Ashgabat. Day 6

 Another interesting day around the town. It's still very hard to know what to make of the place. It's odd and things never quite add up.

Anyway, we started off heading out of town - with a brief stop at the world's largest indoor ferris wheel! It didn't seem to be moving... a lot of the places we go, you just look at the outside and it's not clear if they're staffed or working.

I will leave out some of the other buldings we passed, other than to note the telecommunications tower features the world's largest eight-pointed star.

Eventually we reached Nisa. This is a legitimately interesting ruin from the Parthian empire (BC and following the Greeks) and wandered around the site.



On te way back into the city we went to the national carpet museum. This was also fairly interesting, at least for a while, though Lynn's attention wandered fairly soon. You may not be surprised to hear that we saw the world's largest rug, at 301 square metres. All of this can be confirmed by checking with the Guinness people.

Not the world's largest rug

Then we had a lunch stop in a restaurant in a shopping centre. This was more exciting than you'd expect, but it is hard to convey how strange this place is. We have essentially seen NO shops. The streets are lined with trees and white buildings and that's it. This place was also a large, white marble building, but on the inside it was a conventional, rather upmarket, shopping centre with quite a few recognisable brands. It was pretty quiet though, and our suspicion is that it is unaffordable for lots of locals. It included a supermarket and we had a quick look around at the mostly unremarkable contents.

Then back to the hotel and we had the remains of the afternoon to relax. Half the group went off the the Darvaza gas crater. We didn't sign up for this extra because it's 4-5 hours each was by 4wd (because the roads are very poor) and expected to return after midnight. The burning gas crater seems kind of interesting... but only up to a point.

So we had a rest and then dinner in the hotel, which was fairly good.




After dinner we wandered around the gardens. There is an entire wing of the hotel that seems to be mothballed, and another large swimming pool with is sitting empty. The enormous walls match all the other surrounding buildings.



Comments

  1. Dad8 September 2026 at 08:34

    M and L,
    Thanks for your blog notes.
    I wonder if Ashkabat is a bit like North Korea where many exalted-looking structures are built to impress visitors, but they are really an illusion. Big hotels that are empty and fun parks that are closed. So often they are grand monuments to mad autocrats. Many apparently follow the earlier soviet-era monuments that show giant muscular figures that exalt the noble workers etc etc.
    But, you say, streets with no visible shops, how odd ???

    ReplyDelete

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