Fire! Fire!: Darvaza

One of the coolest things I did in Turkmenistan was to visit the Darvaza burning gas crater. This is in the middle of nowhere, about a three-hour drive through the desert north of Ashgabat.

It’s 60 meters in diameter and was apparently created sometime in the 50s when the Soviets were prospecting for natural gas in this area. That’s all the guidebook says, and when we got there I asked my guide for a more complete explanation. So, how exactly was this made, I asked. “It was natural,” was the answer. So, I still don’t know. If anyone has any information I’d be very grateful to hear it.

But no matter how it was created, it’s super cool. When I read about it I imagined a sort of single flame, like a Bunsen burner in the desert. But it’s in fact dozens of fires of various sizes. It’s mesmerizing to watch, though unfortunately (and unsurprisingly) it’s really hot when you get close to it, so I could only stand to be next to it for a few minutes at a time.

Apparently animals find it mesmerizing, as well. I heard that there is a time of year when spiders run, in the thousands, into the crater like lemmings. I didn’t see that, but I did see moths literally drawn to the flame. The light was so bright that it illuminated even these little moths so well that at first I thought they were birds. After a few seconds flitting above the crater, though, they would suddenly stop flapping their wings and plummet into the fire. I did see some birds do roughly the same thing, as well, and hawks would also hunt the smaller birds that were flying over the crater, making this definitely the hub of animal life in the desert.

We camped out near the crater, and it was pretty fun. My guide made up for his lack of knowledge about the crater by barbecuing some excellent meat, and the driver brought some homemade “vodka.” When I asked how he made the vodka, he said he got some sort of high-quality Ukrainian pure grain alcohol and mixed it with spring water. That was it. And it sounded like a recipe for disaster. (He said of the Ukrainian alcohol, “It’s the best that you can get in Turkmenistan,” and I couldn’t tell if that was bragging or apologizing.) But it was actually quite tasty, and made us all giddy without being disoriented, and has made me vow to look into Ukrainian spirits importers when I get back to the US.