How to Get Out of Turkmenistan When You’re Out of Cash
If you should ever find yourself, as I recently did, in Turkmenistan and out of cash, on the run from a restaurant in which you dined and dashed, and in desperate need of a $60 ride to the border on the day your visa expires, do not fret. Your situation is not good, but it’s not hopeless. You can make it to Kazakhstan, but you must maintain faith, commit to courage, and above all, don’t tell anyone.
First, some backstory: Turkmenistan is perhaps the strangest country to emerge from the collapse of the Soviet Union. It’s a police state sealed off from the rest of the world and ruled by an eccentric dictator who poses for billboards with a dove perched on his shoulder.
I’ve spent five days in Turkmenistan. In that time, I’ve slept beside a burning crater, inadvertently stayed in a hotel run by the Soviet-era secret police, escaped an attempted abduction, and used the Internet three times. I also ran out of cash, discovered none of my bank cards worked in the country, and, last night, I skipped out on a check for the first time in my life. In short, I am ready to leave.
My visa requires that I exit Turkmenistan into Kazakhstan via a border crossing on the Caspian Sea. This is extremely inconvenient, because the border is not located on a road. To get there, I have to hire a Jeep to drive me across the desert.
The shared Jeeps congregate beside the railway station, where, the day before, I’d arranged to share a ride, negotiated a price, and neglected to mention I had no way of paying. My plan is to remain very silent.
Our driver is a young Turkmen man with a wife and small children at home; my companions: three older, weathered Kazakh men. It’s very unclear why anyone besides me is making this trip. There’s vague mention of family: one of the Kazakh men seems to be the Turkmen driver’s uncle, and it seems families are scattered on both sides of a border that was once more like a state line.
Two of the Kazakh men are short, round, and difficult to tell apart, but one is easily distinguishable. He’s tall and thin and has dressed for the ride in a worn suit and withered cowboy hat.
His two stout friends smile convivially; the Kazakh cowboy shoots me a pointed question: “Do you have a husband and children?” he asks.
I tell him I don’t.
“I am not married,” he declares. His tone is less flirtatious, more wedding guest about to request “Single Ladies.”
I smile and say nothing, reminding myself that I have no way of paying for this ride, and therefore no right to complain.
Here are some sights we pass on our way to the border. Burning smokestacks. Empty oil containers sitting in front yards. Mountains, heavy machinery.
Turkmenistan’s northwest corner border is dominated by heavy industry; specifically, one heavy industry: oil. It scars and chews up the landscape, which is really saying something, because the landscape is mostly barren desert. We pass burning smokestacks, empty oil containers sitting on front
The ride is so bumpy we put on our seatbelts, which had previously only seemed to function as a form of interior decor. Tires have cut paths in the sand beside what appears to have once been a functioning highway; several times, 18-wheelers barrel down it towards us.
The men chat in local languages and I stare out the window, wondering how I will pay the driver and contemplating my other options. Now that I’ve skipped out on one check, I am an accomplished, if guilt-ridden, criminal. Perhaps I am now living a life of crime. Maybe from this day forward, I won’t be able to resist the urge to hop turnstiles, commit fraud, and jaywalk.
The problem is that rides to the border normally end at the border. The driver drops you off at an ominous-looking gate, and then you walk through the space in which one country ends and another begins. At the end, you reach another gate, and negotiate another ride onwards to your final destination. I know I can get money out of an ATM in Kazakhstan, but our driver will be long gone.
It’s safe to assume that no one will be happy when I announce that I am out of money. It’s equally safe to assume that the driver does not accept Venmo. I’m considering asking one of the Kazakh non-cowboys to spot me until we hit the first ATM in Kazakhstan. I’ve been furtively looking up Russian words I haven’t needed yet in my dictionary: borrow, pay back, also ran out on a check in Turkmenbashi and don’t really need you to do anything about that, just wanted to get it off my chest.
Just before the border, we pull off at a cairn, where my companions step out to pray. I realize this must be a holy site.
Many rides I’ve taken in Central Asia have included a stop-off at a holy site whose historical origins seem murky. Everyone, it seems has a spot where the prophet Mohammed’s daughter or son-in-law visited or was buried or was once buried and then his grave was moved. But the ritual is always the same: the devout run their hands over their faces as reflexively as Americans offer benedictions after sneezes.
I came to Central Asia a month ago knowing little about it, except that it had once been part of the Soviet Union. Since then, I’ve wandered through countries I’d previously barely heard of, trying to both mask my ignorance and rid myself of it.
Travel is often espoused as a way of understanding the world and the people in it, and I think this is wrong because I don’t understand much of any of this: which parts of this ritual belong to what religion, many of the words these men speak to me, the landscape, the desert, the Kazakh cowboy. Maybe I’m supposed to understand that these are people, just like you and me!, but if I did not understand that before, how would a 6-hour drive through the desert change that? But maybe for the rest of my life, when I hear the word “Turkmenistan,” I will remember this picture and the word and the place will mean something to me that places I haven’t been will not, or maybe my face will flush with anger when I remember the men whose car I jumped out of on the side of a highway, or maybe I’ll feel a pang of guilt about running away from an unpaid check, or maybe all of these things will happen at once in a flash and then I’ll be back to worrying about money and what I have to eat in the house and whether I should stop to get snacks.
There’s a long line of a long-haul trucks at the border, and our Jeep slips in behind them and then we turn off the engine. This is nice, because I now have extra time to fret about our impending farewell from the driver, who will likely ask me for the money for this trip, which I do not have.
One of the non-Kazakh-cowboys is nudging me, pointing to the truck beside me. “It’s from Belarus!” he marvels.
I look at the license plates, and he’s right. For a moment, I assume he is marveling for the same reason I am: because Belarus is Europe’s last dictatorship, because what a strange place it must be!, because what must it be like to be from a place with so little freedom and such systemic corruption and ineptitude weighing down on you, and then I realize that Turkmenistan is no different, and then I realize that he’s marveling, not because Belarus is a strange place, but because it’s so far from where we are now.
We crawl towards a border outpost more desolate than any other I’ve seen, which is saying something, because I crossed from Tajikistan into Kyrgyzstan in mountains surrounded by no-man’s-land. But the isolation here is even more apparent, because the land is flat, and you can see for miles in every direction and all you can see is sand, and a sad-looking outhouse that I regret to admit I patronize.
While I’m patronizing the outhouse, it briefly occurs to me that I could avoid this whole no-cash-to-pay-for-the-ride mess by just not returning from the outhouse, waiting until the Kazakh cowboy has crossed and the Jeep has headed back to Turkmenbashi, but then I remember that they have my luggage, and, besides, I don’t think I want to be the type of person who travels the world leaving debts unpaid.
I return to the Jeep as the traffic lets up, and suddenly we are all getting out of the car with our luggage to walk through the border checkpoint while our driver stays with the car.
The Kazakh cowboy insists on carrying my suitcase into the border outpost.
“He’s going to Kazakhstan?” I ask nervously, re: the driver.
The Kazakh cowboy says yes in a way that makes me think he would have said yes even if my question had been, “Can you fly?” or “Do women deserve equal pay for equal work?”
Inside, things are casual. There’s no line demarcating where Turkmenistan ends and Kazakhstan begins, but there is a queue (which is largely ignored) and an X-ray machine (which seems equally optional). The men pass through no problem, but the border guard, who is wearing a novelty FBI hat, takes one look at my US passport and seems confused. He refuses to touch it. I try to pass it to him, and he puts up his hands like my passport is a gun and he’s showing me that he’s unarmed.
He calls over someone more senior, who frowns and tells me I need a visa to go to Kazakhstan.
I stare in disbelief. “Americans don’t need visas,” I assure him.
He looks at me for a long time, trying to decide whether to believe me. This seems crazy: can’t he look it up? It occurs to me that this border might be so remote that they don’t have telecommunications, but shouldn’t they have some kind of documentation, or even a handy cheat-sheet of nationalities that are and are not allowed in. “Are you sure?” he asks finally.
“Yes!” I exclaim. I open my passport to show him the stamps from when I entered and exited Kazakhstan a month ago.
With nothing, I guess, to dispute my claim, he begrudgingly lets me in.
We walk out of the border outputs, and, I assume into Kazakhstan. I could fall to my knees and kiss the ground, which is strange, because I did not previously know myself to be the type of person to do that, but I have the strange sensation of having survived some kind of ordeal, and of having put that behind me by leaving Turkmenistan. I feel light, almost giddy. Even more so when I see our driver getting back into the Jeep, which, I think, means that he will drive us to our final destination, and that I can pay him there, that I can be a woman of my word, something like that.
As we get back in the car, the Kazakh cowboy asks me what I’m writing about, and I try to explain.
“My son wrote a book,” he says.
This comment gets lost as we pack ourselves back into the car, so he says it again.
“My son wrote a book,” the Kazakh cowboy repeats. “It was about how I drank too much. And I hurt my family.” He shakes his head. “I cried and cried as I read it.”
I am unsure if I misunderstood him, because the last thing I’m expecting this weathered Kazakh cowboy to tell me is that his son wrote a book and he cried and cried, but his friend jumps in and confirms.
“He hasn’t had a drink since then,” the friend says.
The Kazakh cowboy nods. “Seven years.”
The mood on the other side is lighter, celebratory even. It’s like Turkmenistan was weighing on all of us, and now we are free. We stop at a convenience store made of wooden planks and buy celebratory rounds of energy drinks that taste like some combination of sugar, medicine, and poison.
We haven’t gone far into Kazakhstan when we pass a car broken down on the side of the road. I can say that now, because as soon as we passed into Kazakhstan, we found ourselves again on roads, which meant the men felt free to remove their seatbelts.
Our driver pulls over without any discussion, and the men hop out to help the stranded drivers. Well, maybe “help” is a stretch, because the driver appears to be the only one who knows anything about cars, but what the Kazakh cowboy and his friends lack in mechanical know-how, they make up for in energy drinks and camaraderie. They all shake the car from side to side, for reasons I don’t understand, and then stand around, laughing and chatting.
To make strangers seem familiar, all you have to do is add other strangers. Next to even less recognizable faces, the Kazakh cowboy’s seems familiar.
I realize now why he’d been so quick to declare his singlehood when we got in the car. He destroyed his family and then tried to right his wrongs, but it was too late.
Maybe the one thing that most unites all of us is not love of family or fear of death or inability to stick to diets, but the fact we’re constantly messing up and trying to make amends. No matter how hard we strive to be good and virtuous, we all end up reading the book that shows us our sins. Our lives are all shaped by past mistakes. And in the moments when the mistakes seem most grave, our greatest ambition isn’t love or money or recognition, but rather, the fortitude to get up and put on a suit and cowboy hat and drive across the desert to a place where one thing ends and another begins.
So, in conclusion, there’s no need to panic. The driver will be very understanding when he returns from fixing the stranger’s car and you tell him you don’t have any money. When your offer to stop at the first ATM and pay him in Kazakh currency comes off as terrified and pleading, he will laugh and tell you not to worry. And you shouldn’t. It all more or less sorts itself out in the end.
