Turkmenistan’s cities are the most bizarre of our trip so far. Today we arrived in Turkmenabad, the country’s second biggest city. When we reached Mary a few days earlier we found it oddly deserted so this time we were hoping for a bit of life on the streets. We cycled down a long boulevard, wide […] Read More »
106km Zahmet to Repetek
It’s a long haul through the desert that covers about ninety percent of Turkmenistan. We’re just on day four of our seven-day transit visa but already we’re a bit tired of the endless sand dunes and the wind that never quite seems to blow on our backs. The barren landscape is punctuated only by the […] Read More »
70km Merv to Zahmet
We woke up this morning to the wonders of Merv, an ancient city ruined by Ghengis Khan, on our doorstep. Merv is spread over a huge area and we managed to burn up nearly 20km by the time we were done looking around and back on the main road towards Uzbekistan. Of course we couldn’t […] Read More »
114km Hauz Han to Merv
One of the best parts about our trip has been filling in the blanks on the world map for all those countries we had no real impression of. Who really knows what Turkmenistan is like? For us, aside from a few vague ideas about grand statues of a dictatorial president and natural gas, we certainly […] Read More »
116km Sarakhs to Hauz Han
You can spot a fellow tourist a mile off in this part of the world so we quickly realised we had company when six fair-skinned young men with musical instruments walked by our campsite. We were eager to find out what their story was so we hurried up with our packing and rushed off to […] Read More »