Darvaza Gas Crater

No photograph quite prepares you for the first look over the rim of the Darvaza gas crater — a bowl of fire roughly 70 metres across and 30 metres deep, burning alone in the silence of the Karakum Desert. Travelers call it the Door to Hell or the Gates of Hell; Turkmenistan officially named it the Shining of Karakum. How it was born is, fittingly, a mystery: the often-told version says a Soviet drilling rig punched into a gas cavern in 1971 and the ground gave way, while local geologists insist the collapse happened in the 1960s and the gas was only lit in the 1980s to stop poisonous fumes from spreading. The records are lost or classified — what is certain is that a fire expected to burn out within weeks has outlived the Soviet Union itself. Know before you go: the crater is quieter than it once was. In 2022 the government announced plans to extinguish it, and surveys show the flames have lost more than three quarters of their heat over the past few years. It still glows — hypnotic after dark, when the rim lights up and the desert around you disappears — but this has become a see-it-while-you-can landmark. Darvaza lies about 260 km north of Ashgabat, a four-hour drive with a final stretch of sandy track that needs a 4WD; there is no public transport, which is why every visit runs as part of a tour. On our private tours we time the arrival for dusk, cook a BBQ dinner in the dunes, and overnight in yurts a short walk from the rim — sunrise over the crater is a quieter, stranger sight than the night fire. On the drive you also pass the area's two lesser-known siblings, the water and mud craters. Spring and autumn are the kindest seasons; in mid-summer the desert itself is the hard part.