the monument to 100 years of Krasnovodsk, the Russian garrison town that has been renamed Turkmenbasy in the meantime
After our visit to Old Nisa we head for the railway station. We have been booked on the night train to Turkmenbasy, Turkmenistan’s port at the Caspian Sea – the Caspian being an inland sea, of course, so this is not a very large harbour. Turkmenbasy was named after the first president, Niyazov, who awarded himself the title Turkmenbasy – Leader of the Turkmen -, but before that it was Krasnovodsk, originally a Russian garrison town established in the 19th Century.
apartment buildings in Turkmenbasy, a lot more like we expect in former Soviet republics than what we saw in Ashgabat
It is good to experience a real town again, after Ashgabat. There are people in the streets, there are normal buildings, not everything is made of marble. Some of the architecture, I learn from one of our party, is Stalinist, or early Stalinist, from the 1930s perhaps, house-like buildings containing several apartments, with a sloping roof, and the most basic of decoration, the only sign of non-essential construction. The familiar infrastructure with yellow gas pipes, as we have seen so many times before in Eastern Europe and former Soviet republics, is everywhere, bending elegantly over house entrances, if not necessarily across streets.
with a focus on satelite dishes – we are talking 2026, here!
town houses in Turkmenbasy
more satelite dishes, as if we discovered the headquarters of the secret service
and the yellow gas pipelines, neatly bended over the entrance
most people are shy… except for the children
the port of Turkmenbasy
Yet, people are shy, avoid eye contact, avoid being cornered in a conversation, however basic it would be, because of the language
barrier. Many may know Russian, but don’t like speaking it, and we find that although a little Turkish goes some way, the Turkmen language is really something else. With the children it is easier, they have no fear and are proud to show off their English in ‘my name is…’. But we don’t get much further in conversation.
the small Armenian church, not being used anymore
as is obvious from the inside
one of the church windows remaining
another town window, with the recurring theme of seagulls
and another residential building, old Stalinist, including the satelite dishes
on the way to Bekdash Spit there is not much more to see than the occasional industry in the desert
occasionally getting in the way
and camels, of course, they are plentyful in the desert, too
after 130 kms of ripped up, pot-holed tarmac, the bridge over the entrance of the Garabogazköl lake is beautiful, four lane asphalt
the entrance to the Garabogazköl lake is hazy, and overall not particularly interesting at all
We embark on an excursion to the Bekdash Spit, a narrow land tongue connecting Turkmenistan with Kazakhstan. The Spit is reached across a new bridge over the entrance of the Garabogazköl lake, an lagoon with salinity levels that are apparently even higher than the Dead Sea. It takes three hours to reach, past absolutely nothing – and three hours back -, and at the end there was, again, pretty much nothing. A bridge and a lake. Our travel organisation, Nomadmania, does have a few elements, like, in this case, trying to get to difficult to reach areas, but even the die-hard participants thought this was a rather useless exercise. The weather didn’t help, it was mostly hazy, but even in bright sunshine I doubt that the laguna would have been worth the suffering of bad road combined with an uncomfortable mini bus. After all the construction extravaganza of Ashgabat you would have thought that the government could have invested I little in improving the only road to Kazakhstan, but no, there is no obvious prestige to be gained here, I suppose.
close to Turkmenbasy is Awaza.
