Turkmenistan: Toasting marshmallows at the Gates of Hell

(This is the second of a three-part series on Turkmenistan)

KARAKUM DESERT, Turkmenistan – We’re all gathered on a little hill with a summit just big enough for about 15 bodies. The sun has fallen and the sky is as black as the inside of a tomb. It’s the ideal setting to watch fireworks. We kind of are.

The only difference is, our fireworks are below us.

In what can only be described as one of the most bizarre examples of Mother Nature giving the finger to planet Earth, we are staring down at a gas crater that can kill a man in 60 seconds. In Turkmenistan, one of the most isolated and mysterious countries in the world, it’s the biggest and baddest of what they officially call the Darvaza Gas Craters.

Better known as The Gates of Hell.

It is a pit 30 meters high and 76 meters wide and filled with flames that have been burning uninterrupted since 1971. It’s the Devil’s own eternal flame.

As I look down into its gaping maw, all alit in bright orange like the pit of a volcano, I keep imagining what could be down there. This would be the perfect movie set, where backpackers sit atop a hill, passing around a bottle of cognac, which we are doing. Then all of a sudden a massive monster, its skin alight with flames, crawls out and turns us all into appetizers of molten ash.

What’s down there, however, is much worse. It’s a more painful death. It would be the kind of unlife that would be too gruesome for any Hollywood Grade B horror film.

If you fell in, the fall from about 100 feet could kill you – if you were lucky. If not, you would sit in 700 degrees Fahrenheit and the heat wouldn’t kill you. Instead, the lack of oxygen would asphyxiate you, suffocate you while you feel your skin crackle, break and melt off until you die. How long would it take?

How long can you take your last breath?

Then you’d turn into a skeleton and lay in the rocks forever. No rescuer without a death wish would ever go down and fetch your body.

“No one has ever died in the crater and we’re going to keep it that way tonight,” says our guide, Ben Johnson. “If you go in, we’re not going to get you.”

The journey

I’m in the back of beyond. Turkmenistan qualifies. Next to North Korea, it’s arguably the hardest country to visit. Individual travel isn’t allowed. You can only go with an organized tour group and only after receiving a Letter of Invitation from the government. 

Once here, you aren’t supervised everywhere as in North Korea but you must be under supervision of your tour group. There is a curfew. You are often watched.

I’m traveling with the world authority on this isolated desert nation. Saiga Tours, formed in 2021, knows more about Turkmenistan than most of its 7.5 million citizens. Our Australian guides, Johnson and Eilidh Crowley, have both been to Turkmenistan more than 60 times.

On a postcard-perfect morning in the low 70s late last month, 45 of us gather in our hotel lobby in the capital of Ashgabat. The crater is only 165 miles (275 kilometers) away but it takes four hours to drive there. And the only mode of transport is four-wheel drive.

“If we took a bus,” Ben says, “it would be destroyed.”

I jump into a Toyota Land Cruiser Prado and we head north on one of Turkmenistan’s three main roads. It goes all the way to Uzbekistan and looks like what would be left from an earthquake and a nuclear war. The two-lane road is pockmarked with holes big enough for sand traps at Augusta National. 

Our driver, a short, young man with kind eyes and steel nerves, swerves around them as if he knows every bump in the road. In the meantime, he swerves back right to avoid the few cars that come our way. The road has no lane divider. I don’t know it’s two ways until a lorry comes steaming toward our front bumper.

Every so often we see a sign with an arrow pointing into the desert and reading “GYET.” That’s Turkmen for sinkhole and the cause of the craters that made Turkmenistan famous. 

Turkmenistan is 80 percent desert. We drive past camels wandering aimlessly along the side of the road. We see only two or three other cars which is two or three more than we see dwellings.

Darvaza is Turkmen for “gate” and was the name of the village near the crater. It was until the government closed it, Eilidh says, along with other villages for being public eyesores.

The one village remaining will never become a Club Med. We make a bathroom break in the village of Yerbent, a sand-covered hovel pockmarked with ugly yellow block houses and green roofs. I see a camel in a backyard. Another backyard has bundles of wood for sale.

Yerbent has a communal toilet behind a corrugated door in a concrete shack next to the convenience store. The toilet consists of a triangle hole in the floor, rimmed by urine both stained and fresh. Rolls of toilet paper hang from a plastic bag.

Children play in the street. They show mild curiosity at us until someone breaks out a camera and they scamper as if he pulled out an Uzi. The government’s warning of avoiding foreigners is right before our eyes.

The arrival

Near our destination, we make a couple detours into the sand to see two other craters. They are babies, mere deep pits of bubbling mud and water. We get out, take bad photos and hurry to the star of the Karakum Desert.

We pull off the road and drive through sand for about 30 minutes. Lonely Planet: Central Asia warns people never to try finding the crater on foot.  You can actually find it by following the clouds of smoke we see off in the distance. But returning to the road without the blazing crater as a beacon would lead to getting lost forever in a desert the size of Germany.

The 15-car caravan finally arrives at 6:25 p.m. It’s still daylight. We pour out and rim the top of the crater. It isn’t nearly as blazing as we’d seen on videos and photos. About 15-20 small fires sprinkle the bottom of the crater. But after we hop the meter-high Soviet-made fence and walk to the rim – carefully – we can feel the heat pouring up from below.

It’s like sticking my head in a preheated oven with the fan on. I think it might singe my hair. I take a big step back. We’re told the edge of the crater is fragile.

“As beautiful as it is,” Ben says, “it is a giant environmental catastrophe and it’s basically a Texas every day leaking into the atmosphere.”

How it happened

Turkmenistan has the fourth-largest natural gas reserves in the world and is the reason Ashgabat is dotted with white marble palaces, all built after Turkmenistan’s independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. But in the 1960s, the land here, made fragile by all the drilling, imploded and turned into a giant sinkhole. At the bottom were pockets of natural gas pouring out from fragile land cover. 

In 1971, a shepherd died from the gas fumes. Something needed to be done or the Soviets would have to start fitting shepherds with gas masks. They thought if they set the ground on fire, it would suffocate the natural gas.

It did. But the flames continued and they have to this day.

“Turns out,” Eilidh says, “there are hundreds or probably thousands of years burning ahead of us, still.”

The Turkmen government tried putting out the flames, calling it an environmental disaster. Until two  years ago, it was brushed off as nonsense.  But in 2023 they tried drilling to shift the underground and divert the gas. The flames lowered but never extinguished.

While it remains Turkmenistan’s most famous point of interest, the government does not really promote it. In fact, when Eilidh first heard about it in 2012, she and her husband, Saiga co-founder Ben Crowley, and two others spent five hours looking for it.

The government has relented and put up 50 yurts in a campground just over the little hill where we sit and marvel at the beautiful pit of destruction below.

The yurts are big, round and made of yellow straw with Turkmen rugs lining the walls and floor. It’s cozy and reeks Turkmen. I feel like I’m in a desert, especially as the sun falls and I pull out my windbreaker for the first time in Turkmenistan.

The campground is a mob scene. About three other tour companies have come at the same time and the grounds are crawling with Asians and Westerners, all speakng a spattering of languages.

After a simple dinner of vegetable salad and soup with a fatty, boney piece of meat in it, we all head to the crater for the prize view at night.

The guides are shocked. This is the first time a flame found its way to the lip of the crater. It isn’t big. It’s just big enough to have a campfire.

And toast marshmallows.

That’s right. A Dane had the foresight to buy a bag of marshmallows in Yarbent. We find sticks in the sand and place marshmallows on the end. About 20 of us take turns walking to the flame and sticking the marshmallow inside, dodging like Swirling Dervishes as the strong wind shifts away the flame right onto our pants.

My marshmallow lasts five seconds in the flame before it turns charcoal gray. But it tastes just like it did as a kid in Oregon on summer nights when we’d roast marshmallows over a BBQ. We all curse each other for not buying chocolate bars for smores.

We spend the rest of the night roaming the rim of the crater, standing around chatting, laughing, drinking. It’s Saudis and Brits and Finns and Dutch and Russians and Americans and people from all over the world gathering over one ball of flame.

It’s called the Gates of Hell, but for an intrepid traveler like myself, it’s also heaven.

If you’re thinking of going …

How to go there: Independent travel is not allowed. You must go with a Turkmen-sponsored tour company. I used Saiga Tours, www.saigatours.com. The Australian-based company specializes in Central Asia but also runs tours to the Middle East, Afghanistan, Pakistan and North Korea. They handle everything from the visa to the sightseeing.They are excellent.  The Gates of Hell were part of Saiga’s Turkmenistan Independence Day Tour. I paid $1,715 for seven days including airport transfers, accommodations and knowledgeable, frank guides.

How to get there: Flights go to Ashgabat direct from Istanbul, Moscow, Dubai, Frankfurt and Almaty, Kazakhstan, among others in Asia. The four-hour, round-trip flight from Istanbul starts at €580.

Where to eat: Tuncha Cafe, on Oguzhan Kocesi road near Ashgabat’s hippodrome. I paid about $4 for a big plate of plov, Turkmenistan’s signature dish of rice, meat, carrots and onions, a Turkish salad and a soft drink.

When to go: Saiga runs various tours to Turkmenistan all year round. The weather during my last week in September and first week in October was the best I’ve ever experienced overseas: high 70s-low 80s, dry with a cool breeze. I was never hot; I was never cold. In summer it can reach 120 degrees (50 celsius).

For more information: Turkmenistan Ministry of Culture, 993-12-44-2222.

(Next: Northern Turkmenistan)