Monday, 24 August 2009
Douglas Whitehead endures a hellish two days attempting to cross the Caspian Sea on an Azerbaijani cargo ship.
"Ferry go in two hours ... maybe."
It was early Saturday afternoon and the grumpy lady in the ticket office had modified her tune slightly. For the previous five days she had been barking out a mantra of "ferry go tomorrow ... maybe."
The boat's would-be passengers were rightly sceptical, especially the three Portuguese rally drivers who had been camping out since Monday on Baku's unlovely dockside because they were not allowed to take their vehicle back out of the car park.
The Caspian Sea ferry from Azerbaijan's capital city to Kazakhstan is first and foremost a cargo vessel. There's no timetable and it's impossible to buy a ticket beforehand; it sails when it's full of freight, not before, and it departs without any notice.
In terms of customer service, it's a floating version of Fawlty Towers hotel, where tickets for foreigners are charged an inflated $130 (?79) and car drivers have to fork out nearly $500 (?304).
The boat eventually arrived in port, not two but 18 hours later, following a night with everyone sat on the floor of a concrete shelter that was open to the elements and whose roof leaked to let in the rain.
Customs involved handing over your passport to three different sets of officials, one after another. A stern-faced lot, they took particular time questioning passengers who had visas in their passports for Armenia, the neighbour of Azerbaijan and its implacable enemy. By contrast, the fact that the metal detector went off every time anyone walked through was not deemed important.
On board our ship the mattress in my cabin looked as though it had been the scene of a previous occupant's death and decomposition.
I carefully spread out my sleeping bag on top as I overheard a Danish woman's tired pleas to be given a set of sheets, only to be told that these would not be handed out until the ship set sail in another six hours, at noon.
"This was Soviet Union," explained one of the ship's staff, cryptically.
That evening I caught up again with the other tourists above deck. As well as the three men from Portugal, there were a couple of other teams of drivers - a pair from Australia and a pair of Americans - who were taking part in the Mongol Rally, an annual charity race from various points in Europe to Ulan Bator.
From tiny beginnings about seven years ago, when just three teams entered and none finished, 500 teams were taking part this time, with each committed to donating their vehicle when, and if, they eventually arrived at the Mongolian capital.
It sounded like fun and I was eager to swap notes: Yes, the Georgians were crazy drivers and, yes, Istanbul was a great city.
Besides the Danish woman, her sister, brother and a young French backpacker, also on board were a Belgian couple, who had set off cycling six months ago on February 11, exactly the same day as myself.
Unlike me, however, they had not begun in Belgium, but had instead travelled by train straight down to Greece and spent the early months island-hopping around the Mediterranean. It sounded a more pleasant experience than camping amid the snow in Germany during March.
At 9am on Monday, a woman loudly knocked on the cabin door. She was demanding my key. The ship was coming into its destination, Aktau, a city port in south-west Kazakhstan, but her impatience was puzzling given that we were not allowed off the boat until noon.
Two hours followed in Kazakh customs, during which we were all kept under guard in a locked room, including a lorry driver who had drunkenly stumbled over while on the boat. His nose was broken and it looked as though his arm was too. Either way, he was definitely in a lot of pain.
Finally one of the Kazakh soldiers intervened but only to tell off the young Frenchman for laughing at the institutionalised absurdity of the whole situation.
Then came the matter of retrieving the bikes and cars from the hull of the boat. I don't think I've ever seen anybody quite as dejected and unhappy as the three Portuguese were during those three hours sitting on the dockside. The 12-hour journey across the Caspian had taken me 45 hours; it had taken them a whole week and they were still being kept waiting.
A brief half hour of nonsense followed where another official was commanding us to go through customs yet again, this time with our bikes, but the soldiers around the corner were refusing to unlock the doors. The Belgian couple and I finally made a break for it by loading our bikes onto the back of a passing jeep.
Anyway, spleen vented, I'm now in Kazakhstan, although I haven't had any time to look around yet. More next week if I can find out why none of the ATMs here accept my bank cards.
By Douglas Whitehead
