I flew out of Istanbul late Sunday and arrived at the Ashgabat airport early this morning at 02:00. It is a miserable arrival time, but it is fairly typical for the flights from Europe into Central Asia.
Immediately upon entering the airport I got a sense of how fancy many of the Ashgabat public buildings are!
To get a tourist visa you need to book a tour, and none of these are cheap, at least as far as my research found. I used Stantours, who charged me $650 USD for the three day visit. This price seems typical or even on the lower side. The price included arranging the visa, including providing me with a letter of invitation; pick up and transportation from the airport to my hotel; hotel for two nights in Ashgabat; yurt for one night (and dinner and breakfast) at the Darwaza gas crater; transportation from Ashgabat to Darwaza to the Uzbekistan border; and support as required (for example, black market currency exchange). It does NOT include whatever the Turkmenistan authorities charge you at the airport, nor does it apparently facilitate an easy process getting through the airport... You have to queue for your visa, then go to another desk to pay a fee, then go back to the visa desk to show your receipt before they give you back your passport, then go get a COVID test (seriously, they are still doing COVID tests in mid-2025), before you can finally go through passport control. Keep in mind, too, that one is doing this at all in the middle of the night! I was charged $85 USD per below... $70 for the visa, and the other two lines seem to translate as "real cost" and "for drinking" so who knows what those are for.
Then the COVID test cost me $31 and actually there was another $14 for something else that I really do not understand. So, wallet lighter by $130 USD, I walked out of the secure area and found my pick up, Dias. Dias told me the one hour it took me to get to him from my flight was fast and often it takes two hours. Dear god...
The exterior of the Ashgabat airport is quite impressive, even at night. It is shaped like an eagle. You can also see in this photo already that all the vehicles in Ashgabat are white (or silver, but mostly white).
Here are some poor photos from the moving car that I took in the twenty minutes or so as we drove from the airport to my hotel. They give a sense of how clean and manicured Ashgabat is.
Close to my hotel we passed the Olympic Park with the main stadium with the large horse head and an elevated rail line all around it (which apparently no longer operates).
At my hotel, Dias checked me in without issue, then sat down with me to explain a few things and, most importantly, get me some Turkmen manat cash. The official exchange rate is 3.5 manat to $1 USD, but the black market rate is more like 19 or 20 to 1! Dias gave me 600 manat and asked for $30, then did the calculation on his phone and asked me if I had $1 because $31 was more fair. I gather this was fair, but really I had no way to know. One thing that surprised me is how comfortable Dias was doing this black market exchange in the lobby of the hotel, presumably with cameras on us, because I had heard that it is truly illegal to change money like this. Who knows...
Dias said 600 manat was likely sufficient for my three days, or at least my two days in Ashgabat since a meal would only be 100 manat or less. In other words, although it is expensive to get in, once you are in Turkmenistan it can be pretty cheap!
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