Since departing Ashgabat, I have not collected much imagery, but anticipating that I will get back into it soon, I decided to invest in a dedicated smart phone just for that purpose–nothing fancy, just something with enough RAM not to crash and able to accommodate a large SD card for storing images. The Mapillary website advises that the requirement for the Mapillary app is Android 4.0 or higher, so I bought a gently used, relatively inexpensive older model Samsung smartphone with Android 4.3. However, Google Play informed me that my newly acquired phone is incompatible with the Mapillary app since it requires Android 6.0 or higher. Google Play refused to install it, so I now have an extra Android smartphone which is essentially useless for the purpose for which I bought it!

Yes, I have pinged Mapillary and asked that its website be updated.

I have been asked to be the banquet speaker at the NACIS 2019 conference in Tacoma, Washington, on October 18th. The topic will be “Open Source Mapping in a Closed Society”, i.e., the cartographic work in Turkmenistan between 2015 and 2019. It is an honor to be asked to speak at the banquet, but I feel compelled to ask fellow mappers who followed my work in Turkmenistan: what points do YOU think I should be sure to cover in my presentation?

The last wall maps I generated of Ashgabat and Turkmenistan took a different turn, due to the heavy data requirements involved in a road atlas of the whole country. I was forced to learn Osmosis and the rudiments of Inkscape to edit SVG files first in order to reduce the volume of data and second to take the Maperitive-generated map and tweak it more easily. The lessons learned are now posted on the OSM wiki here. Comments on this tutorial are welcome.

Working with SVG images has its pros and cons, but on balance I think the map quality is better with this approach. That said, one can only wish that Inkscape and Osmosis were a bit more intuitive!

Ann and I have returned to the United States. I am presently uploading the last several thousand Mapillary ground-level images from a series of trips around Turkmenistan made in my final weeks in country. When they are uploaded, that will be it for local imagery collection
:-(

I still have a few loose ends to tie up, including full analysis of geographic name changes, now documented at Turkmenistan Geoname Changes, plus full analysis of the Soviet military maps currently en route to our home in our sea freight from Ashgabat, and of course a fresh writeup of how to generate wall maps using a combination of Osmosis, Maperitive, Inkscape, and Corel Photo Paint. These efforts will compete with the need to effect some urgent repairs to our house, which we have not occupied for 16 years and which our tenants of course rather neglected.

Not quite the last hurrah, but close. With three weeks left in Turkmenistan, Ann and I went to Koneurgench to see the marvelous architectural monuments, to the Dashoguz American Corner to give presentations (mine was on the Apollo 11 moon landing and U.S. space program; Ann’s was on White House chinaware). While moving around, we of course collected geodata and imagery.

We had a couple of spare hours during the return, so we went north up the P-1 highway past Ruhubelent to cover a section never before imaged (I will upload the Mapillary imagery after returning to the United States this month, where the Internet is much faster). The road was horrible! It took an hour and a quarter to go 50 kilometers, and at times we drove on the sand because it was smoother than the broken asphalt. Upon return to Ashgabat I logged into OSM and downgraded the P-1 north of Ruhubelent from trunk road to tertiary road. We identified several villages and other POIs, corrected one mistagged object (it was not a residential area, it was a cotton yard), and so on.

After almost four and a half years in Turkmenistan, Ann and I will depart in June upon completion of my tour of duty as U.S. ambassador here. My successor was confirmed by the U.S. Senate this week and so I must depart to make room for him. Since we started mapping Turkmenistan, we have posted over half a million ground-level images on Mapillary, over 280,000 edits, created these wiki articles:

and expanded the Turkmenistan wiki article to approximately 10,000 words. We have dug up authoritative lists of all municipalities in Turkmenistan, created from scratch a gazetteer of street names in Ashgabat, and added over 11 thousand roads and streets.

Alas, our contributions will mostly come to an end with our departure, but I hope that people I have trained over the past four years will continue to contribute to the Turkmenistan map in OSM.

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I have started a new wiki page to document changes to geographic names in Turkmenistan from 1992 forward. Since geographic names are established by the central government by decree or parliamentary resolution, there has to be an official document attesting to each change. My current intent is to collect as much information on name changes between 1992 and the present as possible, then to maintain the page into the future. With a lot of help from some friends in Ashgabat the page is started. There are still citations of government decrees and resolutions missing but with luck and more time perhaps we can find them, too. As time permits I hope to upload copies of the relevant decrees and resolutions for reference.

A rather interesting if eclectic collection of 45 interesting maps posted at https://www.farandwide.com/s/amazing-world-maps-74d6186e6d0e414b caught my eye. Here are some of the maps that caused me to stop and think.

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Ann and I found a steam locomotive on static display in Ashgabat yesterday! I’ve explored that neighborhood previously but not seen this!

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!

A friend got me a set of Soviet military maps dating to the 1970s and 1980s, which are uncopyrighted and unlike Soviet military maps of foreign countries contain original cartographic data and are not based on stolen copyrighted materials from foreign sources. I have thus begun examining them when the weather is bad for usable data. Two new route numbers emerged, the P-3 and P-10 national highways, which have been duly added to both the map and the Turkmenistan wiki article. The maps have also helped identify some villages on roads less traveled, where the names were preserved from the Soviet period into the current period (not many, but a few, and every little bit helps).

The map of Turkmenistan is actually useful. Today I needed to buy an elastic bandage, which involved a trip to a pharmacy. We have mapped enough pharmacies in Ashgabat that finding two pharmacies nearby was easy. The bandage was made in Dashoguz, and cost 16 manat (about $4.50 at the official exchange rate).

Well, not really, but welcome heavy rains are drenching Ashgabat and environs. This is good news for the wheat crop and sets the stage for successful cotton planting in another couple of weeks. This is a desert, so rains in winter and spring are a blessing.

For collecting ground-level imagery, of course, it’s not that good. Today I scouted a couple of textile mills to nail down their names, but could not really collect imagery, so did it the old-fashioned way–scribbled their names onto a FieldPapers printout. While at it I found a couple more street names in an Ashgabat suburb, Yasmansalyk, and then came home to update Bereket based on imagery collected some time back but never analyzed. So rainy days are good for something in cartography, too, not only agriculture!

The only way for certain to identify villages in Turkmenistan seems to be to drive to them, find the town hall (‘‘geňeş’’), and record the name either by photographing it or, if lighting and the angle don’t permit, punching it into the smartphone or GPS. Ann’s and my curiosity got the better of us so over the St. Patrick’s Day weekend we have identified the villages of Ahal obasy, Tagan Baýramdurdyýew adyndaky geňeşligi / Gökdepe obasy (yes, that’s the full name of the village), and Täze Eýýam, which has had its name changed officially.

I wish all mappers out there the luck of the Irish!

This weekend my hardworking laptop uploaded my 500,000th ground-level image to Mapillary. This is the single most extensive database of ground-level imagery for Turkmenistan anywhere. Others in the embassy have contributed roughly another quarter of a million images. We still have a few highways to collect but the bulk of major highways in Turkmenistan are now available to mappers anywhere in the world.

Friday, March 8, was International Women’s Day and thus a local holiday. I therefore had a three-day weekend for some exploration. In reviewing the OSM map I found some blank spots close to home, so probed nearby villages that were unidentified, explored unmapped roads, found a couple of farms and a fast food place, identified several factories, updated a town hall, and found a rather large cemetery way out in the boondocks as well as the municipal garbage dump and a satellite uplink station (just how does one tag a satellite uplink station, anyway?) In the process Ann and I gave away several sets of books of American children’s literature the embassy has had translated into Turkmen. The map is in a bit better shape and several Turkmen children have something to read! The three days passed in a flash, but this was one of the best three-day weekends ever.

Business took me to Dashoguz for three days, including surveys of the surrounding area and observation of conditions in rural villages. In the course of travel I collected over 30,000 Mapillary images (now being uploaded, be patient!) plus eight previously unmapped gas stations. I also collected station numbers for two already on the map, and deleted station 40, since it has been demolished to make way for new residential apartment buildings.

My team and I also collected several dozen village names, as well as major streets and POIs in some of the towns and cities in Dashoguz province.

You might ask why gas station numbers are a focus. In Turkmenistan each station number is unique. If a traveler’s car breaks down, he will tend to look for the nearest gas station for help. If we have the database of gas station numbers in OSM, it will be easier for friends to find broken down motorists stranded at a gas station. We also collect hospitals and clinics, and map them, as well as police and government offices.

Bouygues, the French construction firm, has won tenders for five new buildings, and they are well underway: two bank headquarters, a new state tribune, a convention center, and a luxury hotel. Rönesans of Turkey has two more contracts, an expansion of the Nusay Hotel and construction of the Garagum Hotel near the airport. GAP Inşaat of Turkey is building a new burn center (hospital) on Bekewe köçesi. I’ve added those construction sites to the map and where possible have added photos of the billboards about the projects to Mapillary, such as this one for the convention center.

My current effort is to finish collecting gas stations so that travelers in Turkmenistan can easily find them, and to geolocate and label properly the major performing arts centers in provincial capitals. We stage our summer and winter film showings in these theaters, and I was surprised to discover that while on the map they were not tagged properly.

Haven’t finished uploading the images from the last trip and this weekend collected about 30,000 more on a three-day excursion to Turkmenbashy via Balkanabat to open our winter film showings (“Black Panther”, “Home”, and “Princess and the Frog”) in those cities. Updated the maps for Balkanabat and Jebel a bit, cleaned up the M37 highway, deleted a demolished gas station, and generally cleaned up the map along that highway in a few places. Ashgabat to Turkmenbashy is about 600 kilometers one way, so we did ok on data collection.

The previous weekend Ann and I visited Gokdepe and identified two hospitals plus explored some residential developments under construction. Lots of updates!

Sunday I had to go to Mary to open our winter film festival, after which I went down to Yoloten and doubled back on the P-25 highway to Bayramaly, a road not traveled by anyone in the embassy in living memory. On that section of the P-25 we confirmed one gas station I was 99% sure from imagery was indeed a gas station, and we found three more that were not obvious in the imagery. We added other POIs found along the way and I am presently uploading about 10,000 ground-level images to Mapillary.

Of course, the best part of the day was fresh fish for lunch at the Lebap Cafe in Hanhowuz, deep fried in cottonseed oil.