Baku, Azerbaijan. It's deep in the night. We've driven the breadth of the country and finally reached the Caspian Sea at Baku, a soulless shrine to oil money, where we've heard the bars are full of drunk Scottish rig workers fighting, and the police patrol the streets in phat BMWs.
After scouring the fading alleyways of the old town, we finally find the Thousand Camels hostel. We step over the bodies of travellers sleeping on thin mattresses in the lobby, and a young Russian-looking bloke in white vest and jeans shows us to a dusty old sofa. A day's drive across Azerbaijan to find our sage.
He sparks up a cigarette.
The room is dark, the silences long. We talk in hushed tones.
'We are going to Turkmenbashi,' I say.
The sage offers a barely discernable nod.
'Do you... know... when the boat leaves?'
He takes a drag on his cigarette.
He exhales the smoke.
'The boat?'
'Yes.'
He taps the ash. I watch it fall slowly to the ash tray.
'No.'
-
We've been following Ollie and Ernst in the van to Baku, which we reckon is about 600km from last night's camping spot at restauran Palid. It's all open countryside and one long road. Jeff recalls the road with the bend in it back in Bulgaria. The road to Baku beats that. 'It's a fucking straight road,' he says.
We've got lush mountains in distance ahead of us as we drive across the plains. The territory looks unforgiving, but watching the dusty road is fascinating. It's full of old Russian cars and trucks, and little dudes riding past overloaded on little mutant scooter-trucks. We see three-wheeled tractors. At one point we're on a main highway entirely engulfed by cows. Everyone's selling watermelons. We see a truck rammed full of cattle. Steve's suspects they're actually dead.
I hear a loud toot, and look up to see four dudes driving past in a tiny blue Lada. They give us a big thumbs up, flashing huge grins as they overtake. It's a happy feeling. The tunes are on and everything is well with the world. And it's a world away from that gated military compound at the border last night.
There couldn't be a starker contrast between the warmth of the regular people here and the b'stardity of the law. The whole system is screwed. Ernst tells us he heard that you have to pay a small fortune to become a policeman. Then in your first year you basically work for yourself. Any money you get, you get to keep. No wonder they're keen to abuse their power to rinse westerners.
It's not too long till we're on the receiving end. We hit a police checkpoint, and the van boys are pulled in ahead of us. The cops wave us in too. One comes over and asks for Steve's 'driver document'. Before Steve can even dig out his licence, the cop leans in and traces a 60 on the steering wheel with his finger. He means dollars. We fumble our way through it and give him 30. He lets us go. We drive up the road to wait for the others, and have a discussion about the right approach. You can treat the whole bribe thing as a complete and unjust pain in the arse, or just part of the way things work here. However you look at it, you can either pay up, or choose to sit it out and wait for them to get bored with the whole charade. There's probably no right answer.
The van boys pull up beside us. Turns out they had a hell of a time. Ernst got hammered for not wearing his seatbelt properly. He tried to play the game with the cop, turning his empty pockets out and playing dumb, but he was taken off into an office - which the captain promptly left, leaving two blokes standing really close to Ernst's face, really tearing strips off him. They tried to get him for $250. Crazy. And once it gets that aggressive, it starts seeming less of a game and suddenly very real. 'Not a good experience,' says Ernst afterwards. He gave the bastards all he had - $80. But what about the next checkpoint? This country could end up costing a packet. And to make it worse, we've only got $14 left. And no local money at all.
All you can do is drive on. And enjoy the locals. Guys by the road are jumping up and down waving at us. Roadworkers wave to us from their lunchbreak. We watch a line of cattle herders cross in front of us on manky little horses. The views are amazing: rainclouds spreading shadows on felt fields.
Every now and again we see a billboard advertising a drink called Extra Dad. It's marketed in other countries as Mummy's Special Friend.
As we're driving we hear that Gabi from Romania is following this blog. Hi Gabi. Great to hear from you. We're still going. But Azerbaijan police: BIG PROBLEM...
We reach another checkpoint not 50km from the last one. The van gets pulled again, but we get past unnoticed, and again wait up the road for them to get through. This time Ernst has been done for a dodgy overtaking manouevre he didn't make. And this in a country built on suicidal driving. Again, the fee is over $200. But his cop is softer this time and his pleading works, and he gets it down to $10. It all seems painfully random. It could be $200, it could be $10. And technically if someone's willing to shout at you in the face for a crime you didn't commit, there's no reason why they wouldn't be prepared to stick you in jail for a while. Look what happened to the A-Team.
I wonder what these people are like when they go home from their jobs carrying unfeasible piles of watermelons on top of small cars.
'You should have seen how many watermelons I had on the Lada today, love.'
'Yeah?'
'Yeah. Loads. Put the kettle on, I'm gasping.'
Our convoy continues for a bit, then the van pulls off the road outside a couple of concrete buildings. Ernst is still a bit riled from his run-ins with the cops. 'I need a positive experience,' he says. That means drinking tea with the locals. We go inside. The building looks like a cold concrete shell from the outside, and it's a cold concrete shell on the inside too. Just a couple of tables - moustached men playing backgammon on one, and a little moustached man on the other. We join him for tea.
Again, the warmth from everyone is ace. We're surrounded by smiles. A teenager stares in through the window with a big grin on his face. I see casual sweaters everywhere. I bemoan the fact I can't communicate with anyone here, beyond the words hello, thank you, and Manchester United. 'Manchester United?' The little moustached man has heard the magic words. He waves two youngsters across. 'Manchester United,' he says. They bring over a printed sheet and begin frantically pointing at some squiggles. 'Manchester United,' they say. I don't even know what it means. I meant to write that as a joke, but it's actually true. We have a linguistical common ground which, once you've said it, still has absolutely no relevance to anything. I can imagine my Manchester United is different to theirs. Jesper Olsen. Prawn sandwich. Trawlers and seagulls.
I love speaking to these people. Even if we can't understand each other. This morning at restauran Palid, a guy excitedly handed me his mobile. I took it.
'Hello?' I asked, curious as to who in this country would need to speak to me.
'Hellooo! My name Ahled!'
Ah, it's Ahled.
'Hello Ahled.'
I didn't understand anything else, so I just handed the phone back.
We buy some eggs and tomatoes and stop off up the road for feed in the van. Ollie's cooking while the rest of us chat with the locals. The watermelon salesman comes over from his spot across the road, as does the local shepherd. He shows off his mastery of twirling his stick, martial-arts style. Then he spots his sheep wandering onto the road, so he lobs his stick at them - across two lanes of traffic. He's a nice kid for a bit, then he just gets annoying. He keeps drawing circles and talking about 'sex discs'. We work out he wants us to give him porn DVDs. That wasn't top of my packing list. I note that it's unusual to have a litttle foreign chap asking you for illegal DVDs when you're trying to have dinner.
Ernst starts getting a bit pissy with this kid, which is fair enough. As he points out, he starts off friendly, then he's just taking liberties. He's soon trying to peel the stickers of some of our attractive female friends (and one team member's spouse) off the car. There's only room for one randy little bastard on this trip. It's a shame, as we get nothing but hospitality from the locals, true to their roots as nomadic people, but we're left with no choice but to begrudgingly tolerate this chap because he's being a knob.
Later we discover the extent of his twattery: Doug, our duck-dog mascot who has guided us for 4,000 miles, has disappeared from our bonnet. We check the photos and realise he was still with us when we met the shepherd. Never leave a man behind, goes the military motto. We're tempted to turn around, and instruct Ernst and Ollie to kick this sheep-shagger's arse on their drive back through.
After dinner we leave, refusing to rise to the shepherd's challenge to box him, and drive for another few km looking for a cash machine. We really need some cash. We pull in at the next town. Steve goes after the money, Jeff and I hang out by the car, which soon has about 20 blokes hanging around outside it. We exchange salams. Everyone just likes to mill about and take a look at things. Jeff's drawn a map in the layers of dust on the back windscreen, telling people what we're doing. Everyone thinks we're ace. Right now we're so damn cool I'm fairly sure any of these moustached men would happily do me. The shepherd could watch.
We make the plan to plough on to Baku. It's now about 280km according to one local. At normal speed that's nothing, but it's turned into an all-dayer for us, on crappy roads following a lumbering van.
Driving through the black behind a Mercedes van, deeper into Azerbaijan. Just like last night. Jeff driving, eyes fixed intently on the darkness, trying to focus on the shapes.
It's approaching midnight, we pull into a service station to stretch our legs. But this is Azerbaijan, so that soon turns into an invite for coffee. Who with? None other than the local police chief. In a land of intensely friendly people, and impossibly corrupt officials, we finally manage to bridge the two worlds, sitting here in the corner of a highway cafe. The chief talks no English, but that doesn't stop him talking - about how he trained at the police academy in Moscow, and how he has four kids. We talk for half an hour, while all the security guards and everyone else in the place stand around watching, staring intently at Steve's eyebrow ring, and laughing at our inept attempts at communication. After the experiences we've had of the police in this country, there couldn't be a better way to end the day.
Especially when the copper picks up the tab, as we figure ours did. At least we hope he did - we realise that none of us paid. Plus that'd mean there's more to the police here than we thought. At least he's human. Either that or he's radio'd ahead to his mates: 'Three idiots in a Punto coming your way. And they owe the state of Azerbaijan five coffees. I make that $1,500.'
And so to Baku. Pulling in at a garage we look up at the hills and see a huge TV tower looming over the town. The entire thing glows a deep red, which morphs slowly to purple, then green, as it shoots spots of light into the warm night sky. It's probably meant to symbolise hope, to instil a sense of joy whenever the town's populace looks up and see its pretty colours. To me it's a giant surveillance stick, shooting cancer at the clouds.
There's no room at the hostel, so we trawl our way round the town's manicured and polished sea front seeking supplies, and decide to sleep in the vehicles at the port. It's a strange night, especially as we find a bar called Princess Diana's and choose for some reason not to go in. Instead we sit in the back of Ernst's van at the port eating sausages and drinking beer until 7am, and end up with three hours' kip.
It's good to be tired - ours is a task that suits a mangled brain. Tomorrow we must unravel the mysteries of the infamous Caspian Sea ferry. No one knows when it leaves. No one knows when it arrives. And when we awake in the morning, we will be entirely at its mercy.
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