In Baku we quickly finished the Uzbek visa business, and started gathering information about the ferry across the Caspian to Kazakhstan. We knew that it’s a tricky business, but we had no idea what a rough adventure was expecting us.

The system, if you can call it that, is simply absurd. The ferry leaves from the old port; the tickets are only sold at the new port. When selling the ticket, they won’t tell you when the ferry is leaving; for that you have to go back to the old port again. The ferries in fact follow no schedule, and it’s impossible to know about their departure until a day, or sometimes just a few hours, in advance. The ticket booth follows no schedule either. When we finally found it, it was being mobbed by an army of Kazakhs who had been living in their cars for the past week trying to get ahold of a ticket.

These were “peregonshiki”, people who buy second-hand cars cheaply where they are in surplus and then drive them, sometimes half a globe away, for resale at a premium. In this case the cars were imported from Europe and the US to Georgia, then driven to Baku, to be ferried across the Caspian and sold in Kazakhstan. A couple hundred of them happened to arrive here at the same time, overwhelming the ferry service, and that is precisely when we showed up. It took us two exceedingly frustrating days to get our tickets, after having to deal with impatient drivers, indifferent officials and ticket office clerks who work less than half of the hours they’re supposed to, providing exceptionally rude service for which in any other place they would’ve been fired on the spot. Things did not improve after that, and four days later, at sea, we almost wished we had never gotten those tickets at all.

The length of the ferry ride, as published, is supposed to be 18-20 hours. The ferry was loaded the same evening, and finally left the port at 4 AM. At 9 AM it stood still and dropped the anchor. The wind was too strong — we’d have to wait. 24 hours later we started moving again; after another 24 hours, we anchored off the coast of Aktau, Kazakhstan. It took another 24 hours to get the clearance to enter the port. All in all we spent four days and four nights on board. We brought food with us as instructed, but of course did not budget for such a long stay. We were pleasantly surprised, thus, to find out that there’s a kitchen serving meals which are even included in the ticket price, but having a captive audience, they demanded money for their greasy and unappealing product, destined for their own pockets of course. We stood our ground and refused to pay, and were served nevertheless, but with such a disgusting face that it removed any remains of appetite that the food itself didn’t. The toilet was straight out of “Trainspotting”; I’ll spare you the details, but suffice is to say that Dana almost passed out due to dehydration after refusing to drink water to avoid having to use it. Add to that the constant uncertainty, during the whole 4 days, about when this is actually going to end, and you get a rather traumatic experience.

When the captain instructed the crew to lift the anchor as we got clearance to enter the port, smiles came back to our faces again. A festive mood took over everybody on board. We stood on the top deck, looking at the anchor breaking the water surface, looking at Aktau at the horizon, and couldn’t stop smiling. When finally at the city, we went straight to a hotel, got us a nice big room, and then crossed the street for a proper dinner at a restaurant. It felt like finishing a jail sentence.

All in all, Azerbaijan left in us a bitter taste. It’s hard to judge a people based on just a dozen individual encounters, but as travellers, this is the exposure we get and we have no other choice. We had some genuinely positive encounters in this country — Asildar and his family (who are actually not Azeri, but belong to the Avar national minority), and the family which runs our hostel in Baku. They were truly sweet people with good hearts. However, the rest of our experiences here left us wondering where has the soul of the Azeris gone. We got into this discussion with many foreigners passing through or living in Azerbaijan, and the conversations almost repeated themselves word-to-word — everybody comes to the same conclusions. It is easy to blame the Communist regime for robbing the people of their spirit, but this has not been the case everywhere — the Cubans are a prime counter-example, and even the neighboring Georgians and Armenians we met were uniformly kind-hearted people.

It’s probably the easy money, pumped directly from the oil wells: all our negative experiences seemed somehow to revolve around money. Alas, Azerbaijan is a third-world country, and all the BMWs of the world, parked in Baku, do not change that one bit: being undeveloped is a mindset, not a result of being poor. They may have washed the city center with a mop (for real — I’ve seen it) but they still have no concept of keeping the environment clean and not littering. They may repave the roads every year, but information about bus routes is entirely unavailable; no maps of the routes exist — it is just common knowledge. Neither are there bus stops — they just brake wherever there are clients. With all their efforts to develop tourism, they get the core of it completely wrong: invest in good service, build up a reputation, instead of trying to milk people’s money here and now, or attempt to impress them with fancy renovated buildings — think long-term, and you will succeed. I’m quite used to third-world countries; this would not have driven me up the walls as much if I didn’t witness so much wasted potential and so much completely misguided effort in Azerbaijan.

To end on a more positive note, Kazakhstan is a world away from all that. We’re only spending one day here, so our impression is very superficial, but even in this forgotten place, Aktau, on the dry and deserted coast of the Caspian Sea hundreds of kilometers from any other city, we’re witnessing life being lived well, with welcoming attitude and friendly people. There aren’t any fancy buildings here, but the Kazakhs seem to be a healthy nation — we thought so as soon as we got to know some of our fellow passengers on the ferry. It’s quite ironic and frankly unfair that Sasha Baron Cohen chose them, among all others, for his Borat character. I can understand their initial bitterness about it, having seen at least one of their neighbors; we’ll see more as we go on. I wish we had more time to explore this country. But our route takes us away into Uzbekistan, on a train which we are boarding today. I definitely wouldn’t mind visiting another time to take a bigger bite of Kazakhstan.

June 26, 2011