The night train from Tbilisi to Baku left perfectly on time. Clean sheets, pillow case and towel arrived in the hands of a fierce female attendant with instructions from her in Russian on their precise use.
The DUVET must clearly NOT be used as a mattress although it was identical in fact to the roll out ‘mattress’ also provided.
Passengers clearly may not express their individuality and indeed all sheets, mattresses, whatever, must be folded once again in the prescribed way to be collected in the morning.
No question here of falling out of bed and the train on arrival, or of lying in bed until required at the border where there was some difficulty over a visa marked ‘male’, a typo I had chosen to ignore.
So tempting to get into the trans debate with these humourless border guards standing very much on their small authority. The early call was modified with a cup of tea and a bowl of boiled sweets and the gratifying amazement of the female gauleiter when she received and accepted a tip, proffered not least to take the wind out of her sales. The train was fine, it worked, the nearest loo didn’t but the next was bearable, it was only astonishingly noisy and appeared to be shunting something every few minutes.
I was met by Ruslan for the drive to the Boulevard Hotel via Nizami Street with its designer shops, Ferrari, Bentley and Aston Martin showrooms, and those palaces of the early oil barons beside post WWII government buildings in mixed neoclassical and Islamic style.
Now, probably the most famous buildings in Baku are the 3 flame shaped towers of the Land of fire, where the lighting effects at night appear to envelope the buildings in shooting flames alternating with with moving patterns. The old city, a UNESCO Heritage Site, dating back to the 12
th century and beyond, is packed with tourists. It is largely pedestrianised and has been all too recently restored so the honey coloured stonework is spotless, every caravanserai is now a restaurant, every madrassah a gift shop and other major buildings have been transformed into museums of one sort or another, all exemplars of the development based on oil riches. Enormous wealth pours unceasingly out of the ground and the old nodding donkeys still pump away within touching distance of the fruits of their labours.
Museums have been created in general with more enthusiasm for the idea than expertise in labelling either the historical site or its displayed treasures. It was here where I first came across the 'dervish pouch' described by Ruslan correctly as the begging bowl of the travelling dervishes across Central Asia but not, as he maintained, made of carved wood or worked camel leather. It was quite clearly to anyone who had ever seen one before, the half of a coco de mer and all so much more magical and extraordinary than any wood or leather. Ruslan had never heard of such a thing and I wasn't sure he believed what I told him but that is what it was and there were others in other museums across the region, individually and collectively inspiration for a new book, The Dervish Bowl, about one of the more unusual travellers in Central Asia even in the 19th century days of the Great Game.
Other contemporary buildings and exhibition spaces include the remarkable and utterly beautiful Zaha Hadid, Heydar Aliyev Centre with its museum dedicated to Aliyev, the authoritarian 3rd President of independent Azerbaijan. It stands in its own green space dotted with primary coloured sculptures, the various levels of terraces used for temporary exhbitions and the curves and background of the building a magnet for bridal group photography. Less beautiful by far but a curiosity in its own right, the carpet museum, down close to the shore, is designed as a rolled carpet - makes sense except, we are told, from the point of view of actually displaying anything inside on all those tightly curved walls.
More Russian is to be heard on the streets in Azerbaijan than in Georgia although mixed with Azerbaijani as we tour the old city. UNESCO status notwithstanding, it is only moderately interesting to anyone who has seen less reconstructed examples of similar period. Lunch with Ruslan at a popular restaurant just inside the city walls on this rather whistlestop tour of Baku's best was thin pastry to be rolled around a filling of minced meat a bit like Turkish borek and a similar pancake roll with kebab meat, Qutab, plus aubergine salad, and, much needed, a lot of cold beer. Ruslan's English is enthusiastic if idiosyncratic and he was at least as interested in stories of life in other countries as in telling me about his own. He referred constantly to his 24 year old 'bride' - they were in fact due to get married in a few months if hefty wedding expenses could be covered besides the problems of finding affordable housing, the merits of renting over a loan for down payment on a house, questions of working abroad and the difficulties. The 'bride' is to be sent to do a manicure course, the diploma then a passport to additional financial support.
After lunch, on the street outside the walls we met Farhad the owner and director of SF Travel, recommended by a UK friend with Azerbaijani contacts. If his Lexus 4WD and the air of prosperity of him and his wife were anything to go by, Farhad is doing very well as might be expected of a German educated, chess grandmaster. He was delightful, well-travelled, sophisticated and with a clear view of what is needed to improve the quality of the tourist experience in Azerbaijan. He was right too, the Boulevard Hotel looks like any other good quality business and tourism hotel anywhere in the world and the rooms are extremely comfortable but service is chaotic and, when the going gets rough, there is a dearth of charm or helpfulness among staff who don't really know what they are doing and revert to abrupt and bad-tempered ignorance and a non-existent rule book that requires everything to be paid for in advance, including breakfast. Farhad appeared to have contacts in every possible camp in the city but even he was flummoxed by the vagaries of the Caspian ferry system and our potential journey to Turkmenbashi, Turkmenistan, by that doubtful method of travel. By the time we had waited up for most of one night for the call to go to the terminal we all knew each other very well indeed.
Before that, however, there was more to see with Ruslan as I awaited the arrival of Barbara, my travelling companion through Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, IF the ferry ever arrived. We set off out of Baku proper for the Gobustan petroglyph park a few miles down the coast back towards the West. Here, among the broken hills, rock falls, earth movements and time have exposed the interiors of former caves and the rock faces are covered with remarkable pre-historic paintings and carvings. These include images of aurochs; yalli, traditional group folk dances; hunters and their prey, might that be a hippo or a rhino? In more modern times, a Roman legionary cut an inscription stating that the 12th legion had been there during the reign of Augustus Germanicus and there is an excellent little museum with timelines and exhibits from the area.
From there we went to Yana Dag, the famous burning hillside, now a mere patch of fire at the edge of the huge blackened area that has burned here since the 1950s. It was probably only one among many such phenomena in the Land of Fire, where Zoroastrianism was unsurprisingly the main religion. The Ateshgah or Temple of Fire with its one time natural eternal flame is reputed to be an ancient Zoroastrian Fire Temple but had clearly been as much a caravanserai used simultaneouslyr by Hindus and Sikhs, travelling pilgrims or as likely migrant workers, craftspeople and merchants from Indian communities living on and among the networks of the Silk routes through Central Asia. The temple has inscription in Sanskrit and Gurmukh - on a hot summer's day, the sun bears down on the bold midday pilgrim to the much scrubbed and restored site and the shade of the cafe terrace and a ready supply of cold beer rapidly become the holy of holies of this particular pilgrimage.
Barbara arrived in the early hours of the morning from a flight via Moscow and, as a result, without any of her luggage. While its whereabouts were pursued by the highly resourceful Farhad - it eventually and almost miraculously arrived a few days later at the extraordinary airport in Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan, we went shopping for replacement essentials. This involved visiting a number of internationally well-known chainstores in a huge contemporary shopping mall and a successful line in men's cotton shirts, if rather less satisfactory excursions into underwear departments intended to beguile the very young and very slight.
When the call for the ferry eventually came via Farhad's contacts around 2 in the morning we set off for the port and a long wait in shipping container waiting room/cafe crammed with our fellow passengers and their mountains of luggage. They were all Turkmen going home after shopping expeditions and laden with goods to sell on in local markets at home and were mainly the tough-faced, strong looking, strident women you would expect to find in any fishmarket in any country and any century of the last 2 millennia. They knew their route and how it worked so much better than we did and our additional payments through Farhad for a double berthed cabin for us alone might have been so much wastepaper but then, if you travel as 'cargo' under a bill of lading, in the end you are just that, to be disposed by whoever is in charge.
By the time we moved from the airless container, dragging our bags through the early morning drizzle to a different part of the largely deserted new port, pecking orders were well established and we were at the bottom, somehow in the care of a personable but ultimately unpleasant and bullying young man, Aziz, aged 24, with his pregnant archetypal dumpy, slavic blonde, Russian wife, Vera, aged about 19. Their baby, born safely by now one can hope, was to be called Beatrice if the wanted daughter arrived. Their 9 month old son had been left at home with grandparents. On embarking, barely a crew member in sight, actually we never saw more than about 3 including the 2nd mate who made unwelcome and extremely unexpected advances given our ages versus his own but was otherwise both harmless and apparently short of any sort of useful job. We never saw a first mate or a captain,even on the bridge, which may have accounted for the tortoise like speed of our crossing under some sort of remote control - 48 hours, as opposed to Lord Curzon's journey across the Caspian between sunset and sunrise of one day in 1888 and Fitzroy Maclean's 24 hours, 50 years later once soviet efficiencies had had its effect on regional systems.
Thanks to the organisational skills of the Turkmen traders, we found ourselves sharing a 6 berth cabin with Aziz and Vera plus their friends, another young and pregnant couple, Raoul and Zarina, who were a great deal easier to deal with. We realised the prized double cabin/s even had their own bathrooms with showers, the communal versions were expectedly disgusting BUT after 24 hours, I remembered that water out of a tap/shower/hose is always better than none at all, found dry enough spaces for my clothes and had a glorious shower regardless of the surroundings. After that the water ran out for much of the rest of the trip and the gallon demi-johns carried by many of the passengers made more sense.Bizarrely the first lunch on board, in a communal room we thought might be our home for the crossing, as we sat for a further 20 hours in limbo at the quay, was utterly delicious chicken and vegetable soup after which we more or less gave up eating other than a few handfuls of dried fruit and nuts, until we arrived at Turkmenbashi in order to avoid as much as possible visits to the appalling loo.
Instead we lay, left totally alone, on the bubbled paint of the top deck between pipes and stanchions and watched the near empty sea, meandering at near walking pace or occasionally stopping altogether so far as we could tell. We had already realised, once our passports had received their exit stamps that we were in limbo, unable with our single entry visas to go back and barely moving forwards. It was strangely disconcerting to be nowhere for hour upon hour as occasional other ferries steamed busily past in the distance and the opposite direction.So we read our books; exchanged boiled sweets and confused histories for tea with the only crew member we met apart from the over friendly 2nd mate. 'Were there mussulmans (not a term we would have expected to hear since about 1900) in our country?' He wanted to know and how were they treated? What about Liverpool football team? Did we know that most Turkmens had all their teeth taken out? We were shortly to understand that one as every smile revealed a mouthful of gold. What about Roman Abramovich? And we bruised our bones on the hard surface of the deck and burned our noses in the sun, finally returning below to the cabin as the sun went down, where the atmosphere was increasingly crotchety and the air grew stale. Aziz fought with with and occasionally seemed on the verge of beating Vera and we were bitten by bedbugs or flying bugs or both until we agreed that:
The curse of the Caspian Sea
Is a fly with a fondness for me.
Is it odd that my smell like bad meat
After days in the upper deck heat
Should so sadly proved to agree
With the curse of the Caspian Sea?
We had an idea by the end that Aziz was our appointed minder, certainly he was very determined to tell two women, older than his own parents what to do and was disappointed clearly to find female charges of any age who paid no heed to his exhortations. He was not the only one in Turkmenistan where the driver who was indeed a minder, took unkindly to any mooted deviation from our itinerary or our itinerary as he chose to interpret it. Aziz became slightly more useful on landing at the brand new port in Turkmenbashi in translating to get us through customs but melted away never to be seen again as we fought mistakenly over the necessary bribes. What possessed us to stand on principle and argue over US$5, god knows, apart from objecting almost to so negligible a display of endemic corruption. What was the point for anyone given the number of staff in the customs hall to take a share and the paucity of tourists to provide the wherewithal? Perhaps the demand was also a point of principle. We were innocents abroad and should have paid our 'border tax' with a smile to save missing our flight to Asghabat although we saw more of the famous and endlessly empty Karakum desert on our alternative 8 hour taxi ride. Anyway we may have got off lightly; when researching his book The Dawn of Eurasia, Bruno Macaes took 3 or 4 hours to clear immigration and customs as the only foreigner 'arriving that day, or, most likely, that month'. He fails to mention 'border tax'.
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