Turkmenistan's archaeological highlights are vast, hugely unexplored, and poorly publicised. Which is great, because when you get the chance to visit them, you can do so without any other tourists around, meaning you can get a much better impression of the atmosphere.

Gonur Depe is a 4500 year old settlement, which practised advanced pottery making, as well as bronze making, and is also thought to be a possible birthplace of the Zoroastrian religion. The site is only accessible after an hour long drive through seemingly empty tracts of desert, but once you are there, you can stroll unmolested through huge pottery kilns, gaze on ancient burial sites (where human and animal skeletons rest alongside magnificent ceramics, and wonderful bronze artefacts (chariot wheels, cauldrons, swords etc...). The subsequent realignment of the Oxus River meant that the rich agricultural land around Gonur Depe became barren, and the settlement importance diminished as people moved away, eventually abandoning it entirely.

Nearby, the Silk Road city of Merv (inhabited from around 600BC - 1300AD) is another magnificent site, from a different age. Successive colonisations (by Parthians, Greeks, Arabs and so on) saw the area become rich in culture and diversity. Amazingly, despite being made largely of mud brick, many of the buildings survive to this day, on a site that is now totally uninhabited. Shrubs and trees, nibbled by roaming camels, are the otherwise empty buildings' current tenants, giving the place a bizarre and dusty atmosphere. Silk caravans used to pass through the area, taking wealth east and west, and making the city one of the most important and wealthy of the last Silk Road period. Unfortunately, Jengiz Khan put an end to all that when his ambassador was murdered in the twelfth / thirteenth century. He came with an army, razed quite a lot of the city to the ground, and killed 95% of the population (around 200,000 people). I wonder if he had a troubled childhood or something.