Turkmenistan: the 3 day transit visa dash

As soon as we got out of the taxi from the border in Turkmenabat, we were (as usually) besieged by taxi drivers. Diverting them by asking if there's a toilet nearby only helped for a minute or so: negotiations were soon undertaking in the (by the way not so inviting) toilets.

Finally, we got a taxi to Ashgabat for 30 USD, which is a fair enough price. The driver was taking his wife to the international airport (she was going on business to Istanbul), and thus acted as an impromptu taxi driver for the day. And why not? It was a pleasant drive across an endless desert, but we had a nice conversation (in "travel Russian", mixed with some local words and a lot of body language) and we ate some nice chicken on the way.

Arriving late in Ashgabat was not really a problem: it's a well-lit city and we easily found our way to the guesthouse we had in mind. Dobranow guesthouse: 20 USD, breakfast and dinner included, nice family: good deal!

The next day, we walked around the city. It is one of the more insane places in the world: Ashgabat is a very modern city, with loads of white marble apartment blocks, impressive palaces, ministries and monuments, golden domes on palaces and theatres - and of course loads of golden statues of the former president Niyazov.
One of the craziest monuments ever must be the "Arch of Neutrality": a 50 m 3-legged concrete arch with a 12 m high golden statue of the president on top. Most interestingly, the statue rotates so that the president always faces the sunlight. Madness.

There are some other crazy sights: a pyramid shaped shopping mall cum waterfall, a 80 m high monument to the independence which resembles a plunger (one of those things you use to unclog a toilet) and an earthquake monument where the golden baby Niyazov sits on top of the world, supported by a bull.

We learned that Turkmenistan is really a weird place. Gas, electricity and water are for free, resulting in people leaving their gas stoves burning all day, leaving lights on as they please and toilets and showers with constant running water being the norm. The plus side is that having a hot shower is a common luxury, but the Turkmen people obviously have never heard of Global Warming...

The streets of Ashgabat are impressively empty: on big lanes and in parks, there are no other people than the ever-present police (friendly police towards us foreigners, but still: they're literally on every corner) - and in parks there are loads of gardeners tending the flowers and mowing the lawns.

However, all people we met were very friendly: bus drivers, post office clerks, shopkeepers, policemen and other officials - but maybe that's mainly because they're utterly unaccustomed to meeting foreigners: Turkmenistan is a very closed country, listed only one place ahead of North-Korea in political unfreedom.