strange carpet run along the back of the village, but beyond them the dunes crept, unconstrained. The villagers live below the dunes, where the ground is firm, where they can draw skinfuls of life-giving water from a single well on a long rope. Their houses stand in no particular order, there are no streets, and the rectilinear urban mind is forced to relax.
Behind, the dunes are like a sea in slow motion, as bleak and as beautiful. Like the sea, they are no place for the foolhardy. But they are a world, specific to themselves. This world is inhabited only marginally by man, but its permanent dwellers include poisonous reptiles such as snakes and scorpions. These belong rightly here; any recoiling by humans falls away, as there is a sense of that rightness in this environment. Like the sea, the desert also teaches respect. We were too early in the year to see any snakes; but small lizards moved on the surface, motionless as stone and then darting with improbable speed.
The road on to Darvaza had deteriorated from the grand trunk route out of the capital to a single carriageway. It narrows all the more as the sand encroaches on its edges in drifts and swirls across it in a mirage of dust over black tarmac. Two hours later we came to Erbent, the next settlement, where yurts stood dotted about a sandy expanse, and between them saxaul paddocks, camels standing, tandyr bread ovens and their inhabitants, squatting by the road or in groups or repairing an old motorcycle. There was just a glimpse of this as we drove by, the Russians in our old bus still chattering and singing, and looks of curiosity darted at us from the roadside. It held me rapt, like a dream world.
Postscript, 2026
Beyond Erbent our turning point was Darvaza, notionally the half-way point from south to north across the desert, an administrative boundary and checkpoint. There was no obvious settlement – someone in our group said that it had recently been demolished. Arriving at dusk, the reason for our visit could be seen up a track a mile or so from the road: the red glow of a large fire. The minibus ground its way up the track and duly parked beside it.
It was the Darwaza Gas Crater, so-called since (we are told) this giant crater in the earth, leaking natural gas from Turkmenistan’s ample gas fields, was accidentally set on fire in the 1960s by some engineers, who then couldn’t put it out. A lot of gas has been burnt here since: but we can be relieved that all this gas did not escape to the atmosphere as methane. In the Soviet manner, no spiritual meaning was associated with the fire – whereas in Baku, Azerbaijan, similar natural leakages of gas, which at some point caught fire and became eternal flames, have been associated for millennia with Zoroastrianism, with temples and devotional facilities built around them.
A good couple of hundred metres across, if not more, the crater is dotted with small flames from individual jets of escaping gas. If the heat could be collected, it would make for a furnace. We stand and stare, moving about the rim of the crater, anxious not to get too close, as it becomes completely dark. A safe tourist object, not political and not culturally loaded, a semi-natural feature and quite spectacular, it is a popular destination.
True to the Young Pioneers spirit, we get back into the bus, share our provisions, bread, fruit, instant coffee, pashtet (a very smelly pate) and noisy talk, before setting back on the four-hour drive, on the disappearing tarmac under the breezy sand, the voices dying down as tiredness sets in, halting again at Bahardok to set our hosts down and getting back to Ashgabat around midnight.
Previous Ashgabat Dragoman entry: Precursor of the Arab racehorse
Next Ashgabat Dragoman entry:
Be_flummoxed 