5am... knock, knock! Who's there? Why the skipper of course, miming for us to pack our things - we are here! Turkmenbashi! At last!

I wake Fintan up and start shoving our things into the bags ready to race off the ship in a minute, Fintan is looking for his razor - shave!? Now?! In these crucial few minutes?! Of course, it took us about an hour and a half to get off the ship, so I had nothing to fret about really, I just wanted to get off the ferry and be in Turkmenistan. There was a fair amount of walking up and down the ship, for one thing locating the skipper again - he'd taken our passports for the duration of the trip. Once we got down to the car there seemed to be a mass decision by the Turkish truckers that Fintan needed a mans help to reverse off the ship and onto the dock... obviously, it would all go terribly wrong if I just did it! So after about 30 minutes of 8 guys yelling and waving madly to Fintan he ended up closer to the wall of the ship and no closer to the dock. They gave up and let us get out ourselves, which took maybe 5 minutes... ha ha ha!

Into Customs and Immigration, another step closer... the office seemed to be bustling with people, but no one paid any attention to either Fintan and myself or Tobias, the German motorcyclist. Until our tour guides arrived that is! Savkat - our guide - arrived and took control. He and Fintan paraded around 8 offices, got all the stamps and papers, while I sat in the corner with the bags and got haranged by the Turkish truckers some more, The customs officers gave a look around the car, and we were off! Not bad! We had heard horror stories of 10 hours waiting and really thorough searches, but we made it through in about 3 hours!

Good thing too! As the ship hadn't docked on time, we were behind schedule for our tour. They consider the guides time sitting/sleeping in a hotel waiting for us as "tour time" so unless we wanted to pay more for another day we had to get going! On to Ashgabat then... 9 hour drive, for Fintan - he hadn't gotten insurance for us both... The road was terrible! Poor Yoshimi got a proper battering, at least we'd got new suspension!

We stopped briefly for some dumpling soup and bathroom break - Fintan tried to discourage me saying I would be mentally scarred for life... I didn't think it was the worst squat toilet I'd ever seen, granted it was bad I'm not sure that even Mr Muscle would be able to do anything about that. But he and Savkat have the advantage of being able to jump out of the car nearly anywhere, I have to take the opportunities as it comes!

We arrived into Ashgabat by 7pm and drove down a large, and largely empty, 10 lane highway passed some of the ministry buildings. Ashgabat is also known as the Lover's City, translation of the Turkmen name, and the White City, because after the old city was destroyed by an earthquake the new president after independence decided everything should be built from white marble. Strange but true.

The architecture is grandiose. The Ministry for Education is designed to look like an open book, but even better the Ministry for Oil and Gas is designed in the shape of a giant lighter!! The Turkmen also claim to have the largest flag in the world at 300kg for the fabric. We stayed in Aziya Hotel which also housed a chinese restaurant. We were both so tired, but distrought when we got the the room and dance music was pumping out from next door. Little did we know there is a restriction that after 11pm all nightclubs must close. Not great for nightlife then, but good for us!