12.6 to 16.6.2001 - Ashgabat, Turkmenistan

Cass writes...

Incongruous in the vast bowl of the Karakum Desert, shadowed by the dusty Kopet Dag mountains, Turkmenistan's Ashgabat is perhaps the weirdest city I've come across on my travels.

It's a city synonymous with the country's egocentric leader, Saparmurat Noyazov - aka Turkmenbashi, Head of All Turkmen. Complementing this title modestly bestowed upon himself, is his ubiquitous slogan: Halk, Watan, Turkmenbashi! People, Nation, Me! Emblazoned across the very first billboard we see on the descent from the mountainous border with Iran, I wonder how the British public might react to a such a Labour Party manifesto. People, Nation, Blair - Head of All Britons!!

Passing a kilometre of extravagant fountains, one would hardly believe we have entered into the fringes of the Karakum Desert, one of the hottest, bleakest deserts on Earth. An array of palatial buildings in a fusion of Islamic and Roman styles catch the eye. Enormous placards adorn every building depicting the President in various poses - deeply concerned, clutching a bouquet of flowers, smiling benignly. Turkmenbashi statues reside on the podiums once home to Lenin and on Romanesque columns like a contented emperor. A twelve foot high golden sculpture tops Turkmenistan's own Tour Eiffel, the Tower of Neutrality. Rotating with the sun like a surreal jewelbox ballerina on a motorised platform, arms outstretched, Turkmenbashi greets the sunrise and bids farewell to the sunset...

Our first night is spent in an old colonial style hotel - the Oktober. It's a basic room lost down a long, noisy corridor where faces peer surreptitiously from doorways. At fifteen dollars, it's extortionately expensive for what it is, due to a recent law that demands foreigners pay in US dollars. Changed at the official rate, four times less than the black market, it's a tax that makes the government a tidy profit whilst bringing in some much needed hard currency. Luckily Nelly, our entrepreneurial peroxide blonde receptionist, makes a discreet phone call and soon finds us a room in her sister's house for a very reasonable seven dollars. Changed at the black market rate, it's a good little earner for the family - in context, teachers make just twenty five dollars a month.

By day, we wander this spotless city of long, soulless boulevards, lush with a myriad of fountains, firing jets of water that sparkle in the midday sun. An army of gardeners tend shrubs, polish statues and sweep roads - everywhere the president passes is immaculate manicured. There' s no smoking in the street. The President gave up a while ago and like an authoritarian father, he forbade his children too. Other Presidential indulgences include closing the highway on his daily commute from palace to city centre and owning the world's largest carpet. A recent law declaring a 50,000 dollar tax on foreigners marrying Turkmen women, a handy state dowry, has also sent ripples through the expat communities.

Other acts have potentially more far reaching consequences. An enormous water themed complex, including reputedly the world's largest fountain, helps satisfy an obsession with wasting this valuable commodity, perhaps seen as the ultimate symbol of victory over the desert. Along with the other fountains liberally sprinkled around town, it's won Turkmenistan, some ninety per cent desert, the dubious accolade of consuming the most water per head in the world.

Despite his years in office as communist party boss, before being unanimously re-elected after independence with a 98 percent majority supposedly, Noyazov retains a background shrouded in mystery. Clanism and the family unit have long held a crucial role in Turkmenistan, stemming from years of nomadic roaming. Yet no-one seems to know which clan he belongs to, and his own family live far away in Russia. Who is this man? Why do the Turkmen people follow him so wholeheartedly? Perhaps the plethora of billboards have succeeded in sending out their subliminal messages of Turkmenbashi worship. In any case, opposition parties are banned and voting is rigged. After years as tiny cogs in the gigantic wheel of communism, this nationalistic leader is telling the once proud Turkmen race what they have always wanted to hear - the importance of their nation. Subdued mercilessly at the battle of Goek Teppe by the Russians, then ravaged by Stalin's cartographic reinvention of Central Asia, it's a quest for a newer, purer Turkmenistan that's losing its way in Turkmenbashi's own eccentricities.

Indeed, like many of the newly independent countries in the region, nurtured to rely on subsidies and the central government in Russia, Turkmensitan is trying hard to go it alone. With a vast reserve of gas but no means of transport, it's sitting on a potential fortune - if it could only settle on a route to pipe it to a hardcurrency market. The pretext for Ashgabat's incredibly ostentatious facelift - the palatial public buildings of mirrored glass and intricately tiled domes, the monuments, the fountains - seem the establishment of a capital in which international companies will invest. The reality, with such a disparity in the black market and the official exchange rate, as well as a ream of murky beaurocracy and the unrelenting tide of governmental oppression, is quite the opposite. In the words of a British embassy employee, Ashgabat is fast becoming Disneyland in Ancient Rome...

As westerners brought up on our own mind-set, there's an almost voyeuristic fascination in witnessing the fall of the Soviet system, the last great empire. Changes have been widespread in the ten years since the break-up of the union. Yet for all its cultural evils, those we spoke agreed healthcare and schooling standards have plummeted since Soviet times. All that is Russian has become almost untouchable, its Cyrillic script replaced, streets renamed. The few remaining blocks of modernist concrete include the Russian market and the disused Circus, a concrete flying saucer emptied of life, epitomising this fallen era.

For us, Ashgabat is a fascinatingly bizarre place, to visit at least. With its rich and turbulent past, there's a profusion of beautiful faces, a myriad of features, skin colours and cultural merging. Whiling away the days waiting for our Uzbek visa, we sit at low tables in leafy parks at 'chaikhanas', sipping green tea, chewing on kebabs and cooling off with ice cream. We hang out with the expats, including David of Ayan Travel, Frenchman Pierre Francois who cycled here from Paris two years ago and enjoy the warm hearted hospitality of bike enthusiast Brendan and his wife Repsina.

When it gets too hot to move, we escape to the swimming pool of the ' Independent' hotel, part of at a strip of surreal Las Vegas style hotels on the edge of town, startling against the backdrop of the arid Kopet Dag mountains. Each as empty and ostentatious as the next, the reception alone seems inspired by a pastiche of church and nightclub - golden mirrored columns supporting a vast hall of stained glass windows.

We stop to gape at yet another surreal creation, as we have so often in the last few days. But in Turkmenbashi's Ashgabat, nothing seems out of place...