Have Money, Live Better. Turkmenistan. - NotCompeting

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Have Money, Live Better. Turkmenistan.

NotCompeting<br>Jun 01, 2026

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We did a three-day guided tour in Turkmenistan, which is easily the weirdest place I’ve visited.1<br>Turkmenfacts

Population : 7 million people (disputed)<br>GDP per capita, PPP : $21,000 (disputed)<br>Economy : Has the 5th largest reserves of natural gas on earth. The gas was exported to Russia until a payments dispute shut it off, exported to Iran until a payments dispute shut it off, and is now piped overwhelmingly to Xinjiang in China. There is active construction on the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India(!!) gas pipeline, which sounds like the most difficult negotiation in human history, but vast amounts of hydrocarbons are apparently a strong motivator.<br>Ethnic mix : 85% Turkmen, 9% Uzbek<br>Religious mix : 95% Islam<br>Political trajectory : Gained independence from the USSR in 1991, was run by Saparmurat Niyazov (at independence, secretary of the communist party of Turkmenistan) until his death in 2006, subsequently by the still-living Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow, and since 2022 by his son Serdar Berdimuhamedow. 2nd president still has influence behind the scenes/might still be directly running things. Various elections occurred while all this was going on, exactly none of which meant anything. President #1 aka Niyazov ran a full-on personality cult calling himself Turkmenbasy i.e. “leader of the Turkmen”, which is now the name of the major port city on the Caspian. He also wrote a book called the Ruhnama (to be discussed later). This plus other stuff has given the country the nickname “The North Korea of Central Asia.”<br>Subscribe to get new posts!!

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Visiting The North Korea of Central Asia

To not bury the lede, I think the nickname misses a more interesting (and probably worse) dynamic. My understanding of North Korea is that basically no one lives a normal-by-western-standards life (if nothing else, travel to not-China is restricted to a microscopic elite). There isn’t some group of North Korean doctors and software engineers who go on vacations, consume global culture, have a reasonable understanding of rest-of-world living standards etc., everyone is in the crazy boat together.<br>Our only unstructured time on the tour came in the form of wandering a luxury mall in the capital Ashgabat. The prime advertising real estate (the underside of the escalators) was occupied by a cell plan touting Dubai and Bangkok roaming:

(Side note: my Verizon plan advertises free international roaming in 205 countries, more than the UN acknowledges, and I have never had it not work before. After crossing the border, I was informed that Turkmenistan is not in that very extensive list and I would now be paying $2 per megabyte. Turn on airplane mode on arrival!)<br>We ate in a (mediocre) Turkish restaurant on the top floor, where the woman eating next to us was practicing her Russian on Duolingo. Halfway through our meal, my ears were violated by an absurdly loud soundtrack of western pop music, accompanied by a man dancing in a Labubu costume to entertain the kids while parents ate.

If the dancing Labubu wasn’t keeping their interest, the kids could also ride around on a miniature (but functional, internal stairway and all) London double-decker bus that was doing loops around the top floor. You could at least guess you were in Central Asia because all families had a minimum of two kids.<br>After eating dinner, we went to the basement and ended up playing pingpong against some university students hanging out after class. They were studying economics, spoke good English, and said Ashgabat was a pretty good place to live. Our first tour guide (whose heart wasn’t really in it, apparently he signed up as a second job to help a friend who organizes the tours) had spent several years studying in the US and had a better knowledge of the 2026 NBA playoffs than me. The tour guide, students, and mall-goers were obviously privileged, but I don’t think they were members of a microscopic political elite (the guide didn’t even grow up in Ashgabat). I don’t even think the tour company was trying to give a particular impression, since we only got to the mall by refusing their suggestion of hotel dinner. Clipping those 8 hours would give the impression of Turkmenistan as a generic (with high inequality, but ehh) petrostate.<br>The Rest of our Turkmentrip

The rest of the 72 hours managed to do a very good job dispelling the notion of Turkmenistan as a normal country. We arrived at the land border with stacks of $20USD notes and were first told to pay for a COVID PCR test, that was brushed like a feather over our nostrils and placed into a box, never to be examined again.2 After 3 hours of nonsense navigated by our guide, we entered the country and began the first task of acquiring cash. The official exchange rate of 1USD to 3.5 Manat would make domestic prices higher than Switzerland or...