A burning pit in the Karakum, the road to it, and why daylight wastes the trip.
About two hundred and sixty kilometres north of Ashgabat, beside the village of Darvaza, a pit some seventy metres across burns in the sand. It has burned for decades, and locally it is called the Gates of Hell — a name that has travelled so well that people who know nothing else about Turkmenistan know it.
The usual account is that the crater opened during drilling and the gas was set alight so that it would not poison the area, and that it never went out. The date given is the early 1970s. Every guidebook repeats it; documentary evidence is thin and the date is disputed. The honest version: the pit is man-made, it has burned a very long time, and nobody can produce a paper saying exactly how long.
**Go at night.** By day it is a shallow grey hollow with the air shaking above it; the photographs people come for happen when everything around is dark. So the standard shape of the trip is to leave Ashgabat in the afternoon, arrive at sunset, sleep beside it in a yurt camp or tents, and drive back in the morning.
The road: tarmac to the turning, then a few kilometres of sand that only a four-wheel drive will cross. An ordinary car does not get there. That is not caution, it is a fact.
What to bring: warm clothes — the desert is cold at night in any season, July included; more water than seems necessary; and a torch. There is no railing at the edge and no light but the fire.
Worth knowing that the authorities have more than once announced an intention to extinguish it. For now it burns, but nobody can promise it will still be burning in five years.