#9 Hard To Get In, Hard To Get Out
May 8, 2023
Last night I camped at a restaurant. I asked the owner if there was a hotel nearby, not that I wanted to spend the night at the hotel, but first I wanted to take his pulse. The voice, facial expressions, gestures and tone say a lot about a man’s character. “60 kilometers away”, he said. After that I showed him a picture of my tent and asked for his permission to camp on his property. He was more than happy to host a tourist and he even gave me a cup of coffee, let me use the restroom and washing area.
It is a short day of cycling today. 60 km to Alat where the ferry terminal is situated, for the boats going across the Caspian Sea. I’m glad I visited Baku five days ago. If I hadn’t, there wouldn’t have been another opportunity to do so, because Alat is 70 km south of Baku.
I entered Azerbaijan with few expectations other than knowing it’s a country built on oil money. Once you arrive in Baku, you immediately notice the wealth, internationalism, eye-catching architecture and glamour. The city still has an easily noticeable ex-Soviet disorganization and is trying so hard to be noticed, in the last few years hosting one big stage event after another – Eurovision, the European Games, Formula One to name a few. Most of the country however is farmland and cottage industries, with decent simple houses, and basic infrastructure. Then the scenery changes from dense, green forests in the northern mountains to dusty and dry plains in the east and diverse landscape at the Caspian Sea coastline. Azerbaijan is predominantly a Muslim country, still you wouldn’t say so. There are no prayers every five hours, alcohol is very accessible and you rarely see covered women, even in the countryside. The most un-muslim country of the muslim countries I’ve ever visited. Azerbaijan is a country of contrasts, they are everywhere you look.
I arrived at the ferry terminal early, a little after lunch. I am given the option to choose my own boat. There’s one boat leaving tonight but with mechanical problems, or the next one which leaves God-knows-when. Fuck it, I take my chance with the defective boat. I heard reports of people waiting for days for a boat and I am definitely not in the mood for that. I do understand the risks; Mercury 2 sank some years ago with all but nine passengers drowning. I realize that these ships are prone to capsize and are only really intended for mild coastal or river waters.
After buying the ticket to board the defective boat, they threw me into the sequestered area reserved for pedestrians behind the barbed wire from where you can only get out with the guard’s permission. Here I find a Turkmen, who has been waiting for his ship for five days. The waiting area has the basic amenities: water, toilet, chairs, and beds, but still can’t imagine waiting for five days in this Auschwitz-type enclosure. The port is essentially a giant plot of tarmac, sandwiched between the desert to the west and the sea to the east. To the north is the entrance and a lot of buildings, and to the south is a train depot. Trucks from Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan are parked in an orderly formation.
The Turkmen teaches me how to steal wifi from the nearby offices, shows me how to escape the barbed wire, to take the short walk to the restaurant found in the port. “Bring me a Coca-Cola from the restaurant”. Sure, my pleasure. “How can I get the visa for America?”. Hold on, take a pen and paper for this one… Then Alban from France and Jagdish and wife from India enter the confined area. Alban is a backpacker, Jagdish is on a multi-week vacation throughout Asia.
Location: Alat, Azerbaijan
May 9, 2023
Little past midnight, deep into my sleep, Jagdish enters the dormitory area. “Get up, we gotta go, ship is leaving”. In order to get from the confined area reserved for pedestrians to the ship, first you pass through the customs. You are transported in a van for a kilometer. Since my bike doesn’t fit in the van, the driver says to cycle behind and follow him.
The customs officer is very curious about the Advil box. I point to the head, making a facial expression of pain, to which he looked at me as if I had mental problems. Deep into my luggages I have sheets of medications, which could easily make me look like a drug dealer. Luckily, we are directed to passport control without any issues.
Four tourists to one customs officer. Should be easy peasy lemon squeezy, right? The Indians are allowed in Kazakhstan (our next destination) only for 14 days without a visa. A new law became effective in 2022, a law that our customs officer has no idea about. He makes a call to the guy above him in rank. The French has the Armenian stamp on his passport (if you’ve been to Armenia then you are very scrutinized about the visit). He makes the call again… For some reason, the scanning device won’t read my Romanian passport. He makes another call… Two army officers show up to take Alban into an in-depth questioning about Armenia. Then comes the call from the supervisor of the guy above our customs officer, confirming that the Indians are okay to enter Kazakhstan. The officer looks at every detail of my ‘fake’ passport with a magnifying glass, like a jeweler inspects a million dollar diamond, after which he puts the passport into another type of microscopic device equipped with ultraviolet. It took one hour and a half for the Azerbaijani to process four tourists. Hard to get in, hard to get out of Azerbaijan.
At two in the morning we are finally into our cabin, occupied by Alban who is above me and Tokhir, an Uzbeki truck driver. The ship is called… just a second… wait for it… it is called Azerbaijan! It was inaugurated by the president of the country himself in 2019. The faulty ship we were supposed to board seems to have changed its route, or maybe it sank, I don’t know.
We are woken up at 7:30 by a knock at the door, signaling that breakfast is ready. Our ship has no shop, no bar, no TV room or anything like that, but it has a reception area and serves three meals a day. Bread is the main component of all of these; three boiled eggs and cheese for breakfast, while lunch and dinner consist of rice or pasta and a piece of chicken. Each cabin has its loo, shower, window with a sea view and a useless TV. There is no alcohol on board, no strip club, roulette, or gambling. This is not a cruise boat. This ship has train tracks running inside of it, and carriages go directly from shore to the ship along the rails. On this trip, there are only cargo trucks, the drivers, and four tourists.
We’ve been floating on the sea for about eight hours with the anchor dropped. It seems there is a storm ahead that the captain wants to avoid.
Before dinner, Jagdish made the evening more pleasant. He slipped a bottle of Tequila into the ship. He gave the French and myself a discreet nod in the reception area where we were all socializing, to follow him into his cabin for a drink. It would be a big mistake to take out a bottle of spirits, in a boat full of Soviet truckers.
Location: Caspian Sea
May 10, 2023
We are moving at full speed ahead, on a sea scattered with oil rigs, mostly abandoned and rusting but a few seemingly still in use. A sight of the dystopian movie Mad Max, but on a sea.
Word is we will be in Aktau by 1 pm, our port destination in Kazakhstan, which is happy news indeed. The breakfast menu has not evolved, still three boiled eggs, two pieces of feta cheese, packaged honey and butter. I noticed that Jagdish’s wife is not showing up for the meals, probably due to the soviet truckers lacking the minimal good manners towards the weaker sex. Yesterday I slipped few manats into the chef’s pocket for an extra portion of chicken and rice, so now I have six eggs for breakfast as a complementary gesture.
There is suddenly a rush of activity from the crew to pack, empty our rooms, and strip the beds, which we could have been warned about beforehand, in the hours we had to kill . All of this just so we could wait for a couple of hours crammed in the ship’s waiting area. Slowly, and I mean slooooowly, we are processed one by one. Some members of the staff are in full army uniforms, others in casual clothing. The medic lady wants a selfie with the four tourists… she couldn’t give a shit about the truckers. The bored x-ray employee motions me to follow him through a separate door directly on the other side. Nothing was checked on me, not that I am complaining…
The four of us convened to get a taxi from the ferry terminal to Aktau, which is 75 km away (doesn’t affect my EFI rule!). Like any Indian who knows how to bargain, Jagdish takes the price down from 25,000 tengis to 20,000. Once we arrive at the hotel in Aktau, none of us has any Kazakh money. I stayed at the reception with Jagdish’s wife and the luggages, while the other two went to exchange money to pay the driver. It’s past 6. Once they were back at the hotel I immediately noticed an irritated mood on all three of them.
“What seems to be the problem?” I ask.
“He wants 2000 more tengis for the extra trip to the bank!” Says Jagdish, really bothered.
I start panicking. “Are you fucking kidding me?” Jesus! I get angry in a second. We don’t pay anything more… wtf man!
The Kazakh driver is pissed, the French is talking to an interpreter into the phone who translates to the driver, the Indian is pacing around nervous, the Romanian is disturbed… Then I have this moment of leadership capability and pull out the calculator to see what the hell 2000 tengis mean. Conversion rate… dollar… 2000… parity… divide by four of us… .
JAGDISH!! I yell… pay the goddamn driver. I don’t want to get killed in Kazakhstan by a flat head for $1.13.
Location: Aktau, Kazakhstan
May 11, 2023
Knowing what I have in front of me, a great steppe as the locals call it (I tend to name it a desert), I decided to stay one more day in Aktau.
Kazakhstan is the Russia of the past and present. The streets look exactly as they probably looked 30 years ago. I want to take a closer look at the soul of Aktau. I want borscht, caviar, black bread and vodka. I walk the streets looking at the humongous soviet apartment blocks, which look so familiar to me. I grew up in one of those inner city projects, back in the 70s and 80s in Romania. The people look grim, not because they want to look grim, rather the way of living life makes them that way. Or maybe it seems grim based on the American standards, to them is normal? I wish all of these people would have my luck to live where I live now. When I first got off the boat in America 25 years ago, I wondered why the fuck is everyone smiling and acting so polite? Couldn’t get it. Took me a couple of years to get into the game of America. No one speaks English here and I speak no Russian. For about three hours, I walk and sit, walk some more and eat and stare at gingerbread look alike establishments, untended plots behind peeling fences and run-down stores with cyrillic letters. It is May and getting hot, I can’t imagine how it is in July. With the element of adventure in me, I drank a couple of beers and felt good. Really good. So good, that after a couple more beers mixed with bread and sausage from the street vendor, I am ready for some more. I am drunk on the streets of Aktau. I am happy… enjoying my flower power status and looking at the hard working people going to and coming from their unglamorous jobs.
When the car crashed, on the streets of Mumbai in 2003, there were nine people inside. Out of the three deceased passengers, one of them was Jagdish’s eight year old daughter. She died in the arms of her father with the wife looking hopeful for miracles. Since then, every year, Jagdish’s family cuts a slice of cake on the date of May 11th, in the memory of their daughter. Today is May 11th. I, too have a child, which is an adult now, but a child to me until I die. I would be 90 and still slip a Benjie into his pocket when he visits me. They’ve been in the mourning ritual for twenty years and probably forever into generations to come. Also, along with the daughter, Jagdish’s father died shortly after from a heavy heart, caused by the family’s loss. Alban is next to me. I am given the task of filming the mourning ritual in their room. I couldn’t keep it together. Do you know how it feels to have a dead child? Because I don’t. But the imagination pushed me into an uncontrollable crying. Jagdish had to calm me down. I take the photos, after which we eat cooked Indian food made in the pressure cooker, brought from India along with the spices, because this is how Indians proudly travel. We made sure to finish the bottle of Tequila.
Location: Aktau, Kazakhstan
9 thoughts on “#9 Hard To Get In, Hard To Get Out”
Aventura asta te pune in atitea situatii in care te descoperi pe tine . Orice ai face , devi mai aproape de perfectiune.
Ce misto ii , sa fi obisnuit cu confortul , da sa iei o pauza de la el fara sa iti pese .
Sau sa fi asa de uman , incit sa te apuce plinsul pentru cineva care l-ai cunoscut de a lungul calatoriei si nu o sa il mai vezi niciodata .RESPECT !
Everyday is different. Everyday the brain just want you to survive.
So touching this one…As a parent, I can’t even imagine what Jagdish and his wife went through over the years. In my eyes, they’re heroes!
You get to meet a lot of people on your adventure, each with beautiful and unique stories, worth telling.
6 oua la micul dejun? Hai ca nu-ti merge rău🤪.
Saluta-l pe Flappy din partea noastră 😊.
I meet more people that i can handle
It must be so unique to get to know strangers and share meals and heartaches with them. And then to say goodbye, allowing them to become a precious memory for you. Priceless!
Great job dad!❤️🤜🏻
😘
I was so intrigued from the first moment of reading your journal and life adventure. I read the first few lines and had to go brew a pot of coffee. I sat outside in the beautiful cool morning air as the sun would begin to rise and read your whole journal. Wishing for more as it ended I never even sipped that first cup of coffee. You are an inspiration! Thank you for sharing your life and adventures for myself to find and read. It definitely makes us look at our own reality and wander at my soon to be age of 49, what’s next? Instead of wandering, waiting, and grinding at work, I have a complete new outlook on why and where. Thank you 🙏 for that! I wish you peace and love and safe travels on your new Escalades as I’m sure there will be more!
Oh my, beautiful comment Mrs Heather. Thank you!