[ DISCOVERY · THE DISPATCH ]

There's a Door to the Underworld in Turkmenistan That's Been Burning for 50 Years

I camped at the rim of a flaming pit in the Turkmen desert that's been on fire since before I was born. The Darvaza gas crater is the most genuinely unreal night I've ever spent outdoors.

The Darvaza gas crater in Turkmenistan is a hole in the desert the size of a small football pitch, and it has been on fire continuously since roughly the early 1970s. They call it the Door to Hell, which sounds like marketing until you’re standing two metres from the rim at midnight with the heat pushing against your face and a roar like a jet engine coming up out of the ground. Then it just sounds accurate.

I’d seen the photos for years. Figured it’d be one of those things that’s smaller and tamer in person. Reader, it is not. It is enormous, and it is loud, and at night, out in the pitch-black Karakum desert with no other light for miles, it glows orange against the sky like something tore a vent straight through to the centre of the earth.

The story — the one everybody tells, anyway — goes that Soviet geologists were drilling for gas here in 1971, the ground collapsed into a cavern, and methane started leaking. Worried about poisonous gas, they set it alight, assuming it’d burn off in a few weeks. That was over fifty years ago. It’s still going. The gas reserve down there is so vast it just… keeps feeding the fire.

There’s some debate about the exact dates and details (the Soviets weren’t big on paperwork for this kind of thing), but the upshot is the same: a manmade accident became one of the strangest sights on the planet, and it shows no sign of stopping. Turkmenistan’s government has occasionally talked about putting it out. So far, thankfully, the Door stays open.

Here’s the honest part. Turkmenistan is one of the hardest countries on Earth to visit independently. It’s tightly closed; tourist visas typically require a letter of invitation arranged through a registered tour company, and you’re generally expected to travel with a state-licensed guide. There’s a transit visa option some overlanders use, but for most people the realistic path to Darvaza is booking a tour out of the capital, Ashgabat.

So budget for that. It’s not a cheap or spontaneous trip. But the tour operators all run the crater overnight excursion, and frankly the logistics of getting out there and camping safely are better left to people who know the desert tracks.

Ashgabat itself, by the way, is worth the entry on its own — a surreal city of white marble and gold statues, weirdly empty, like a film set nobody’s using. But the crater’s the reason you came.

From Ashgabat it’s roughly a three to four hour drive north, the last chunk of it off the paved road, bumping across sand to a campsite a short walk from the rim. You go in a 4x4 with a driver who’s done it. There’s no village, no facilities to speak of — the tours bring tents, food, and water, and set up a camp where you eat dinner under the stars and then walk over to the fire.

We arrived in daylight and honestly I was a touch underwhelmed at first — a smoking pit, fine. Then the sun went down. And the whole thing transformed. The flames brighten, the heat becomes this physical wall, and the desert around you vanishes into total dark so the crater is the only thing that exists. I sat on the sand for hours. Couldn’t stop watching it. A guy in our group, a softly-spoken Dutch traveler named Joris, just kept whispering “this is insane” every few minutes, and nobody disagreed.

Our guide, Merdan, made tea on a little burner and told us the same crater stories his father had told tourists in the 90s. The fire crackled and roared the whole night. I barely slept, and not because the ground was hard. I just didn’t want to miss it.

Go overnight. A daytime drive-by is a waste — the magic is entirely after dark.

Mind the rim. There are no railings, the edge is unstable in places, and people have done genuinely stupid things here for a photo. Keep a healthy distance. The heat alone keeps you honest.

Dress for desert swings. It can be roasting by day and properly cold at night, even in shoulder season. Layers.

And go in spring or autumn. Summer in the Karakum is savage; winter nights are bitter. April-May or September-October is the sweet spot.

I’ve stood at the edge of volcanoes and slept under a lot of skies, but nothing quite prepared me for a flaming pit that’s been burning since the Cold War, out in a desert most people couldn’t find on a map. It’s absurd. It’s a little dangerous. It is unlike anything else.

If you can navigate the visa maze, go camp at the Door to Hell — spend one night watching a fifty-year fire eat the dark, and tell me you’ve seen anything stranger.

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