The water-spray coolness of the plane from which I descended onto the tarmac at Ashkhabad airport, on a late August evening, was replaced by a sickly, overbearing heat, heady with the stench of what seemed like rotting vegetation.

Turkmenistan — the land of the Turkmen; a land over which empires held sway and collapsed; subjugated by tsarist Russia, inherited by the Soviet Union and now an independent state, rich in natural gas.

The Silk roads traversed this desert land that I was about to discover for myself. You aren’t on the tarmac long before you realise that the recently deceased president for life, Saparmurat Niyazov, also known as Turkmenbasi — 'leader of the Turkmen' — is omnipresent. His statues adorn streets and squares, he even renamed the days of the week and the months of the year after him and his.

A khan ruling from his capital Ashkhabad, an ex-Soviet-cum-middle eastern eccentricity of bleak and shabby Stalinist blocks of flats, kitsch palaces and mosques, luxurious hotels, and dusty avenues — bang in the middle of the desert. And it’s the desert, the Karakum or 'black sands' which nurtured and grew the soul of the nomadic Turkmen, the scions of a people who moved with the shifting sands, who conquered empires and held Europe in awe.

The Turkish-built hotel provided welcome respite from the 40° heat outside. Nowhere else have I had such prompt and quick service, nowhere else was hot milk for muesli readily available; and nowhere else were the looks on the faces of the staff more bemused than at the foreigners who found such things important.

I wasted no time in taking on the sweltering air, making off to the vast open-air market on the outskirts. Soviet memorabilia, fabrics, fruits, carpets — indeed, the traditional carpet motifs and colours identifying the five Turkmen tribes compose the flag of Turkmenistan — and the colour of traditional clothing, the women in long, flowing dresses and head scarves, the men in robes and sheep-skin hats that towered above their heads. They looked fierce and proud. No wonder Russia only managed to subdue them in 1894; and why, during the Great Game of the 1800s, the British looked on indignantly from the far-away Khyber Pass as the tsar moved into Turkmenistan. The tsar was but one of many.

Outside Ashkhabad I visited Nisa, built by the Parthians in the fourth century BC. Little remained of the palaces and temples of the Parthian kings; and yet the Tower temple with its cool, dark corridors and lofty windows still afforded a spiritual solitude over two thousand years later.

Nondescript, dusty Mary

Leaving the tatty peculiarity of Ashkhabad, I flew to Mary, once the ancient and fabled Merv, described as a vast and blooming oasis where the Silk roads converged. Sitting as the stewardess ordered me to, I stared out of the bi-prop Tupolev tin can at the Karakum below, sipping warm club soda from a thick, orange plastic cup.

Nondescript, dusty Mary. Its museum holds a collection of ethnographic exhibits and ancient artifacts from the town’s bygone glory, made even more stupendous by the extraordinary passion with which the Azerbaijani woman curator explained them to me. I then headed into the desert to the prize of Turkmenistan — the ancient city of Merv; a vast amalgamation of ruins, layer over layer of civilisations swallowed up by the desert and whose debris lies scattered over the scorching landscape.

I was mesmerised by the tribulations of ancient Merv; the Achmenid proto-Zoroastrian temple of 5BC, Alexander the Great’s Hellenistic buildings; 10AD sees Merv as a centre of Zoroastrianism, Buddhism and Christianity. Its heyday came with the Abbasid caliphs when Merv became a spiritual, scientific and cultural centre only to succumb to the Mongols in the 12th century.

I traipsed along the sands, over ruined temples, mosques and palaces, observatories and libraries. I picked up and stumbled over bits of pottery and ceramics, Buddha and goddess images. A bountiful treasure hunt on a virgin archaeological site. The return flight to Ashkhabad was astoundingly on time, the pilot so inebriated that he couldn’t finish his routine in-flight speech, glorifying Turkmenbashi. So it goes in Turkmenistan.

Each place you visit gives you something. What Turkmenistan bequeathed to me I cannot say. What? Was I really in Turkmenistan? I am always in awe at how in some lands the past is so much more a part of the present than in others. In Turkmenistan it’s as if the past and the present are one and the same. Musing thus, I left Turkmenistan, my plane rising into the brilliant blue sky and heading west over desert sands toward the Caspian Sea.

For more info...
• Visit the Turkmenistan Embassy website