Mary, Turkmenistan. Jeff nearly got in a fight a minute ago, for holding hands with a whore. What a brilliant trip.
I'm quite pissed as I write this. Something about drinking in the heat. We reckon it was 40-plus today. Bottled water we had in the car was piping hot even when it'd been sitting in the shade, which says something about the ambient temperature. It makes doing anything really hard. Driving saps your energy; even writing is really hard to sustain for more than about 15 minutes. Sweating like a loon and smelling like the old woman who used to sell flowers in Stenalees is, however, piss easy.
We'd been braced for bad things in Turkmenistan. From a quick glance at other rally teams' blogs, everyone seems keen to see the back of the place after run-ins with the police here, picking up fines for innocuous stuff like not having a clean car. And after reading about all the weird officialdom, and tasting the bureaucracy at the border, we'd really feared the worst. But it couldn't be more different.
Take this morning. We got up early at our camp, and drove straight for the underground lake at Kow Atta - a natural sulphur pool 65m under the surface of the earth. It keeps a natural temperature of 36 degrees 'on the celsius'. (The information board there also says you're forbidden from going in if you're 'in drink'. I like this phrase. 'Sorry love, I accept full responsibility for that. But I was in drink.')
We make the most of the soothing qualities of the water. Which was hot. Then coming out, into the heat, we wind up in a prolonged photoshoot with our fellow bathers. It starts with one request for a photo, then works through a thousand permutations of different people and cameras. Then they come to see the car, and it all happens again. The tourists have become the attraction.
People here greet you with a warm two-handed handshake. It's great, and it feels incredibly genuine. They seem truly stoked to see you. Even Azerbaijan had an underlying sense that friendly gestures may be offered with money in mind; here it's all part of the Turkmen nomadic heritage. Two generations back they were still wanderers, and extending a warm welcome to others is a fundamental part of the culture.
Which is ace fun. Ever since Turkey the car has been attracing more interest. But now everyone is beeping and waving at the car, or 'machine' in the language of these parts. People are always keen to see my machine. And when they see my machine, they always point and laugh. Women, kids, men with moustaches - everyone loves my machine.
After the photoshoot we settle onto this outdoor bed thing for a coffee. You're served up a lot of instant Nescafe round here. It's a bit of a disappointment - I figured you'd get cracking coffee thanks to the Turkish influence, but in these parts they're all about the chi.
And bamboozling you with currency. They had manat for ages, then recently decided to modernise it and introduced a new manat. It's 5,000 old manat to one new manat. Which is fine. Except everyone still talks in old manat. And they abbreviate it, showign you a calculator with 145 on it, meaning 145,000. At first I was handing over the equivalent of £200 just to buy a Mars bar. Much mental arithmetic. It's like living in a box-question from our old GCSE maths textbook.
Fully refreshed we set off on a 500km drive to the capital, Ashgabat. The roads are potholed and bumpy in parts, but we're mainly keeping a steady 60, driving in the relentless heat across the desert, the mountains to our right forming the border with Iran. There's not much around, but we're never far from civilisation - trucks, watermelon markets on the side of the road, the occasional petrol station.
We're heading to Ashgabat for cash - we've spent the last of our local currency on petrol, and there's nowhere to withdraw money round here. The only place to use your Visa is at the State Bank for Foreign Economic Affairs which, like most of the public buildings in Ashgabat, is a deliberately ostentatious edifice. Turkmenbashi isn't a man to hold back. Driving around we see some of his incredible displays of egoism, big gold statues of himself next to lavish waterworks and huge needles. Remember the Rumana, the book he had blasted into space? He's even built a statue of that.
Cash in hand, we drive on again, to the brilliantly-named Mary. We've been recommended a home-stay but struggle to find it in the back-streets of the dusty town. The air smells of sulphur. We pull over to ask directions, and soon I've got a whole crowd trying to help out. One bloke knows it and gives me full directions, but it turns out he's talking about somewhere else - the town's most expensive hotel.
I'm just about to give up when a guy comes over speaking pretty good English - he says if we follow his Suzuki jeep he'll lead us to a cheap hotel. So he drives us about 2km out of town and we pull up in a car park next to a truck stop. Another great act of kindness, which leads us to exactly what we needed - three proper beds, aircon, a shower and a cooked meal. All for 70 manat, or 350,000 manat. Or, in our regular parlance, fuck all. Then the bloke is asking if I can get him a visa for England. I doubt it. He's got a vehicle parts business and he's keen to use us to set something up in England. I'm not sure he knows who he's dealing with. I give him my number anyway, and he actually seems intent on calling it. That'll be weird.
Soon we're all showered, my first proper one in a week, and now out in the yard, tucking into flame-grilled pork, going for a second plate of chicken, and drinking a few cans of Efes lager. Much needed. I notice the clientele. Most of the people eating here are truckers from the adjacent truck stop. There's a lot of big burly dark-skinned men in thier 40s. Each table of men has a woman on it, most wearing clothes that emphasise their chests. People stand in couples talking in the darkness under trees. Definitely a knocking-shop.
One of the girls has the exotic Turkmen look, with jet-black hair and large eyes in an almost oriental face - she walks past our table and fixes me with a very deliberate look, calculated to say 'you definitely want what I'm offering, but there is no way on earth that it's free.' We conclude it's probably cheaper than our friend in Turkey.
Loud Turkmen music is blaring out of the hotel bar. We have to go in to check it out. It's a brown room, pitch black, lit only by the incessant flicker of a strobe-light. The burly trucker types sit around tables, again with a handful of women spread about, a few young and lithe, others a little older and rounder. The TV above the bar plays Turkmen karaoke videos, of blokes in shirts dancing with bended knees and their arms out, while the camera fixes an extended close-up on a woman's ankles.
One of the girls in the bar has started dancing next to our table, winding her body round, slow and sultry, running her hands up and down her flanks. She's fairly ropey, it has to be said. And she's looking in our direction. Is she? She's looking almost past us. Ah, she's watching herself in the mirror next to our heads. That's quite unsettling.
There's a large blond girl here at the other end of the figure scale. She has latched onto me, talking in bits of English. She keeps saying 'sorry, please,' and seems almost too keen to welcome us to her country. She keeps asking what I want. She seems to mean what drink. I hope she means what drink.
The fit one from earlier is at the bar, absolutely hammered. Then she gets up and tries to get Jeff to dance. He's not budging, so she wanders dejectedly back to the bar, upon which she then decides to rest her face. Then she comes round again and beckons Jeff over to her stool, gripping his hand in a tight clutch, and kissing him on the cheek. She's definitely in drink. Suddenly a bloke comes over, grabbing her hand and pushing Jeff away. Scrap on. It's all over pretty quickly - everyone came in to usher him outside.
Two minutes later he's back, shaking our hands and saying 'no problem, no problem, we are friends'. No problem, mate. He says he's having trouble with his girlfriend. I surmise the trouble may be that she seems to be profiting from doing the nasty in truck stops. Then again, maybe it's not a brothel. Perhaps this random collection of burly men and variously-shaped attentive women just happens to be what the Mary nightlife involves on a Friday night. I dunno. Anyway, after nearly getting into a fight (not that near really, but it sounds dramatic), we go to bed under air-con, dreaming of Soviet ferries, customs offices and heavy-blond-induced injuries.
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