PinShare2TweetShare2 SharesThis post was first published in my old travel blog, Erudite Traveller on 20 December 2017. One of the things I obsessively prepared for during the planning stage of my Silk Road 2017 trip was how to cross to Turkmenistan, a land-locked country with border crossings from Iran, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan. In the end, I opted to cross the Iran-Turkmenistan border in Sarakhs, a city straddling the two countries.  Getting through the border between the two countries was a surreal experience. The brown and desolate winding mountains and sand dunes in the Iranian side, despite the presence of