Turkmenistan, Turkmenistan

 

I’m quoting, obviously, from the chorus of Dear Leader Gurbanguly Burdhimehamedav’s rap about the benefits of sports in the country.  If you haven’t watched John Oliver’s feature on the country and its strongman, I urge you to—it’s on YouTube.  I won’t try to link to it here.  It’s splendid, and our family watches it once a year, in observation of Turkmen Melon Day, a holiday in the second week of August.  It is also definitely not suitable for children, so be mindful of your tolerance for adult material. I arrived in Turkmenistan just after the holiday, and you better believe that the first thing I ate was melon.

The Ashgabat airport is a farce of performative bureaucracy.  I needed a covid test to enter the country.  When my flight landed at 2am, a bored and tired nurse stuck a swab barely up my nose, dipped it into a liquid-filled receptacle, poured water on a tray, looked at the tray, and threw it in the trash.  Whole transaction took maybe 3 seconds.  One has to pay a “migration fee” of $75 USD in clean crisp cash at the airport, plus admin fees, also in unmarked US bills.  A bit of a shakedown vibe. Passport scanners didn’t work. I think they took my fingerprints but I didn’t see the scanner actually scan.  They did not care at all what was in my backpacks through customs though the locals were getting searched thoroughly.  Lots of stages, lots of men in uniforms checking additional papers, 90 minutes from landing to airport exit. 

My guide--required to enter the country--was waiting and very, very friendly, and so eager to drive me through the absolutely pristine city to my hotel.  He kept slowing down to urge me to take photos. Striking city of white marble edifices.  Wide roads so clean it’s as if they were scoured with a floor waxer.  All the cars are white, too. Hotel a high rise of white marble, whose enormous rooms are decorated in an aesthetic I might describe as Middle Trump. 

In the light of day, the city is even more impressively clean and white.  Like, there is no trash anywhere. You could eat off the floor of the tunnel that runs under the auto roundabout next to my hotel. Nor are there people walking out amongst all these beautiful white buildings.  Nor is there any sign of commerce taking place: no shops, no bustling from one door to the next.  It’s almost like a giant child built a model city and plopped it here in the basin beside a small mountain, and then left to go do something else.

My guide joked that locals call the city Ash-Vegas

V cool airport, actually, in the shape of a falcon.