Turkmenistan is the strangest country in Central Asia — an all-white marble capital with gold statues and almost no people, the ruins of Merv where a million once lived on the Silk Road, and Darvaza: a gas crater that has been on fire since 1971, roaring in the middle of the black desert. You camp beside it. Almost nobody comes here: the country issues a few thousand tourist visas a year.
Ancient Merv & Silk Road Cities — 9-Day Turkmenistan is a 9-day private tour of Turkmenistan, run on your own dates with a private guide and driver. You stay in 4-star Ashgabat hotels and a desert camp at the Darvaza crater on full board, with the mandatory licensed guide and LOI both included.
Prices are per person and drop as your group grows — from $3310 per person for two travellers down to $2150 for a group of seven. Every departure is private: you never share the vehicle or the guide.
9-day Turkmenistan itinerary
Met at Ashgabat, a city that holds the Guinness world record for the highest concentration of white marble buildings on Earth — an entire capital rebuilt in Italian marble, floodlit, and almost empty of people. The Monument of Neutrality carries a gold statue of the first president that once rotated to face the sun. Turkmenistan is one of the least-visited countries on the planet, and nothing here will look like anywhere you have been.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
Nisa was the first capital of the Parthian Empire — the power that stopped Rome from expanding east, and that annihilated Crassus and seven legions at Carrhae. It is now a mound of eroded mud-brick on a hill outside the city, UNESCO-listed, and you can walk the royal treasury and the round hall where ivory drinking horns were found. Then the Earthquake Memorial in town, for the 1948 disaster that erased Ashgabat in seconds.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
East to Merv, which in the 12th century may have been the largest city in the world — a Silk Road capital of libraries, observatories and half a million people. In 1221 the Mongols took it and, by the chroniclers' account, killed nearly everyone in it; the city never recovered. What is left is a plain of walls and citadels, five cities built beside each other over two thousand years, and almost nobody there.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
The Mausoleum of Sultan Sanjar stands alone in the middle of the ruin field — a 38-metre dome the Seljuks built in 1157, which the Mongols failed to destroy and which the Arab geographers said could be seen a day's ride away. Erk Kala is the oldest of Merv's cities, a bowl of earth walls from the 7th century BC. The Gyz Kala 'koshks' are corrugated mud fortresses with no known parallel anywhere.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
North-east to Turkmenabat on the Amu Darya — the Oxus of the ancients, the river Alexander crossed on inflated animal skins. Lebap is the least-visited province of the least-visited country, which is a claim worth taking seriously.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
Amul was the Silk Road crossing point on the Oxus, and its walls are still there in the sand. The river itself is wide, brown and fast, and it is the reason every empire in this region existed and the reason the Aral Sea does not.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
Back to the capital, and an afternoon among the marble: the presidential palace, the Neutrality Arch, the fountains, and the almost total absence of pedestrians, which nobody ever quite gets used to.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
Out to Yangykala, which almost nobody outside Turkmenistan has heard of and which deserves to be famous: a canyon system where the walls are banded in pink, red, yellow and white — the exposed floor of an ancient sea — running for kilometres with nothing around them at all. At sunset the colour is difficult to believe.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
A transfer to Ashgabat airport for your flight. End of our services.
