It was the second holiday in as many days, but this time it was seemingly less celebrated. Just a few flowers tossed randomly around the great Turkmen poet’s statue in Independence park were all there was to show for it, along with a few of his poems, badly recited, on state TV.

The constant police controls for foreigners meant that we were unable to make a day trip to the silk road town of Merv. This was a huge disappointment for me as it is supposed to be a marvel. Still I hadn’t checked my original itinerary closely enough and had missed that it wasn’t listed. We therefore were not permitted to go there especially not on our own without our guide who was unwilling to make the long roundtrip no matter how much we were willing to pay.

Instead we hired a car to go to the nearby Kow Ata underground lake which was within the region we were allowed to travel in. This was some 160km away from Ashgabat and took a couple of hours and a few police checks to get to. It is basically a giant cave and at the bottom, some 70m underground there is a large lake with naturally heated water at 36 degrees. The best part of this was that we  could dive in and take a dip in the sulphurous-smelling water. It doesn’t smell too appealing, but it certainly was great fun swimming through the caves and exploring a little.

We took lunch outside in a shady spot and ate Shashlyk with enormous amounts of fat (as is the custom). It was boiling hot, and afterwards we were in no state to move until about 3pm when the we decided that we had better drive back into town and visit the Russian Bazaar. Here the highlight of our purchases had to be the Chal (fermented camel’s milk) which tastes of watered down slightly off cheese but has a surprisingly refreshing effect after a long, hot day. The rest of the afternoon was spent wandering the Las Vegas-style architecture of  Ashgabat and avoiding policemen and being amused by stupid things like the Ministry of Fairness and the Russian washing powder “Barf”.

We ate supper in a deserted restaurant where a lone pianist provided loud, electronic Russian music as entertainment, before tempting to see what the expats were up to at the British Pub. Ultimately they weren’t up to much and it was pretty deserted too though it was refreshing to hear some English music after several days of Russian Pop!

All Hail Turkmenbashi!