Dasoguz, Turkmenistan

 

We spent our first night in Dasoguz and began to see how Turkmenistan was going to be a very unusual place to visit. I had read about how the country’s leaders had been replacing Soviet buildings with big dramatic white fine Italian marble buildings for years, but I didn’t fully get how strange this would be to see in person. This small city is the center of the agricultural sector in the area. It had large almost empty boulevards and giant showy buildings that really don’t seem to fit into the desert scene around them. Many have been built for government ceremonies and are only used once or twice a year and otherwise are empty. At night most of the buildings were lit with colorful light displays. Click thru to see the huge marble hotel we stayed in with only a handful of other guests. Check out our hostage photo showing we were ok, or were we? Every newspaper in the lobby has the same two pictures of Serdar Berdimuhamedow, the county’s newish 3rd President, on it. A sure sign of a strange type of authoritarian rule, if I’ve ever seen one.

This is as good a place as any to mention again that Turkmenistan sits on the one of the largest natural gas reserves in the world. Due to that the leaders have had lots of money to build their marble vision.