No sleep, just drive! How we got deported from Turkmenistan

by Sheila on 21 Aug, 2014 - 2 comments

With the expiry date of our visas looming over our heads, the second we cleared the border control we booked it out of Turkmenbashi. We were determined to reach Ashgabat, sleep for 5 hours, then power through to Turkmenabat. We wouldn’t be able to visit the Door to Hell, but leaving the country in time was more important. This all would have been more feasible if not for some of Turkmenistan’s special geographical features. Notably, the Karakum Desert.

The first thing we learned about the desert is that it gets very hot very quickly. So hot, in fact, that before noon you already begin to feel like a roast chicken. You could drink all the liquids you can find, but you will still have a dry mouth and think only of ice cubes in a tall glass of fresh water. Cheese slices we had bought in Baku had melted while in the wrapper:

Our lack of air conditioning in the car became a serious issue, as we had been compensating by having our windows open at all times. If we thought the air in Azerbaijan was hot, the air in Turkmenistan blowing through our windows was like holding 10 hair dryers in our faces, not to mention the blowing sand and dust. Grit in our mouths, dust on every surface, and becoming rapidly dehydrated, we still pushed on.

As if being in a desert in August wasn’t bad enough, the roads alone were cause to lose our minds. We could not fathom by what method they laid down their tarmac, but we are certain that the roads in North Korea are better constructed:

Ridges, ripples, pointy bumps, potholes, gravel, torn-up asphalt, you name it it was present. It seemed the country itself was intent on preventing us from reaching Turkmenabat. With our car as low as it was, every ridge or bump was a cause for grave concern. If we didn’t evade it quickly enough, or if we didn’t slow down enough, the result was an ear-splitting SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEECH from the bottom of the car, followed by grimaces and fervent prayers that nothing was horrifically damaged.

With the amount of butt clenching I did as we attempted to drive through Turkmenistan, I’m certain that by the end of this trip I will have the firmest & most shapely bottom in North America. Who needs pilates?

As our average speed was drastically reduced, we only reached Ashgabat in the late afternoon on the 12th. Ashgabat is a truly bizarre city. The best way to describe it is that it feels as real as Disney World, but with fewer people, no available services, and you can’t take pictures of anything. The city is stuffed with massive white marble edifices capped and trimmed with gold, glimmering in the sunlight but are as useful as a mint-flavoured suppository. Golden statues of late president Turkmenbashi in various poses and outfits were scattered through the streets like absurd confetti. The population seemed to consist only of old ladies employed to hand scrub the marble curbs on every road.

We had heard that there was a Sofitel in Ashgabat, so with a bit of hunting we managed to find what may end up being the single most ridiculously opulent hotel in the world, made only more ridiculous by the fact that hardly anyone stays there. It was the perfect place to scrub off the accumulated dust of the desert and to eat our first full meal of the day. The hotel restaurant was French-themed, so we celebrated my birthday early by feasting on French cuisine while being serenaded by a live singer also singing in French. Completely bizarre.

Washed and dined, we left the hotel at 7am on the 13th to book it to Turkmenabat, only to find that all the roads exiting Ashgabat were closed off with no detours! After an hour of crawling through maze-like roads and screaming at Google Maps, we found the one unmarked route out of the city. This delay came back to bite us.

The one upside I can gather from the continuously horrific roads, serious dehydration and intense desert heat, is that we had our first camel sightings!

Trust me when I say that the novelty of seeing wild camels wore off quickly with the heat.

At 8pm we reached Turkmenabat. While navigating the worst roads we had seen yet (this is saying a LOT), a friendly local guided us to the bridge crossing that led to the border with Uzbekistan. As we pulled up, the officer at the bridge crossing informed us that there was a fee to pay before exiting Turkmenistan, but since the “bank” had closed less than an hour before, he would not permit us to cross to the border. We begged and pleaded, telling him our visas expired, but nothing worked and we were told to pitch camp right there and await the return of the “bank” in the morning.

With no choice but to comply, we parked to assess the car’s damage and make ourselves comfortable for sleep. We must have cashed in some serious cosmic favours as our car emerged from Turkmenistan more dirty but relatively unscathed:

(I spent my birthday in a sleeping bag on the road right here. Rally spirit!)

Awake bright and early on the 14th, we paid the necessary fee to the man that was the “bank” at the bridge crossing at 8:15am and proceeded to the actual border to Uzbekistan. Our hopes were to get everything sorted by noon and be on our way.

LOL

Once the guards noticed that we had overstayed our visa, despite our explanations of the situation it seemed that they had to shift to Super Bureaucratic Mode. They had no idea what to do with us, so their instant solution was to pass the problem off to someone higher up. All we could do was sit and wait, and wait, and wait some more. Noon came, and the guards invited us to join them in their cafeteria for lunch. Offers of food never to be denied, we joined them and had some decent dumplings and melon, only to notice that while the guards’ lunch was half an hour, that was only so the entire staff at the border could accommodate a half hour nap time. Nothing is more infuriating while waiting to leave a country and process papers than seeing the people responsible for the processing of said papers taking naps at their desks. By 4pm, the only progress that had been made was that I had finished all of the day’s Sudoku puzzles on Mom’s iPad app.

Finally, we were guided up to see a ‘higher up‘ border guard in his office. He told us that he had been on the phone to Ashgabat all day (uh huh okay) trying to talk the government into a reasonable solution to let us leave Turkmenistan. Instead, he said the government would not be swayed, and our only options to leave were to be formally deported or to pay a fine of over 1,000 USD each. Not willing to throw that kind of money around for such a ridiculous situation, we chose deportation.

In true Turkmen fashion, the process of deportation involved many handwritten papers done in duplicate and triplicate writing about our circumstances and agreeing to various things. As we wrote everything in English, all of these papers had to be taken to another official to translate them, and then we signed the translated papers again. Fingerprints were digitally taken and, by 5:30pm, we were given the boot from Turkmenistan and told not to re-enter for 3 years.

We could only pray that the Uzbek side of the border would not be as complicated.