Qazvin to Ashgabat

 

Greetings from Turkmenistan!

 

We are currently relaxing in the Grand Turkmenistan Hotel Ashgabat taking some well earned down time from driving having crossed the border yesterday. I'll begin by recapping since our last blog which was written in Qazvin. We left Qazvin en route to Gorgon, the drive was an interesting one covering a variety of landscapes and roads, specifically the insane traffic of downtown tehran and the wild pass through the Alborz mountains. Lewis was in the driving seat through Tehran with me navigating, it would seem his driving style is well suited to the Iranians as we escaped with no incidents, whilst  google maps took care of navigation pretty smoothly. I took the wheeland tackled the mountains, on the most scenic road ive ever driven. The Iranians tried their best to ruin it with their rash overtaking manouvres and poisonous exhaust fumes however the scenery was breath taking. I estimate we were somewhere in the region of 2000m at the summit, way above the tree line, the road wound roudn the contours if the valleys, which looked extremely vulnerable to landslide! A night in Gorgon was pretty uneventful, the usual hunger brought on by the tiring ramadan fasting was creating some pretty grumpy exchanges between us navigating our way to a hotel!

 We then left Gorgon, with the idea to hit the Turkmenistan border around lunchtime. All was going well, and we turned off the main road onto the single track road to the border town in good time. The road proposed by google maps on lewis's phone was slightly different to the one on our map but we thought we would go for it anyway, a choice we later regreted! After an hour of decent roads, and amazing arid mountain scenery the road began to worsen, we were about 20kms from the border, but road conditions weren't doing the fordy any favours! We stopped and asked some locals if we were on the right road, they spoke no english but said the road did continue but wasnt paved. We pressed on for 5 mintues, following a local on a motorbike, but in the end decided it was stupid to continue knowing a prefectly good road existed if we back tracked. to make matters worse our benzin (petrol) tank was running low, so we had to buy some dodgy nectar from the locals at the nearest village to get us back to civilization. Frustratingly the time delay our poor navigation created meant we missed the border that day and had to bed down in the nearest town for the night. Spirits were pretty low as dreams of an ice cold beer in Turkmenistan were agonisingly close! We stayed the night in the worlds worst hotel room, run by an old couple who kept insisting we showered, we knew our hygene wasnt perfect but this offended us slightly! little did we know they just wanted to charge us an extra 4 dollars for each time we used it!

 We left at a reasonable time the next morning and headed for the border. The process was long, taking about 5 hours. As the registered owner of the car i was left to fill in endless paperwork, most of which i couldnt understand, and paid the necessary 113 dollars for the car, whilst johnny and lewis ate pies and sat in the sun. they bought me a mars bar as a consolation.

We finally left the border late afternoon and headed through no mans land of about 15kms. The road was spectacular and mountainous. we came round a sharp bend only to find a car transporter lorry on its side in the verge. The cars on top were completely destroyed, and their was fuel dripping from the fuel tank. We found the driver in a pretty bad state, bleeding from his face and arm, and covered in dust. Understandably he seemed in shock. We waited for the next car who was a local, and picked the guy up and told us to scarper, we were quite relieved as we were not particularly keen to be involved with the authorities incase of any misunderstandings.

On arrival in Ashgabat we were totally shocked, completely modern and covered in gold and marble, the place is a model city, nice cars and buildings, Turkmenistan seems to be thriving from its oil. We checked in to a hotel, 5 star, for 30 dollars each per night! bit of a steal. We had a day relaxing by the pool today, ready to press on tomorrow with a view to getting close to the uzbekistan border.

We shall update again soon when we next get the internet, probably Tashkent.

P.s. the phone network in Turkmenistan i apparently 4G, therefore none of our phones are working!

Ciao for now,

Stuart