Hitchhiking to Turkmenistan’s capital

Just before I took this picture I got my first police warning: I wasn’t allowed to take a picture of a big golden statue. The hitchhiking was tough because I discovered that almost all drivers in Turkmenistan ask for money. Basically any car can be a taxi. Which makes the hitchhiking tough. I communicate with Google Translate which makes everything more complicated. Furthermore everyone suggests to bring you to the ‘official taxi terminal’ for a little amount of money. They just don’t understand that I want to stay at the main road instead of going into town. That’s why I needed 6 different cars to get passed a medium sized town. After that, I finally got a long distance lift from a really kind man. Unfortunately the maximum speed at the highway is about 70 km/h. This is partly because of the bad road conditions, but mainly because everyone carefully follows the traffic rules (which wasn’t the case in most countries I visited so far). They all seem quite scared to do something wrong. So covering a distance of 400km took me almost the whole day. But hey; I made it to the capital by hitchhiking and I got a first impression of the country and culture.