Last week I spent four days on the road, speaking at the American Corner in Turkmenabat, meeting with local businessmen, and visiting Hojambaz out of curiosity–it is an out-of-the-way city, and I adhere to the philosophy that you cannot know a country by sitting in the capital. You have to get out and see as much of the country as possible if you want to understand it.

Of course, during the trip I collected geodata while going from appointment to appointment. Several villages got identified from ground truth, we found a few new gas stations, collected some street names in populated areas, and perhaps most important, I ran down some minor anomalies on the map of Turkmenabat, which is Turkmenistan’s second-largest city. A couple of major streets’ names were misspelled, and that has now been corrected based on ground truth. A dead end was discovered and mapped in a section of town that previously had been better connected. Errors in nomenclature of major POIs were corrected (e.g., the Lebap Province Library is not the “city library”). Along the way I collected over 28,000 Mapillary images, which are now being uploaded.

We took the P-39 highway to Hojambaz. Between the China National Petroleum Company’s camp at kilometer 21 and the connector to the Amu Darya bridge it is horrible. We traversed 200 kilometers in six hours, for an average speed of 33 kph. We worried about the return, as another six hours would have us driving in the dark, but locals advised us to take “the Chinese highway” (“Hitaý ýoly” in Turkmen), which CNPC built a few years ago but which we had never heard of. With the help of directions from locals, we found it, and discovered a smooth ribbon of asphalt that took us to the 21-kilometer signpost within a couple of hours. That route is now on OSM, too.

The sun had set by the time we returned to Turkmenabat, and the Silk Road Monument was lit up. Click here to see what it looked like!