ASHGABAT – When the Turkmenistan government announced new streamlined visa regulations in April, people familiar with traveling to the Central Asian nation were unsure what to make of it. Not that there are many such experts — along with North Korea and Eritrea, Turkmenistan has long been considered one of the globe’s most isolated countries, a legacy that dates to the 1990s when the nation broke away from the disintegrating Soviet Union and turned inward, settling into a sealed-off, independent authoritarianism. For certain travelers, though, especially those who gravitate toward conflict zones and geopolitical oddities, Turkmenistan’s impenetrability has given it an alluring mystique. There’s just one problem: getting in. Scoring a tourist visa is a long and involved process that requires obtaining a Letter of Introduction (LOI) from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs after booking your visit with a government-approved tour operator. The vetting — the government decides if you should be allowed to enter — can sometimes take months. Word that the regime intended to make things more user-friendly for travelers, then, was startling, says Dylan Lupine, whose UK-based Lupine Travel offers small-group Turkmenistan tours. “We are still in the dark about it, as are our local partners in Turkmenistan, as there have been no updates since,” Lupine says. “The new visa regulations haven’t yet come into place and there’s no news of when this will be happening.” If and when the new process kicks off, visitors would be able to apply online, with officials pledging that it will be much faster and result in fewer rejections. The LOI requirement will reportedly vanish, but visitors will still need a “sponsor” in Turkmenistan, which in most cases means signing up for a guided tour. “Once it does come into place, I do think it will strongly boost visitor numbers,” Lupine adds. CNN has reached out to Turkmenistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs for comment.
