Ashgabat's guide fee is fixed, but everything after it can cost almost nothing. Entry to the marble mosques, memorials and sculpture alleys is free, city buses cost 50 tenge, and a bazaar lunch of plov and tandoor bread runs under 20 manat.
Free-entry Ottoman-style mosque on Azadi Street, a scaled copy of Istanbul's Blue Mosque with six minarets and blue-grey domes. Open from dawn until dusk outside the five prayer times; headscarves are lent at the shoe rack.
Free open-air memorial to the 1948 quake that flattened Ashgabat and killed some 110,000 people: a black bronze bull heaving the cracked earth while a gilded child is lifted clear. Accessible 24 hours, no ticket, no fence.
A shaded pedestrian park of bronze statues honouring Turkmen poets and thinkers, headed by Magtymguly Pyragy, with working fountains and a marble colonnade. Gates open roughly 08:00-22:00 and cost nothing to enter.
The Guinness-listed largest enclosed Ferris wheel sits inside a 95m glass-and-marble star. Walking the plaza and photographing it as the floodlights snap on at dusk is free; a wheel cabin costs about 15 TMT if you want the ride.
The domed central market off Turkmenbashy shayoly, open daily 07:00-18:00, where Ashgabat actually shops: tandoor çörek for 1-2 TMT, a kilo of apricots for 8 TMT, whole melons from 5 TMT and sacks of tea and spice by weight.
Third-floor canteen counters in the marble Berkarar mall serve the cheapest sit-down meal in central Ashgabat: a plate of plov, manty or lagman with salad and tea for roughly 15-25 TMT, in air conditioning that costs nothing.
A working residential bazaar in the southwest Mir microdistricts, far off the guide circuit: cotton telpek hats, secondhand Soviet crockery, cheap tekke embroidery and stalls frying samsa for 3-4 TMT while the neighbourhood queues.
Evening stalls between the Parahat apartment blocks sell chal, the fizzy fermented camel milk, from plastic barrels at about 3 TMT a cup, alongside fresh gutap pastries and bread pulled straight from a courtyard tandoor.
UNESCO-listed mud-brick capital of the Parthian Empire, 18km west at Bagyr village: earthen ramparts, the round hall and treasury foundations, with the Kopetdag ridge behind. Site open daylight hours, ticket around 50 TMT.
Village teahouses on the Bagyr-Ashgabat road serve the standard cheap Turkmen lunch: green tea by the pot for 2-3 TMT, dograma or shurpa for 12-18 TMT, eaten cross-legged on a tapchan platform under grapevines.
Twelve kilometres east near Anau, the 15th-century mosque destroyed by the 1948 quake survives as carved rubble, tiled fragments of its dragon portal and a pilgrimage hill of cradles and ribbons. Unfenced and free to walk.
The concrete health path climbing the Kopetdag foothills off Archabil shayoly is free and open to anyone; twenty minutes of steps buys the best panorama of white marble Ashgabat spread against the desert at sunset.