I was lucky enough to visit in 2018. It is a truly surreal place. I've been a few places, and Darvaza is still one of the most memorable. Since travel in Turkmenistan is quite restricted, I hired a driver to travel from Ashgabat to Darvaza to Konye-Urgench, with an overnight at the crater (and another overnight in Dashoguz, after visiting Konye-Urgench).
The heat of the crater. The size of it. The light it puts out into an otherwise perfectly dark surrounding. The remoteness. The bareness of it all. To be there as the sun sets, and as the stars come out, and until the crater is the only source of light.. absolutely amazing.
Of course, sometimes the destination is only part of what is memorable. The drive out was an obstacle course of avoiding potholes at high speed. Once there, healthy amounts of vodka were enjoyed with my driver. Hours of talk, despite minimal shared language. And sleeping involved a rather tiny tent (perfectly serviceable for a night of camping).
At least it is burning. Two gas fields in Turkmenistan are reported to be leaking “mind boggling” quantities of unburnt methane - more CO2e than the entire annual emissions of the UK:
I camped close to the crater. One photo on Wikipedia shows some tents.
The view at night is definitely better than the one when the sun is up in the sky so it's worth getting there late in the afternoon and spend one night. There is some smell of burnt gas downwind but not much. It's not even so hot, but you don't want to risk standing directly on the rim, as with any cliff.
I'll never forget how I learned about this crater: When the leader of Turkmenistan defied rumors of his death by driving around and doing donuts next to it.
"The Chimera is depicted as a three-formed beast; a lion in front, a python in its hinder parts, goatlike in the middle. Certain writers on natural history say it isn't an animal, but a mountain in Cilicia, which in some places feeds lions and goats, in some burns, in some is full of snakes. Bellerophon made this habitable, whence he is said to have "killed Chimaera".
> In 2013, George Kourounis became the first person to set foot at the bottom of the crater;[5] he was gathering soil samples for the Extreme Microbiome Project.
The exploration part of this article is fascinating. At my previous job we looked in soil for drug producing fungi and I would have loved to have worked on a sample from there.
I've visited this crater. There were a surprising amount of gas tanker lorries driving around nearby. A friend suggested that maybe they keep topping it up to keep it burning to attract tourists!
(Not that Turkmenistan gets - or indeed allows - an awful lot of tourists).
I grew up near the impressively named Flaming Geyser State Park. As a kid, I was excited to see what would surely be a terrifying jet of fire. But no, it was a mere few inches tall, hardly visible in daylight. Alas, it was apparently depleted in 2016. Sign my petition to rename it The Park That Formerly Contained a Natural Bunsen Burner Called Flaming Geyser
The heat of the crater. The size of it. The light it puts out into an otherwise perfectly dark surrounding. The remoteness. The bareness of it all. To be there as the sun sets, and as the stars come out, and until the crater is the only source of light.. absolutely amazing.
Of course, sometimes the destination is only part of what is memorable. The drive out was an obstacle course of avoiding potholes at high speed. Once there, healthy amounts of vodka were enjoyed with my driver. Hours of talk, despite minimal shared language. And sleeping involved a rather tiny tent (perfectly serviceable for a night of camping).
It's hard to convey how surreal the place is.