After Bukhara, we did a six-day swoop through Turkmenistan. The most closed of the Central Asian “republics,” Turkmenistan can only be visited on an organized tour on fixed dates, much as Intourist controlled travel in the former Soviet Union. We had arranged this tour over the summer, and we worked the rest of the trip around these dates.

Turkmenistan has a well-deserved reputation as one of the most closed and bizarre police states on the planet. Its government is as close to the Soviet Union as still exists, and indeed its “Democratic Party of Turkmenistan” is simply a renaming of the machine that ran the Turkmen SSR. But using energy riches found since independence, the “presidents” have gone on a spree of building monuments to their own grandeur that would make even North Korea blush. The result is a country that lives in its own twilight zone divorced from normal economic reality, where marble-covered buildings and gold statues of the great leader live alongside a population still mostly at the poverty line.

Because internet access is tightly controlled and monitored in Turkmenistan, we were unable to post blogs as we went. I have therefore assembled all the entries in a series of posts in chronological order starting TM-#, which follow this one. As always, you will probably need to click the “Older Posts” link at the bottom to get to the later entries.