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.
Darvaza Gas Crater & Karakum Desert — 7-Day Turkmenistan is a 7-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 $2650 per person for two travellers down to $1720 for a group of seven. Every departure is private: you never share the vehicle or the guide.
7-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.
The National Museum has the Parthian ivory rhytons from Nisa, which are among the finest objects to survive from the ancient world. The Carpet Museum holds a single hand-knotted carpet of nearly 300 square metres — the largest ever made — and explains the five tribal guls, the medallions, that are on the national flag. The bazaar is where you buy one, or watch other people fail to.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
North into the Karakum, which covers 70% of Turkmenistan. At Darvaza there is a hole in the desert seventy metres across that has been on fire since 1971, when Soviet engineers drilling for gas collapsed a cavern and set the escaping methane alight, expecting it to burn out in a few weeks. It has been burning ever since. You camp beside it, and after dark it is the single most extraordinary thing in the country.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
The crater is a daylight curiosity and a night-time event: seventy metres of roaring orange flame in absolute blackness, with the heat on your face from twenty metres back, and nothing else for a hundred kilometres in any direction. Sleep late, and at dawn there is a camel and a horizon.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
North across the desert to Dashoguz, in the Khorezm oasis on the Uzbek border — irrigated, green, cotton-growing, and about as far from marble Ashgabat as the country gets.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
Konye-Urgench was the capital of Khorezm and one of the great cities of Islam until Genghis Khan destroyed it in 1221 and Tamerlane finished the job in 1388. The Kutlug Timur minaret still stands at 60 metres, the tallest in Central Asia. The mausoleums around it are Khorezmian, blue-tiled and beautiful, and the whole site is a pilgrimage place — people come to roll down a hill here for luck, and you may as well too.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
A transfer to Ashgabat airport for your flight. End of our services.
