Journey Around the 5 Stans: The Hole Thing!

Ken Powell a seasoned globe-trotter and experienced photographer (powellphotography.ca), blogs (powellponderings.com) about his journey with Adventures Abroad’s 21 Day Five Stans Tour, which covers Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan. His insights, images, and expertise offer a wonderful glimpse into this extraordinary tour.

The Karakum Desert is home to a huge natural gas crater, about 260 km from Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan. To reach the Darvaza gas crater a very long drive in our 4×4 vehicles took place over a “highway” that has not been maintained for years. Asphalt had once graced the surface, but it has mostly disintegrated. It wasn’t just rough, the vehicles encountered huge holes that just needed to be avoided. Speed was not possible (oh, the drivers tried!) so jerking and swerving was the hour-by-hour experience (nearly nine hours in and out).

A magnificent sunset graced us as we arrived and checked into our yurt. The site has become a tourist attraction, so a development has sprung up near the crater complete with a number of yurts to bed down in plus restaurant facilities.

Around the Yurts. Video by Brendan Powell.

The yurt, by the way, is a fairly large round tent covered and insulated with skins or felt, with a door but no windows. Ours had two beds and a place to hold your clothes. Traditionally they were used as a dwelling by nomadic groups, and thus are portable and can be assembled and taken down quickly. Washroom facilities are somewhere else.

Crater Approach. Video by Brendan Powell.

After dinner, we walked over in the dark about half a kilometre to check out this strange phenomenon. Hundreds of natural gas fires illuminate the floor of a huge crater, sized about 30 metres deep from the rim of the crater and about 70 metres across. It was surreal and sort of attractive, like Christmastime when all the lights get hung up.

Nighttime at Darvaza Gas Crater. Video by Brendan Powell.

More of the Darvaza Gas Crater. Video by Brendan Powell.

It’s also called the “Door to Hell” or the “Gates of Hell” by locals – for a reason. Dante couldn’t have done a better job at creating an entrance to where I probably will end up when I finally kick the bucket.

In an interview with National Geographic, a scientist who was the first person to set foot at the bottom of the crater said: “I describe it as a coliseum of fire – just everywhere you look it’s thousands of these small fires. The sound was like that of a jet engine, this roaring, high-pressure, gas-burning sound. And there was no smoke. It burns very cleanly, so there’s nothing to obscure your view. You can just see every little lick of flame.”

There are confusing tales regarding the origins of this crater. One assertion is that the site was drilled by Soviet engineers in 1971 as an oil field but it collapsed within days, forming the crater, with the engineers choosing to flare the crater to prevent the emission of poisonous gases. Some local geologists have claimed that the crater collapse happened in the 1960s and that it was set on fire only in the 1980s to prevent the emission of poisonous gases. Strangely, records are either absent from the archives, classified, or inaccessible. My own take is that the Russians tried to drill and really mucked it up, and just let it burn.

In the morning it took another four hours in our 4-wheel drive cars dodging potholes and photographing camels to reach Ashgabat.