The Midnight Train to Ashgabat

Last month, two other volunteers and me needed to come into Ashgabat and decided to take the train. When we arrived at the train station at 11:00pm, hundreds of Turkmen occupied the seats with either themselves or their plastic "dayza bags". Seeing the futility of waiting for one of the Turkmen to get up we headed outside to wait.
The night had a bit of chill to it and the scene that met us was one out of the movies. A rusty and dingy freight train waited on the far tracks and reminded me of almost every WWII movie I have seen. It could have been the train or the multitude of soliders and policemen who were roaming the platform that made me a bit apprehensive.
Nevertheless, being the PCVs that we were, we wanted to capture the moment. We took out our cameras and snapped a couple of shots of the train and the surrounding Turkmen.
Our presence did not go unnoticed at the station, as people passed by we were greeted with open mouthed stares. One poor child, a Turkmen boy who looked to be about 5, actually walked into a pole while he was looking at us.
The train's arrival was announced by a woman's voice crackling over a speaker that I had only seen in movies before, a giant rusty bullhorn on top of a 40 foot pole, giving off a cracking sound before and after the announcement. The train had arrived exactly as scheduled at 11:30 pm.
We waited for our turn to board the train as bags and children were passed up the steep steps. The first thing that hit me upon boarding was the prominent smell of urine. The cabins were placed on the left of a narrow hallway, already crowded with kids, bags of vegetables and Turkmen men hanging out the windows smoking.
I glanced at my ticket and then at the bunk numbers ascending from 20 in our car. I saw 6-8 people crammed into each cabin along with all of their belongings which made the cabins look more like closets of people than of actual sleeping areas. The closer I got to our cabin the worse the smell became, until I finally realized that our cabin was right next to the toilet. The smell was absolutely foul and I was certain that it wasn't just my American nose that thought so. Two Turkmen men headed toward the Ukraine had hankerchiefs over their noses as they sat and talked on the bottom bunk of our cabin.
The train began to roll, much like the complaints of the smell from my fellow PCVs. Having to rush to make the station on time, I did not have the time to properly relieve myself before we left and the thought of holding it for eight hours did not seem humanly possible. I hopped down from the top bunk, told my fellow PCVs that I would be back and stepped out of our cabin.
With a deep breath and a bit of courage, I opened up the toilet door.
The sight that I saw was unlike anything that I have seen in my life. The toilet was not so much a toilet as a rusty steel basin that had a hole that led directly to the tracks below. The floor had a brown sludge that I could only hope was dirt from people's shoes.
Just as I had steadied myself on a part of the tile that didn't seem to have any brown on it, I remembered one of the unique Turkmen superstitions. According to Turkmen lore, ladies of all ages should not go to the bathroom directly over the hole for the toilet because it will make them infertile. This tale, and the uneven sways of the train over the 50 year old track, made me realize that I was now in possibly the nastiest toilet in the world.
A minute later I emerged from the bathroom and stuck my head out the open train window, grateful for the fresh air. I took a couple of deep breaths and noticed that the stars of the midnight train were clearer than any I had seen since being in Turkmenistan.
The rest of the trip continued much like the first hour, with the notable exception, of course, of not having to go to the bathroom again and my fellow travelers gradually slipping off to sleep as the train made its slow ascent toward Ashgabat. We arrived in Ashgabat at 8:30am and I think for the first time in our lives we were thankful to breathe in city air that didn't leave a smell of urine in our noses.
Now some may say that I am biased or somewhat unfair in my judgement of the train from Mary to Ashgabat, but in case you needed a second opinion I have one. Recently, acclaimed travel writer Paul Theroux came and visited the American Corner in Mary. Paul has written numerous books where he traveled as far as one possibly could on a train starting in Europe and ending in Instanbul. We had a chance to go out to dinner with him after his brief presentation to our students. When I asked him what he thought of the train from Ashgabat to Mary, he said that it was one of the most unique and vile trains that he had ever been on.
So there you have it ...the midnight train to Ashgabat. I doubt that Gladys Knight and the Pips would have had much to sing about if instead of their "Midnight Train to Georgia" they would have been riding along next to the Turkmenistan Peace Corps Volunteers on their way to Ashgabat.