Darvaza Gas Crater lights up the Karakum Desert at night. Many (if not most) of the tourists who visit Turkmenistan each year are “country counters” — travelers determined to visit every nation on Earth. The Central Asian destination is often at the top of their bucket list because the Turkmenistan regime makes it one of the hardest countries for tourists to enter, right up there with North Korea, Eritrea and perpetual conflict zones.
For those who don’t already know, it’s a former Soviet republic that gained its independence in the early 1990s after the disintegration of the USSR. In the wake of liberation from the Russians, the conservative post-communist regime largely closed off Turkmenistan to and from the outside world. Although it’s getting easier to visit, tourism remains a low priority.
Everyone needs a visa, and they can be difficult to obtain. And at the present time, would-be tourists need to join some kind of group to get that visa (more on that later). That makes Turkmenistan one of the globe’s least visited nations — less than 15,000 per year is the usual guesstimate.
Yet another reason it’s a geographical holy grail for so many passport stamp collectors. Turkmenistan is often described as being strange, mysterious, odd or offbeat. Without doubt, there are times when it’s like nowhere else on the planet.
But in other ways, it looks, acts and feels just like the other exotic “5 Stans” of Central Asia. In fact, there’s far more to this d.
