“So, do you think they’ll cut off our heads in the desert if we hitchhike?” I ask the rhetorical question. “I rather think no one will stop us.” My buddy replies pragmatically as we loiter behind the rubble of the highway police checkpoint so we don’t have to explain to them what we’re doing on foot with a backpack in the middle of the desert two kilometers from the international port. The first footprint in a new country always has such a charm of the unfamiliar…
*
Nothing could be further from the truth. The third car pulls up. It’s a yellow cab. But it’s not a taxi. “Sit down, I’ll give you a ride! Oh, really, I’m going straight here. No one would hitchhike here. People are stupid. You’d wait here till the evening. I’ll put you on a bus, you wouldn’t get anywhere by hitchhiking.” But the bus is boring, so twenty kilometres further on we’re walking from the bus station back to the highway.
**
After a few minutes, a stocky man in his sixties stops, looking strikingly like a jovial Monty from Rychlá rota or your grandmother’s hamster. Well, it’s a cross between your kidnapper and your grandfather. His wife died of cancer ten years ago.
“All these women want is money these days. I had a Russian girl, beautiful, young, so beautiful…” He throws his arms around and lets go of the wheel. “…but she still wanted something. First she wanted a necklace. I bought her one, then she wanted another. Then money, monthly. Five thousand, ten thousand. I’m working like a fool, you can’t ask me to do that, that’s all I can do! She was always dissatisfied.” The man looks sad and overworked. A regular gold digger, well.
***
“It used to be okay, there was no such thing, women were normal. No whores and stuff. They were normal girls. If one of them was found to be misbehaving, her father or brother would take her to the market and cut her throat in front of everybody. Like cattle. Yeah, those were the days. Wouldn’t you be ashamed of your mother if she was a whore?” adds the man in a serious voice. Well, look, not really. I’d rather have an alive whore. I don’t think you can explain this clash of cultures. The rest of the journey is spent in awkward silence.
****
“What about in the Czech Republic, do you have any available women? I’d like to come. There are none suitable here in Turkmenistan. I like white ones.” We imagine the average Czech woman in her fifties and explaining the local “no-whoring” rules to her, and we prefer to tactfully skip the sixty percent divorce rate in our country. The whore in this case is also my grandmother, and she was born during the First Republic.
*****
Let’s get some gas. But there’s no gas at the first gas station. “There’s no petrol, there’s a crisis.” We’re surprised. In a country that lives mainly on oil and gas exports, it can’t happen that we run out of petrol. But there’s no petrol at the second petrol station either. The needle on the petrol gauge slowly jerks and the car hiccups. “There’s a big crisis. People have no money. Take it from me, you can change a dollar in the bank for three and a half manat. At the market you get… sixteen, twenty, seventeen…” he muses. “…about seventeen manats to a dollar. Seventeen! Do you understand?” He starts pulling bills out of his pocket and folding them on his lap. “One, two, seven, seventeen! Seventeen manats. Where did you change yours? Do you have any money? How many manats do you have? Well, show it to me, I’ll count it. Well, come on, show me!” My paranoia about undercover cops has growed since my visit to Iran the year before last when they tried to find out if I’m gay. And China. They’re everywhere. Maybe even here. This gentleman is definitely one of them. He won’t catch me. After seeing them quite clearly recording our conversation last year in a cafe and translating it in realtime with a translator into their language, my paranoia is reaching Lexaurin and Blackberry Express levels. “We changed at the bank. Exchange rate three and a half. Gee, we’re stupid. I won’t show, it’s okay.” Because if you get caught making an illegal exchange, they’ll confiscate all the money you have on you. Quite a temptation for a corrupt cop.
******
The next stage of stubborn silence is interrupted by the muttered half-singing of the driver as he drives past a scrubby, overgrown graveyard. “This is where our ancestors lie, you must pray here. You put your hands in front of your face, both wrists together. Fingers and palms apart…” he points to us and we repeat out of respect for his ancestors. After all, it’s nothing new to us, almost everyone prays like that here. “…and then aameen.” and washes his face with his hands symbolically. Not long ago we received training from a gentleman in Nachchivan that only one word in the world has universal meaning and that is the sacred prasl “amen”. It may be pronounced slightly differently in all religions, in Christianity it is “amen”, in Buddhism it is “oom”, in Islam it is “aameen”, but the meaning of this prasl remains the same.
*******
Mr. Hamster drops us all the way to Balkanabat in front of his house, invites us for samsa and watermelon (…the serving wenches grin blushingly as they serve plates of hot samsa, the sunlight from the street streaming through their long flowing dresses. It’s forty-nine degrees outside. It is quite obvious that they are not wearing panties. Hello Iran.) and after lunch she shyly invites us to her home. The hospitality here is somehow different from what we’re used to, people only invite each other over after a long conversation and only if they like each other. Too bad we are so time-constrained, I would have gone now. I don’t think the gentleman’s a secret one. He’s more likely to just be himself. We apologize and say our goodbyes, heading out of the square back towards the highway, the gentleman standing next to the watermelons, tapping Monty’s head ruefully.
********
We continue on relentlessly in my private race called “get as much of any thing done in twenty-five hours”, with a plan to hitchhike as much as possible, talk as much as possible, see as much as possible, experience as much as possible, wait and walk as little as possible, sleep as little as possible. It’s a great plan on paper. After five days of waiting for and on the ship, sleeping on the floor in the departure lounge, in a cabin where it’s about forty degrees, arriving at midnight, sleeping on a bench in the arrival lounge for five hours… it seems a little less awesome.
*********
Meanwhile, a family jumps out of a passing car, wallets in hand, already calling from a distance: “A dollar? Dollar? Remember the dongs?” Change money. They don’t look like secrets, but a sure thing is a sure thing. Foreign currency is unavailable in the country, banks only change money one way (from dollars to manats) so locals go to Uzbekistan to withdraw dollars from ATMs to maintain at least some standard of living. Inflation has been high in the last few months and all goods are getting more expensive. We say we are hitchhiking. “Oh no, go to the bus station, the stop is bad here, nobody stops!” they advise us, then hop back on the crowded Lada and turn back into town.
**********
Next thing you know, a boy of about twenty-five with perfect English pulls up. He’s studying school in Italy and has been given a three-year scholarship by an oil company, with the understanding that he will then work for them in Turkmenistan. Now he’s home for the holidays. “Do you want to exchange money? I have a friend, we can go there now.” Nope, another clear undercover. Thanks, mate, we’d better try the ATM. We know the exchange rate’s bad. And a Lexaurin to go with it. Choosing your criminal is harder than choosing who you’re gonna spend the next night in bed with. You know these guys aren’t ideal, and you have your doubts, but you also know that if you put off your decision too long, you’ll reach a critical stage, so the final choice will basically be a matter of chance. We have 210 manats left, which is somewhere around 280 crowns. We’ll survive a day or two.
***********
With screeching brakes, a car with three exuberant ladies in their forties stops us at the Karakum irrigation canal (yes, it’s the one that caused Lake Aral to dry up and caused the biggest ecological disaster in the history of the USSR, right after the nuclear firing ranges in Kazakhstan, but they don’t talk about those so much in high school geography textbooks – by the way, this irrigation canal is still working). The glitter attempts to drown out the full-blown radio with current Russian hits such as “The smell of my wife, I want to stay with her”, which does not evoke in the average Czech listener the image of a lady being scented by Chanel Five, as the Russian filmmakers probably dreamed it up, but rather evokes a six-foot beaver crawling out of a clay box. However, the pop hit of Russian Mikhail Fatty’s “Spasíba što já na svetě” will become the anthem of the coming days. The ladies, with a boisterous bounce in their 100s, jump over all the motorway speed bumps and drop us off at the Arçman spa complex, where they’re off to enjoy a two-day ladies’ night out. But our day isn’t over yet. It’s slowly getting dark and we catch the last car.
************
“My wife is an engineer and hasn’t been able to find a job here for three years. There’s just no work here.” complains the fat man, who can barely fit in the seat of his shot-up Toyota SUV, as the screen plays provocative clips of half-naked female singers with pole dancers and Japanese bondage. “There’s a terrible crisis. The biggest one in the last year. I think we’ll go back to Russia to work. I can’t go there now because I’ve been deported and I’m banned for ten years, but that expires next year,” he grins with both chins, “I’m a criminal.” The conversation about fishing is interrupted by a sweet young woman’s voice from the phone. He shouts back into the handsfree. “Coming, baby!” and turns to us. “I’m sleeping in a hotel tonight. I’ve got bread and sausages, don’t you want some? I dont need it. And take water!” We say goodbye, eat sausages on the highway, and are somehow glad that traditional Czech values of whoring are cheerfully observed here.
*************
At two in the morning and still in forty degrees we pitch our tent in the swamp next to the highway near Gök Depe. Exhausted, I hear the creeping footsteps of the reed puma, a rare species of puma that lives only in my mind. These five days are going to be tough.
