It was around 1am by the time we all made it off the ferry. We were guided off & told to drive towards a building about 200 meters away & park. We had no idea if this was passport control or not. There were no signs to say what anything was. We parked up & along with the other two teams who were with us we made our way to the building, documents in hand. There was a small window with 3 people in an office behind. They filled in some paperwork, scanned our documents & told us all to pay USD$13 for each car. Still not sure what it was for but we paid it & got a receipt.
The guard who was escorting us then jumped in the cab of one of the trucks who was with us & told us all to follow the truck. We duly followed & slowly made our way around what appeared to be a huge military compound. After driving completely blind & going through vehicle X-ray machines we found ourselves at another building. We were told to park & get out of cars & wait at a seating area outside the building. None of us had a clue what was happening & the language barrier wasn’t helping. We assumed the building we were now outside was the border control so fingers crossed they will call us in shortly.
Sadly we weren’t that lucky. After about an hour we all started to doze off on the metal benches. Gradually we started to spread out & each take bench to sleep on. We may have got some sleep except the benches were the equivalent of 3 metal chairs welded together & there was nothing that was going to get rid of the bars. After a couple of hours it seemed we had all given up on getting through the border control so we all slowly made our way to our cars one by one. We each got our sleeping mats out of our cars & finally managed to get some sleep.
We woke the next morning as the sun came up. It was about 40 degrees already. Still no one could tell us what we should do or when the border control would open. After some persistence one of the guards told us the office would open at 9am. Only a couple of hours to wait, we can do that.
9am came & went & still the office wasn’t open. We were all starting to get a little fed up. We couldn’t get any information from the border guards & the morning was getting hotter. Eventually the team from Oz walked into the office & it was open. It seemed people were working in the office but they weren’t to keen to start processing us. We handed over our passports & went back to sitting on the floor or the baggage X-ray machine. After what seemed an age we were called back for our passports & given a pile of paperwork. We were then instructed to go to the office next door & pay for our visas. Once we had paid for our visas we had to pass some more paperwork back to the officials who added the visa stickers. Next we were told to go to another office. They then filled in some more paperwork & sent us to the office next door. This process went on for sometime. Constantly going backwards & forwards, completing paperwork, getting stamps & paying more money.
Finally at around 3pm, 5 hours after we handed our passports over we were allowed to leave the border control & enter Turkmenistan.
