Underground Lake

A few Saturdays ago all 37 of my fellow PC T-stan trainees gathered at Kow Ata, an underground lake west of Ashgabat. There are only four other trainees living in my village, so it’s always really exciting to be with a big group of people, all of whom I have the language skills to converse with. Also, I have friends in other villages that are always good to see. We spent the morning just hanging around outside the mountain, being really loud and wearing jeans (It’s not really acceptable for men or women to be wearing jeans in the village; they get relegated to being your special Ashgabat wardrobe). We also had a cross-cultural session on generalizations and the differences between Turkmen and Americans, and then binged on all the non-meat filled food at lunch—hooray vegetables!

Kow Ata is basically a big sulfurous pool in the bottom of a mountain. To get there you simply walk down a long, steep staircase into a dark cavern. About two-thirds of the way down is a changing area with a few plastic shower curtains (I think I went behind one with purple dolphins; a festive touch). Below that is another flight of stairs that lead directly into the lake, which is as warm as bathwater and smells like the boiling mud at Yellowstone. Other than a single light near the base of the stairs, the lake itself isn’t lit, so after about 2 minutes in the water I got out to get my headlamp. Bringing a headlamp was my friend Shannon’s idea, and it was a good one. Along with a group of trainees I went exploring to find out how big the lake was (at most it was a 50m swim to the far wall). It was really cool to be able to swim around in a dark cave with just one little flashlight, and at one point I turned it off and it was completely black. The PC safety officer got concerned and swam over to tell us to come back towards the light because there might be dangerous things in the water (sharks?). After that I ditched the headlamp and dove off a big rock a few times. But eventually I started to feel and smell like a hard-boiled egg, and it was time to get out.