Camping Beside Turkmenistan’s Door to Hell

I’ve long been fascinated by hermetic regimes. In an era where you can carry the Internet in your pocket, it’s hard to imagine a country where people worship the president.

I wouldn’t have known about Turkmenistan were it not for my Soviet obsession. Most Americans I talk to haven’t, or know it only vaguely, or, I sometimes suspect, think they recognize the name because it sounds a country that would exist, given that others have names that start with Turk- or end with -stan.

The collapse of the Soviet Union brought greater freedoms to most of the nations that emerged from it. Turkmenistan was one of the exceptions. Today, it’s a closed, isolated country, with a government that controls all access to information and fosters a cult of personality.

I wanted to see what life looked like under an oppressive regime. I also wanted to see a crater that was on fire.

In the 1971, Soviet engineers were surveying for oil in the Karakum desert of Turkmenistan. It wasn’t easy work. Temperatures could fluctuate wildly, soaring above 90°F at midday and then dropping below freezing at night. With the exception of a small nearby village, the surrounding area was empty, with nothing but sand stretching out in every direction.

The desert had once been home to bands of nomadic Turkmen tribes renowned and feared for their ferocity in battle. Hardened by desert living and centuries of conflict with neighboring empires, the Turkmens were widely regarded as the wildest, most savage Central Asians, among the last to be subdued by the Russian Empire.

Now, the tsar’s socialist successors believed they’d found oil in the desert they’d once conquered. A rig and base camp had been installed to investigate the sand that earlier surveys suggested was covering a massive oil field.

The engineers soon realized that the site contained natural gas, not oil, and that they’d set up shop on top of a pocket of gas. Not long after, the earth underneath it suddenly collapsed, the desert opening its mouth to swallow the rig and some of their worksite. Miraculously, no one was hurt. But the newly-formed crater was now leaking gas whose fumes quickly spread out across the empty space.

Fearing that the leak could pollute the nearby settlement, the engineers decided to light a fire to burn it off, standard practice on gas fields. They figured all the gas would burn off within a few days, a few weeks, at most.

What they started wasn’t so much a fire as a conflagration. Flames shot up into the hair, 10, 20, maybe 30 feet above the crater. You couldn’t go anywhere near it. It was still burning first weeks, then months, and finally years later.

It’s still burning today, more than 40 years later.

Today, it’s known as the Darvaza Crater, or, if you’re feeling dramatic, the Door to Hell. People come from all over the world to see it: from Japan, from America, from Japan, from Russia, from Japan, from Germany, from Japan. They say the best way to see the crater is to spend the night camping beside it. I wanted to see it. But there was no way, I told myself, that I was camping.

Since the carter started burning, much has changed in Turkmenistan.

In 1991, the Soviet Union dissolved, granting Turkmenistan independence. As in other post-Soviet states, a former high-ranking party official was elected president of the newly independent Turkmenistan. His name was Saparmurat Niyazov, and he quickly realized he had few potential rivals. The 70-year reign of the Soviet Union meant that few people outside of the Communist Party had any real government experience, and you didn’t get to be a high-ranking party member by challenging the men at the top.

Within a decade, Niyazov had amended the constitution to declare himself president for life. He started going by Turkmenbashi, which translated to something like “father of all Turkmen people.” Children studied his bizarre book of autobiography-cum-philosophical-musings in school. His portrait hung in and on the outside of all buildings, and he erected gold statues of himself all over the country. Foreign journalists enumerate his eccentricities: he renamed months and days of the weeks for members of his own family, he made newscasters swear an oath of loyalty before “reporting” the government-scripted evening news.

This news, of course, spoke little of the outside world, and when it did, it was all in service of legitimizing Niyazov’s regime, with little regard to whether or not it was true. Niyazov turned his borders into a heretic seal, cutting his country off from the rest of the world.

The difference between Niyazov’s Turkmenistan and the Kims’ North Korea or the Castros’ Cuba was that Turkmenistan had natural resources. The country’s vast reserves of oil and gas meant that famine and extreme poverty didn’t plague Niyazov’s rule, nor have they that of his successor, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow, a slightly more moderate dictator.

Berdimuhamedow, who began his career as a dentist, got rid of some of Niyazov’s more extreme measures, like the oath of loyalty and the Niyazov-family-themed calendar names. But he still hangs his portrait on the facade of airports and bus stations, and his administration continues to purge political opponents and top the lists of worst human rights records.

I wanted to see what this looked like. I wanted to know if people saw through the propaganda, to learn how it felt to be monitored by faceless autocrats. I wanted this, not because I craved a taste of totalitarianism before skipping back into the free world, but because I thought it would help me understand something that seemed inconceivable. How do people let their freedoms be pried from their fingers, and why aren’t they out on the streets, trying to take it back?

There are two ways to get to Turkmenistan. You can book a tour with a state-licensed operator, which comes with a state-licensed guide-slash-chaperone, or you can apply for a 5-day transit visa. I opted for the latter for many reasons, the most important being that I wanted to see the “real” Turkmenistan. I didn’t want a guide following me around, spouting government rhetoric and making sure I didn’t see anything I wasn’t supposed to. I wanted to have real conversations with real people unafraid to tell me what they really thought.

But not booking a guide meant I was on my own for getting to the fiery crater in the middle of the desert, and finding a ride was turning out to be harder than I’d expected.

I’d spent the past week sending dozens of emails to every Turkmen tourist agency with a website, but it was the end of the tourist season, and everyone was either shuttered for the winter or exorbitantly expensive.

A mile-wide strip of no-man’s-land runs along the Uzbek-Turkmen border, and a man with a minivan is driving me and a few Turkmenistanis to the Turkmen side. When he hears I don’t have a way to get to the crater, he brightens and tells me he knows someone. He pulls out his phone and starts texting, which seems less dangerous than it sounds, given that the only other living creatures on this no-man’s-land appear to be cacti, and none of them are driving.

My first glimpse of Turkmenistan is a border outpost whose facade is adorned with a giant portrait of the president. He’s flashes us a welcoming, benevolent smile.

When you hear that a country hangs pictures of the president from the top of its buildings, you don’t quiet get a sense of how sinister it seems in real life. After all, celebrities wink at us from the top of Times Square, imploring us to buy watches and carbonated beverages. We resent this blatant commercialization, but let me tell you: it’s much creepier when it’s a politician. You feel like he’s watching you, keeping tabs on what you’re up to. More than anything, you realize that someone who can put his face on the side of a government building probably has few things he can’t do.

Inside, I pull up my visa email from the Turkmen ambassador.

“Did you print it?” the guards ask. “You were supposed to print it.”

My face falls. “Errr….” I stare at the three young young men in olive military uniforms. The could easily refuse to let me into the country, which would not be ideal, because I don’t have a visa to go back to Uzbekistan, either. I’ll be like Tom Hanks in Terminal, except, rather than being stuck in a fancy airport, I’ll be stuck in a sandy and possibly land-mine-ridden no-man’s land, and I’ll have to befriend that guy in the minivan and see if he’d be cool with me squatting in the trunk?

“No problem,” they shrug. “We can print it.”

This helpfulness so catches me off-guard that it emboldens me, and I ask them if I can call Ulugbek, the minivan driver’s friend, to negotiate a ride to the crater. Sure, they say, no problem, don’t let him charge you more than X. I think about the woman at JFK who patrols the immigration line yelling, “No cellphones!” as I call the guide in a language the border guards don’t understand.

Turkmenistan was supposed to be one of the least free places on earth. But its border feels only slightly less relaxing than a guided meditation session.

Until a guard hears me tell Ulugbek the name of an ancient town that’s not on my handwritten itinerary.

“You can’t go there,” he cuts in, sharply.

After the visa is printed in my passport, another guard hand-searches my luggage.

“Do you have carpets?” he asks.

I shake my head. “No.”

He frowns and carefully opens every pocket and pouch, as though I might be hiding a carpet in my makeup case. When he finds none, he asks me again. “No carpets?”

I’m confused. “No carpets,” I repeat.

“In Uzbekistan, you buy carpets?”

“I have no carpets,” I insist. I’m kind of afraid he’ll continue interrogating me until I admit to having carpets I don’t own. But he shrugs and lets me go. I gather my belongings, and I walk out the door, headed towards Turkmenistan.

In pictures, the crater looks like a portal to a terrifying dimension, or an artist’s rendering of the Rapture, or an underfunded metal band’s debut album cover. It’s strange to see the earth burning without any visible fuel source. It’s like the moral to an environmental disaster movie, the earth standing up for itself and extracting revenge for all those times we left the A/C running when we ran to the grocery story.

This would seem at odds with my intense desire to spend the night not camping beside it. I’ve always suspected that I’m not an outdoorsy person, and my recent experiences with horse treks and yurt stays and outhouses have only confirmed this.

Still, I’d found myself telling Ulugbek that I wanted to rent a tent and sleeping bag, and spend the night snoring beside a potentially haunted crater.

Ulugbek is waiting for me at the gate. He’s tall and friendly, and though the man in the minivan had bragged that Ulugbek spoke excellent English, it quickly becomes clear that he does not.

“You? Smoking?” he asks me, pantomiming taking a drag of a cigarette.

I shake my head. “Good,” he says. “In city, smoke, NO!!!!” (The president, in an effort to kick his cigarette habit once and for all, has outlawed smoking in all urban areas.)

This becomes a common sentence pattern.

“Here, kielbasa, OK. There, kielbasa, NO!!!” “Here, president, [indecipherable hand gestures].” “Turkmenistan, gas, goooood!”

I respond to all of these statements with a knowing, “Ohhhh!”

Ulugbek pulls over to get gas.

“America, gas, free?” he asks.

“Free??” I say.

Gas used to be free in Turkmenistan he tells me. Under the new president, it now costs a 30 cents a liter.

Turkmenistan has one of the world’s largest reserves of natural gas and decent deposits of oil, which gives the country better economic prospects than other post-Soviet states. But many argue that central planning and bizarre subsidies, like free gasoline, have prevented Turkmenistan from reaching its full economic potential. The average monthly salary in 2012, the most recent year for which data is available, was around US$330.

“How did you know the man who gave me your number?” I ask Ulugbek as he fills his tank.

He grins. “He is my brother.”

Ulugbek is bringing his girlfriend with us to the crater so that I’ll feel more comfortable.

“Two girls, OK!” he announces.

His girlfriend is a young, pretty blonde named Jirnelle. We pick her up at her mother’s house, where she lives with her two young children. At 25, she’s 14 years younger than Ulugbek. Her face is scrubbed clean, and she wears a t-shirt and a tracksuit.

She joins Ulugbek in the front, and they begin talking and laughing in a mix of Uzbek and Russian. Glad as I am to have her here, I quickly start to feel like a third wheel.

I try to feel out Ulugbek and Jirnelle, to see how much they know about the outside world, to suss out how they really feel about their country and the government that isolates it. I imagine that, when I’m not around, it’s all they talk about.

They offer more promise of worldliness than most. Ulugbek was born in the Soviet Union, not Turkmenistan, and, as an Uzbek, he’s an ethnic minority. Plus, the fact that he works as a guide puts him in regular contact with foreigners. Jirnelle is half-Uzbek, half-Turkmen. She studied in Moscow for 5 years, a biographical detail that I can’t square with the fact of her school-aged children, who are not Ulugbek’s.

“In America, do you have the sandwich shop Subway?” she asks, dreamily. When I tell her we do, she replies, modestly, that she used to work at Subway in Moscow, a chain I will soon learn is an almost replica of the American version, but with draft beer.

When we stop for lunch at a roadside cafe, I watch for my chance to steer the discussion towards politics.

Over dumplings and soup, Jirnelle asks me if I’ve noticed the power outages in Turkmenistan. I’ve only been in the country a few hours, so I haven’t, but she assures me they’re a regular occurrence.

“Do you know why?” Ulugbek asks.

I’m guessing inadequate infrastructure or political issues, but I don’t know how to say either of those things, so I just shake my head.

Ulugbek leans in and confides that Uzbekistan is stealing Turkmenistan’s electricity.

“And also petrol,” Jirnelle adds.

I’m trying to imagine what this would look like — soldiers creeping over the border at night and making off with oil drums? Secret wires running under the no-man’s-land that funnel Turkmenistan’s hard-earned electricity into Khiva?

Ulugbek is referring to Uzbekistan’s 2009 exit from the power grid that all 5 Central Asian Soviet republics fed into and drew out of, a move said to have caused shortages in the other four nations, particularly Tajikistan. How Uzbekistan would steal oil is less clear. The source of this, as it would be for all information outside the realm of their personal lives, is the state-run media.

Any misconceptions I had about Ulugbek and Jirnelle’s familiarity with the world fall away as lunch progresses. Ulugbek doesn’t understand why it’s hard for French, German, and Japanese tourists to speak English, because these people speak English in their home countries, no?

“I don’t think so,” I say.

But their languages are similar to English, right?

No, I say. Very no for Japan.

He shakes his head. “Japan tourists, speak English: NO!!!”

Jirnelle’s English is a tiny bit better than Ulugbek’s, and she asks me about my trip. I list the places I’ve been, but I get blank stares in return.

“Bishkek?” I say with disbelief. “It’s in Kyrgyzstan?”

She blushes. “Sorry,” she says. “I don’t know.”

I try to play this down like it’s no big deal, but it’s stunning. It’s a New Yorker never having heard of Iowa.

Ulugbek’s favorite phrase is “No problem.” He uses it to punctuate each sentence.

After I finish my meal: “Finished? No problem?”

When the check comes: “10 manat. No problem!”

When it’s time to leave: “We, go, no problem.”

It’s hard to miss Turkmenistan’s being 80 percent desert. Outside of the cities, that’s all there is.

We speed towards the ancient ruins the border guard had told me I wasn’t allowed to visit. I’ve decided not to share this information with Ulugbek.

If I had to describe Ulugbek’s driving style in a word, it would be: reckless. He tails ambulances and then cuts in front of them. He puts on his seatbelt as we approach checkpoints and takes it off once we’re past. He avoids traffic by getting off the road and driving around it.

Just before sunset, we Konye-Urgench, the site of Turkmenistan’s most spectacular Silk Road ruins. Compared to Uzbekistan’s, they feel almost untouched. It’s not that they haven’t been restored, although a gaping hole in one roof suggests that the work has been more modest, it’s more that there’s no one there. Besides a group of women praying for fertility at one mosque, we have everything to ourselves.

Or, I should say, I have everything else to myself, because when we pull up to each ruin, Ulugbek walks me to the entrance, attempts to impart some basic facts, and then gets back in the car with Jirnelle. As I duck inside a mausoleum that I’m not sure I was supposed to enter, I worry that I’m holding Ulugbek and Jirnelle up? And then I remember that they’re here for me? Some combination of their outnumbering me and my being, for all intents and purposes, mute, has made me feel like an awkward third wheel everyone’s hoping will disappear.

Our last stop is a minaret that’s so tall and thin I can’t imagine why people 800 years ago needed to build it.

Ulugbek tells me that Turkmenistan has the second-tallest minaret in the world after India. “Bukhara, Khiva, no!” he shouts.

“Huh,” I reply.

“OK, I wait you!” Ulugbek calls, already bounding back to the car.

We head out into the desert to find the crater, and I’m still wondering how much I can ask Ulugbek and Jirnelle about politics. Have they spent enough time outside of Turkmenistan to be skeptical of what’s reported on state-run media? Are they critical of Berdimuhamedow? Are they worried that I might be a spy? Waiting for me to bring it up?

And if they are opposed to the president and his oppressive regime, how are they just… sitting there? Why do they go about their lives like normal people, instead of rioting in the streets?

We pass a herd of unaccompanied camels, nonchalantly ambling down the road, as though being a herd of unaccompanied camels roaming freely through the desert is a totally normal thing.

One of the camels has a leash and a bell tied around its neck. “Does anyone own them?” I ask, confused, because there’s no one around.

Ulugbek and Jirnelle are adamant: no one owns them.

I try to picture how a herd of camels could have come to escort itself down a highway. I decide that the animals are owned by a camel herder who sent them on a journey after selecting the one with the leash as lead camel. “You’re in charge now,” he’d whispered before releasing them.

We cross a rickety, Soviet-era bridge spanning a roaring river, which is also confusing, because isn’t the whole point of a desert that it doesn’t have rivers? Ulugbek wants me to check out either the bridge, or the river, so he stops the car and we get out. He points to a new bridge being built beside the rickety Soviet bridge. “This bridge is being built by Turkey,” he tells me.

Then we all get back in the car.

“Did you know that, every Sunday, the president rides a horse around the hippodrome?” Ulugbek asks me.

My ears perk up. “Wow,” I reply, cautiously. “How… funny.”

He either ignores my bait, or I used the wrong word. “This Sunday, he did not,” he continues. “He was busy.”

The fact that Ulugbek works as a guide, I realize, means that if I’d booked an official tour, it wouldn’t have come with a minder. Ulugbek may not be particularly fluent in English or interested in the details of history, but he’s also not trying to keep me from seeing anything. When we pass billboard-sized portraits of the presidents hanging on the wall of public buildings, he slows down so I can illegally photograph them.

I’ll come to regret my decision to DIY it through Turkmenistan later that evening, but for now, we’re driving along a desert highway, surrounded by darkness. It’s the kind of darkness that reminds you that there’s nothing, and no one out there. A red glow appears in the distance, the crater announcing itself from miles away.

The glow grows as we approach, a red orb of light trapped in the thick air hanging above the fire. It’s unexpectedly creepy, menacing even, kind of in the way I expected the whole country to feel.

Up close, it’s even stranger than in pictures. Flames jump and skitter across the crater’s rocky bowl. It doesn’t seem real, this fire raging, but nothing burning. Your eyes scan the edges, looking for the trick. It’s hard to wrap your head around it. You think: rocks cannot catch fire. But that’s exactly what you’re seeing.

As far as tourists pull-offs go, it’s not bad. It’s borderline incredible. I’m momentarily overwhelmed with gratitude, that I found Ulugbek, that he brought me here, that I got to see it.

And then the novelty wears off. A burning crater is spectacular for approximately fifteen minutes, after which you realize there’s not much to see or do or think about. I don’t need to see it at sunrise. I’m very much wishing I’d arranged to have Ulugbek drive me to the closest town and then found my own way to Ashgabat in the morning, but he’s already dragged Jirnelle all the way out here, and it feels a little late to back out.

Did you know that as soon as the sun goes down, a desert becomes extremely cold? I did not. I pictured deserts as places where people died of heat stroke, not places where you could potentially contract frostbite, which is what I fear has sucked all the feeling out of my toes.

I’m curled up in a ball and burrowed deep inside my sleeping bag. I’m wearing two layers of long underwear, wool socks, a down jacket, and a hat. I’ve never been so cold in my life. Ulugbek has given me a tent and a sleeping bag, but no sleeping pad to stop the cold from seeping up through my tent. I shift my weight, stamp my feet, and try to wiggle my toes. Nothing.

My heart sinks with the realization that I have, in fact, contracted frostbite. I curse myself for falling for the camp-beside-the-crater trap. Tomorrow morning, Ulugbek will drive me to a hospital in Ashgabat, where they’ll amputate my toes, or maybe, if I’m really unlucky, my whole foot. I start to cry.

Ulugbek and Jirnelle are not as cold as I am, because they’re sleeping in the car beside me. With the engine running. Ruefully, I imagine them snuggled into blankets, lost in tranquil dreams while several of my appendages wither and die.

Eventually, I fall asleep, but I toss and turn all night, the cold waking me up on the hour. Finally, just after sunrise, I give up. I get out of my tent and go sit beside the crater, which has the benefit of giving off heat, because it’s on fire.

In the early-morning light, the flames look far less dramatic. They seems smaller, less menacing. I can see the rusting carcass of the rig that fell into the crater. The heat shimmers above its twisted limbs.

It dawns on me that I could have gotten up and slept in the car with Ulugbek and Jirnelle and wonder why I didn’t. My head throbs with lack of sleep.

The only other people at the crater are a group of Japanese tourists with tripods and long lenses. When I pass them, they nod.

“Welcome to Japan,” one says, in English.

I suspect that this is not what he meant to say, so I smile back at him. “Welcome to Japan,” I reply.

When I come back to camp, Ulugbek and Jirnelle have set up for breakfast. Instead of spreading a blanket over the sand, they’ve rolled out an oriental rug.

“It was cold last night,” Ulugbek announces.

I glare at him. “I know.”

Ulugbek slices a sausage on top of an unfolded newspaper. When I look closer, I see that the front page has a very obviously Photoshopped picture of the president planting a Christmas tree. His shovel looks like it’s made of marble. Ulugbek laughs when he seems me studying it.

“Can I take a picture?” I ask.

He nods, but tells me not to get his hand in the photo, which strikes me as strange, because how would anyone know that it was his hand?

Ulugbek wants to wash his car before we leave, so I wander off back towards the crater. A camel lingers wearily behind a sand dune, and I step towards it for a picture. The camel stares at me, then suddenly turns and gallops off. I didn’t know camels could gallop. I turn and see Ulugbek, who has seen the counter, beside himself with laughter.

It feels like the first exchange we’ve had where we both understood everything this, or because I’ve had a lot of time to myself beside an only slightly more exciting than usual crater, I realize that Ulugbek and Jirnelle’s reluctance to talk politics might have nothing to do with what they know of the world outside their border, but rather, an intense familiarity with the one inside it. Maybe it’s not that they don’t want to discuss these things with me, but that they’ve gotten out of the habit of discussing them with anyone.

When I get back to the car, Ulugbek is wiping his car down with a rag and bottled water. His phone is tucked between one ear and shoulder.

“My brother,” he grins, gesturing the phone. He tells me his brother says hi. “He, you: ‘hello.’”