Bananas Don't Travel Well

our paperworkThe next leg of our trip, through Central Asia, began with a night flight over the Caspian Sea to Turkmenistan. We were entering Great-Game country, where it took the Russians over a hundred years to tame the local tribes and khanates—notorious slave traders and nomadic warriors on horseback—as well as home to the legendary Silk Road cities of Merv, Khiva, Bukhara, and Samarkand. In Turkmenistan it was immediately apparent that we'd crossed into Asia proper—noodles are on the menu, and Asian features appear on some, though not all, people's faces.

We landed in Ashgabat close to midnight and were treated to our first taste of Central Asian bureaucracy. First, we waited in line for 45 minutes while about 20 people were processed ahead of us. When our turn came, we walked up to the window where a man took our passports and letter of invitation and gave us papers to fill out. We took them to another window where we got an invoice, which we took to a third to pay our visa fee, plus a couple of additional paperwork fees. We then went back to the second desk, surrendered our receipt, got another piece of paper that we gave to the first man, who pasted the the visa stickers in our passports and gave them back. At each step, we had to wait in line. All this accomplished, we then had to pass immigration, where the bored officials stamped our passports, pick up our bags (declining the insistant offer to have them wheeled for us), and pass customs, where to our relief more bored officers waved us through without a search. At the end of it all, we were in possession of several pieces of paper that we had to keep with us throughout our stay in Turkmenistan.

Ashgabat skylineFinally clear, we walked out and found our tour operator, Merdan, waiting for us. We'd been in email contact and already knew he'd lived in both San Francisco and Toronto before, so we immediately had something in common. The drive into Ashgabat was surreal: at night, the city's cartoonish new buildings are lit up with neon, looking for all the world like Las Vegas. The cheap hotel we'd requested turned out to be booked, so they billed us in a three-star government-run joint (the Nebitchi, Russian for oil explorer) for no extra charge. Aside from the broken plumbing that flooded the bathroom every time we took a shower, and the waitress that doubled our restaurant bill claiming the menu listed "old" prices, it was actually a pretty swish joint, with mirrored tiles in the lobby, a spiffly-painted nodding donkey in the front yard, and a large room with TV and fridge.

Due to the paranoid immigration policies of the Turkmen government, we had to sign on to a guided tour for the entire length of our stay—not how we normally travel, but we decided to take the plunge as we'd probably never be there again. In the end, it wasn't a bad deal—for about $160 a day we had a personal tour (just the two of us) with a knowledgeable English-speaking guide, an air-conditioned car and driver, and virtually all of our expenses covered. We covered a lot more ground than we normally would on our own, and having someone else take care of everything made it feel like a real vacation. Although our interactions with locals were limited (one might say shielded), it was made up for by having a guide to answer our questions and explain what we were seeing.

After a few hours sleep, we were met by the first of two tour guides that would show us around Turkmenistan. His name was Bahtiyer, a young man from Turkmenabat who'd gone to university in Turkish Cypress. (Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan and Turkey share very similar languages and cultures, the Ottomans having originated as the Seljuks from Central Asia, passing through Azerbaijan on the way, and there are strong ties between the three countries.)

Old NisaBahtiyer took us on a tour of Ashgabat. We started at Old Nissa, the very ruined site of an ancient Parthian city outside town, from where we got a feel for the surrounding area—the mountains to the south that border Iran, the endless desert plain to the north, the four million fledgling trees ordered planted (and watered daily) by Turkmenbashy, the first president of post-independence Turkmenistan, and the 25- and 8-kilometer concrete "healthy roads" that snake around the region, which government employees and students are forced to walk annually while Turkmenbashy would fly out in his helicopter to congratulate them at the finish. In the distance, the massive "mosque of Turkmenbashy's soul" was visible, sticking up out of the desert.

Our next stop was at the National Museum, a grand marble building flanked by pegasus bronzes, where we had a guided tour. The first half of the tour was an indoctrination session highlighting the accomplishments of Turkmenbashy and the Turkmen people. The displays included the locations on the world map of all the libraries that stock Turkmenbashy's book, the Ruhmana, athletic competition awards won by Turkmens, and gifts received from various diplomats by Turkmenbashy. Upstairs was a good display of Turkmen crafts and traditions, including their beautiful carpets, silver jewelry and embroidered clothing, and an exhibit of overstuffed local fauna, the highlights being a smiling cheetah, a four-legged eagle, and a baby seal well on its way to disintegration. The humour in this (if not the Turkmen-accomplishments part of the tour) was not lost on our guide.

After lunch, we toured the city's many monuments, the vision of former President Sapurmat Niazov, who I've already alluded to as "Turkmenbashy," which means "great leader of the Turkmens". A former mucky-muck in the Communist Party, he became the first Turkmen president when the country became independent in 1991. Born in Ashgabat, his father was killed in World War II, and he was orphaned when his mother died in the terrible earthquake of 1948 that demolished the city. (At the time, the Soviets covered up the extent of the damage and incredible loss of life.) These beginnings, coupled with a paranoid grip on power, led to the development of a bizarre personality cult to rival North Korea's Kim Il-Sung. Though he died last December, his legacy is still fresh, and nowhere is it more obvious than Ashgabat.

turkmenbashy and forty legsPrior to independence, Ashgabat was a Soviet creation, rebuilt after the earthquake. Turkmenbashy took on the task of building an entirely new city, razing some areas of town and extending the city southwards, putting into place a bizarre vision. The new city is almost entirely constructed of white marble, which gleams painfully in the desert sun. Wide, virtually traffic-less streets are flanked by tall, pillared, marble apartment buildings and hotels placed at 300-metre intervals and lit with neon at night. Government ministries are housed in symbolically conceived skyscrapers: the Ministry of the Press building is a giant book; the Ministry of Health is a cobra's head (from the snake-wound-around-stick medical symbol, obviously!); and the Oil and Gas Ministry is designed to look like a giant Zippo lighter. In the middle of town is an amusement park, nicknamed "Disneyland", and several vast squares with grand buildings, fountains, and immaculate landscaping. Several monuments act as centerpieces. The Arch of Neutrality, nicknamed "three legs" for its three structural supports, looks like a spaceship and is topped with a golden statue of Turkmenbashy that rotates with the sun. There is also "five legs", complete with a rotating restaurant, built to commemorate five years of Independence, and "eight legs" to commemorate eight years of Independence. "Forty legs" is actually ten horses (with, of course, four legs apiece) built to commemorate, you guessed it, ten years of Independence. eight legs east view

architect modelWe took the elevator up "three legs" for a view over Turkmenbashi's creation. It struck us as a real-life artist's conception: the monuments, squares, and landscaping were all laid out in architectural perfection, with only a few token people walking around. Next to "three legs" is the Earthquake memorial, a sculpture of a large bull shaking the Earth in its horns, on which a dying woman holds up a golden child—the future Turkmenbashy. His image is everywhere, almost always cast in gold. We also visited the "mosque of Turkmenbashy's soul", the largest mosque in Central Asia, attached to Turkmenbashy's grand mausoleum and set in the desert outside Ashgabat near the town where he was born. Despite its newness and apparent lack of any worshippers, the mosque was actually quite a beautiful, if ostentatious, creation.

On a more antiquarian note, we visited Ashgabat's Carpet Museum, which houses an impressive collection of Turkmen carpets, including the world's largest. The museum houses a small carpet-weaving workshop, where you can see how they are made. This is one of several initiatives to revive cultural traditions in the wake of Sovietization, including a revived breeding program for the country's famed Ahal Tekke horses, the stock from which Arabians were bred—the story goes that Arab traders would ride to Turkmenistan on camels and return by horse. Turkmenbashy also established several culturally-themed national holidays. Who could resist a day off to celebrate Melon Day, Bread Day, Horse Day, or Carpet Day, not to mention Good-Neighbourliness Day, Drop of Water is a Grain of Gold Day, or the Holiday of the Poetry of Magtymguly?

projectile-vomiting five-headed eaglePart of the reason that Ashgabat is so bizarre is that despite the great post-independence building boom, no-one has been allowed to move to the city from other parts of the country, leaving its population fairly sparse. The new president shows some signs of easing Turkmenbashy's policies—public education has been extended from nine to ten years, the Internet is starting to be available in the capital, and people are no longer stopped and searched at the numerous police checkpoints—but it remains to be seen whether any real improvement to people's lives is forthcoming. Despite the obvious controls on people's movements and rights, and widespread poverty, the government does provide certain benefits that perhaps passify its citizens: water and natural gas are free (and unmetered), and gasoline costs all of 0.05 cents per litre. Virtually free energy may be feasible in an oil- and gas-rich country, but we doubt the wisdom of providing free water in a desert nation dependent on canals which (along with Uzbekistan) are notorious for draining the Aral Sea.

As tourists, Ashgabat really appealed to our sense of the absurd. Although our guide was willing to answer all our questions, we didn't detect any sense of irony in him. Asked what people think of the new Ashgabat, he said, "many older people wish that things had remained the way they were. But we young people like it—there is more opportunity now". We couldn't get any more criticism than that out of him. Maybe this was for fear of being overheard, but we really got the feeling he'd truly swallowed the vision.