31 Oct Turkmenistan — The Gates of Hell

In the spring of 2019 when the president of Turkmenistan disappeared, everybody was hoping for the worst. But no such luck. A few days later he showed up doing doughnuts at the Darvaza Gas Crater. Or, maybe, he was doing doughnuts at the Darvaza Gas Crater. It was hard to tell. The video of the doughnuts was taken from a drone at something like three-hundred feet and showed somebody in an ATV doing doughnuts.

. But no such luck. A few days later he showed up doing doughnuts at the Darvaza Gas Crater. Or, maybe, he was doing doughnuts at the Darvaza Gas Crater. It was hard to tell. The video of the doughnuts was taken from a drone at something like three-hundred feet and showed somebody in an ATV doing doughnuts.

Could be it was him. Where else would the president of Turkmenistan go to take a few days off from brutally ravaging an entire nation? The Darvaza Gas Crater is a sinkhole in the Karakum Desert and ranks as the major . . . maybe the only . . . tourist attraction in the country. And what an attraction in the country because of the huge amounts of natural gas it dumps into the atmosphere. Back in the Sixties or Seventies or, maybe, Fifties, nobody seems to know for sure, geologists tossed in a match and it’s been burning ever since.

Nobody seems to know . . . or want to say . . . why, exactly, geologists would do such a thing. The excuse is that they didn’t want natural gas wafting around killing goats in what was then the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic. But if they wanted to protect their goats from gas, why didn’t they just gather it up and pipe it to some goat-free place that needed natural gas? Our guide/minder said the crater burns a million dollars’ worth of natural gas every day. She seemed proud of the fact.

Something else nobody talks about is why there’s a sinkhole in the center of the Karakum Desert in the first place. Apparently it just sort of opened up while geologists were innocently doing geology nearby. Given Soviet history with environmental stewardship, one suspects there’s more to the gas-crater story than we’ve been told.

For whatever reason it’s there, the government is taking full advantage of the money-making possibilities. To accommodate the hordes of foreigners they intend to lure into the country they’ve erected his and hers latrines

protected by a matronly-looking camel, and half-a-dozen yurts

where tourists can spend the night basking in the warm glow of what they seductively advertise as The Gates of Hell. To help with this project they have photos of the president sitting on a traditional rug in front of one of the yurts. He is attended by a smiling Turkmen woman in a traditional gown, a long black braid down her back. Long, black braids are de rigueur among ladies in Turkmenistan on the ground that “men like them” meaning, of course, that the president likes long braids on pretty, dark-haired women. On the rug next to him is a platter mounded with fruit.

The night we stayed at the gas crater we didn’t find any mounds of fruit, or gorgeous women with long braids. Or ATV’s to do doughnuts in. But the yurts were there and the crater . . . well, the crater was really something. We could hop across the pipe railing that serves as a fence, and lean over the side and look right into the mouth of hell itself.

You can see why tourists would come all the way to Turkmenistan just to lean over that edge.

Still, from a marketing point of view it’s a declining resource. What was once a touring pillar of fire you probably could have seen from the surface of Mars has dwindled to picturesque flames licking the insides of the crater.

You’re not going to see anything like it anywhere else in the world, though. As ecological disasters go, the Darvaza Gas Crater is a UNESCO-World-Heritage class disaster although, as far as I know, UNESCO has yet to lend its name to this particular bit of heritage.