Turkmenistan, Part 3 – Darvaza Gas Crater

Following previous posts on our trip to Turkmenistan, as part of our Silk Road adventure, we found ourselves arriving at the Darvaza Gas Crater, at 8pm, as the sun was going down, after a 4 hour drive through the desert from Ashgabat.

Sometimes nicknamed the “Gates of Hell,” Darvaza is a sinkhole-like crater that’s been burning since the 1970’s, when the Soviets made a mistake drilling for natural gas. Now it’s a tourist attraction, though recently, the government has been trying to reduce the size of the fire by drilling parallel gas wells. (Note that our visit was in June 2025, and seems like the government might be working to eliminate the flames entirely).

When we arrived, we were initially disappointed by the size of the flames. Our guide told us that, while the flames were lower than a few months back, it would look better at night. (Hint: he was right).

Dinner

After our initial late afternoon glimpse of the crater, we checked into a yurt camp that was a 5 minute walk away. We took a few minutes to unpack into our yurt and washed up in the communal (but reasonable) bathroom. And then we had dinner as the sun was setting. It was a nice setting, and the camp did a good job at the dinner, with the typical regional dishes like plov.

Our guide told us that this current yurt camp was largely built during the Covid shutdowns. With tours cancelled, the company’s guides and staff were paid to help construct the camp so that the tour employees could maintain some income.

View at Dark

By the time dinner ended, the sun set and it was fairly dark. Our guide walked us back to the crater, and the views were in fact much nicer! We walked all the way around the crater, trying not to get too close – since it’s effectively a sinkhole.

There were some places where we felt safe getting fairly closer to the edge, while in other places, the heat was a bit much. As we took photos, our guide tried to take some cinematic Instagram-style videos of us by the crater, but we might not have been cool enough for that.

The gas crater was memorable, and happy that we saw it.

Hedgehogs!

One silly thing, on the way back to the camp – the camp intentionally had a flock of hedgehogs, to control nearby insects and pests. My teenage son really liked the hedgehogs (they were quite neat actually), and our guide noticed. So the camp staff started gathering the hedgehogs for him, and throwing them kitchen scraps to get them to come. The hedgehogs are very prickly when their fur is up!

After a while, we went to sleep in our yurt. The temperature was somewhat hot at first, but the desert eventually cooled down. We told that, occasionally, folks get the idea of trying to sleep outdoors, but that this is ill-advised given desert spiders. Note that spring/fall months are nicer times to visit the desert, but you sometimes travel when you can.

Breakfast and Trek to the Border

The next morning, I saw the sun rise – the desert is so much nicer at sunrise and sunset than mid-day! We then had breakfast in the camp. After packing up, we were on our way in the 4×4, probably by 7:30.

One particularly interesting sight was a herd of 200+ camels (according to the driver’s estimation) walking through the desert. We also saw a particularly curious camel walking near our car on the highway.

It was roughly a 4 hour drive through the desert to get to the Dashoguz border area with Uzbekistan; our next stop in Uzbekistan was to be Khiva. We stopped for snacks along the way. As on the drive to the Darvaza Crater, the desert road was quite rough in spots.

It was kind of surreal to be on our way out of Turkmenistan, after having planned this portion of the trip for 6+ months! Our Turkmen guide helped us through the passport control, and we said goodbye. Our guide here had been a lot of fun to spend a couple of days with, and he seemed to genuinely love showing us some highlights of his country.

Crossing the land border on foot took us a little under an hour, which was an improvement on the 2.5 hours it took to cross into Turkmenistan. We had to show our passport 9 times, take an internal shuttle, and get our luggage x-rayed twice. These borders are fairly substantial!

On the Uzbek side of the border, our phone data started working again, and we were met by our driver who drove us an hour to our hotel in Khiva.