The Caspian Sea. This may be the point at which I have to pack this blog in and admit defeat. I'm not sure I have the words to describe it any more. I'm on the deck of a dilapidated Soviet passenger ferry, sitting under a spotlight as the ship waits in the port at Baku, on the Azerbaijan coast, for a 150-mile voyage across the Caspian Sea. It's 7am, and we've been up for 24 hours just trying to buy a ticket. And now we sit anchored and waiting to set sail, the ghost ship's human cargo.
I concede: the weird is definitely winning.
Jeff has lost the ability to speak. I keep saying things to him, trying to convey my own addled mind's take on what we're seeing - the beige, the brown, the condemned lifeboat - but he can't respond. He's in stunned delirium. 'It's just so fucking...' He shakes his head. The best thing: we paid $500 for this. But in the strangest possible way, it's actually worth it.
I was half-cut and exhausted when I drove on - three hours' kip in two days, and another night in Ernst's van drinking beer, this time topped off with rakia, a weird Croatian spirit. We crawled Mr Wazzboobleyoid into the belly of the ship, one of only two cars parked in the harsh metal shadows cast by the collosal freight trains. There's no service, no information, no way out. We keep trying to get up to the passenger deck - apparently we've got a cabin - but people keep pointing us the other way. Eventually we suss it out, going back off the boat, clambering over huge deathly maritime cables, and back onto the dock - hoping to make it back up the steps and boarding before the thing starts to move off.
A humourless blond woman takes us to get sheets, then barks us in to our cabin - a tiny wood-panelled box held together by stains. Viral mattresses, a rotten ceiling, and a flourescent light full of flies. I can't help laughing.
Where are all the passengers?
Next to our cabin there's an empty lounge area with a few rows of seats sat facing a yellow wall. The plan of the boat is written in Russian, but among the incomprehensible symbols I spot the words 'restauran' and 'music hull'. I imagine a skeleton band of Stalin's fallen soldiers, playing a death waltz, animated by Ray Harryhausen. We're still drunk, and this place is ridiculous.
Jeff and I are still marvelling from the deck when Steve runs up shouting - apparently Mr Wazzboobleyoid's hazards have come on again, her impulsive blinking lighting up the iron flanks of the trains in the gloom of the hull. A cry for help perhaps. We disembark again and run down the steps to stop it, and then finally turn in.
We wake up at around 6pm. Totally confused. The boat is moving, and the desert mountains of Turkmenistan are looming large in the distance. We go up to the deck and watch. The ship aims itself through a gap in a natural spit - two banks of sand so big there's room for a large military-looking compound on it, and a load of camels roaming around. Yes. Camels.
Pretty soon word comes in that the boat won't be getting in for a while. We've stopped. It's 12 hours since we set off. The port at Turkmenbashi is closed. Estimates vary - it could be three hours, it may be two days. Of course you figure it'll be the former, but you also know that time moves differently here. The whole thing has a beautiful symmetry. You arrive at the port, and no-one can tell you when the boat is going to leave. You're on the boat, and can see the other port, and no-one can tell you when you'll be getting off the fucking thing.
Of course the waiting gives us some rare time to read up on where we're going. And it seems the weirdness of the boat is just a taste of what's waiting for us the other side of those mountains. Turkmenistan has been built in the image of its dictator, now deceased, who got everyone to call him Turkmenbashi - prince of the Turkmen. He demolished half the capital's residential areas to build theme parks and statues of himself, banned freedom of the press, bugged hotel rooms, and wrote a book of nonsensical spiritual thinkings that he forced everyone to read, saying if you read it 100 times it guaranteed a spot in heaven. It's since been sent into space, to orbit the earth for 150 years. There's also footage on YouTube of interviews with Turkmen architects, pronouncing Turkmenbashi to be 'the greatest architect in the history of the universe,' because he 'designed and built all the world's great buildings.' Turkmenbashi's slogan: 'People, nation, me'. A humble man.
Looking out the porthole I can still see his eponymous city in the distance. It seems we're already floating in his eddies.
We're starting to feel incredibly rank, but of course there are no showers. Jess and Justin were told there was one in their room. It turns out to be a piece of piping. There isn't even a gents' toilet. We're using the women's, where they've taken a tiny regular toilet and converted into a squatter by installing a high metal footplate on either side. Jeff gets his aim wrong.
Still we wait. It looks like we'll be getting in in the morning. We sit in the restaurant, opposite three Azerbaijan blokes playing lightning backgammon and pouring tea into their guts. There's a constant electric hum, and striplights douse the room in beige. It's a room of Soviet shadows. Interrogation yellow. On the wall someone's stuck a row of cheap posters, building an artist's impression of paradise - waterfalls, fresh fruit, palm trees. One is titled 'The Milky Way and the Hightest Heavens', while 'The Beauty of Nature' depicts two stags hovering above a stream. It's awful. You too may dream of that while dining on a bowl of potatoes, in a floating gulag of nicotine and asbestos.
A bloke on the boat demands our passports. This is a grey-area of travel that it's hard to get your head around. We've heard of rally teams fighting to keep them, and of people being charged to have them back. Then again, people need to send passenger details ahead. In the end you really have no choice but to hand these things over. Our passports are down in the car. Another oddity of this boat - it's fine to wander back down, unattended in the darkness of the floating train yard, to get them.
Jeff gets the passports and hands them over, and the bloke just takes them to the office and photocopies them and hands them straight back. You feel like a dick arguing with someone who's just doing their job.
Back in the KAFE, our blond hostess is surly as she delivers us more chi. She is capable of the odd smile, she's just been soured by her job. What does working on a ghost ship do to a woman? Spending your life crawling across the same 150 miles of sea, sweating at the arid centre of the world, on an empty boat who's greatest days are far far behind her, and the memories of which are brown at best.
We spend the rest of the night on our bunks reading, and turn in around 1am. Surely we'll be moving tomorrow...
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