Made it hard to estimate their age maybe 65. The woman with the rugs was a short and squat, dressed in native Turkmen garb. E expressed interest in one of the rugs before and the woman just happened to bring a second rug with her. Afterward looking the rugs over we walked her to the door and she stepped into a BMW 700 series and drove away. Got onto back roads that were not much more than worn tracks through crushed shale and scree.
Roads run along ridges.
A jerk of the steering wheel could have sent us on a fast and last ride down a few hundred feet. The only point of the roads seemed to have been to put in a power line leading to an outpost at the Iranian frontier. At the top of one peak, we stopped to admire the set of switchbacks we had moved through. Good road maps of Turkmenistan are hard to come by. On the map we did have, we used to pick out an unnamed mountain and decided our goal for the morning would be to drive around it.