No man's land, Turkmenbashi, Turkmenistan. We finally get off the Soviet ghost ship, and are looking forward to rediscovering our freedom by exploring the madness of Turkmenistan, when we receive an almighty flick to the balls: they tell us we haven't paid for our visas. $300 for us, $200 for the car. Ouch. And we don't have any money.
This is an incredibly stupid state of affairs when you're trying to enter a country. It's like clinging on to the axle of a French truck for 48 hours, only to discover they have speed bumps in Dover. So we're stuck. Again. Can't go forward, can't go back.
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Go back to floating on the ghost ship off the coast of Turkmenbashi. The country is second-to-last in the world's freedom of the press rankings. We haven't even got there yet, and we don't seem to have any say in anything either. We've given ourselves over to time. You can't ask for anything. Just float.
We wake up at 11am. The news? There is none. We're still floating. And so the day passes. 'Is it Wednesday?' asks Steve. Yeah, it is. I go outside. It's already hot. There's no air. One of the moustached truckers points over at some ships and starts talking to me in German. 'Ein, zwei...' he says. Then he points at us. 'Drei.' Twelve hours of floating and we've jumped just one place in the queue.
We go back to Gulags to get coffee. The guys are playing backgammon again. It's a good time to muse over the nature of the trip. The whole thing is a micro version of life. You don't know what's round the next corner - so there's no point in worrying about anything. What's going to happen at the next border? The next police checkpoint? What will the roads be like? Will David Waur land us in trouble? There's not a single thing you can productively concern yourself with other than exactly what's happening at the moment, which is ideal. And the moment means... waiting.
Justin comes in. It looks like we may be docking tomorrow. That's Thursday. 'So what are your plans for today?' I ask. We could join the captain. He seems to be having a wonderful time. A little white-haired bloke in a hawaiian shirt and slacks, he's set up a couple of rods and is fishing off the side.
I lose my Istanbul backgammon crown to Jeff, 3-0. We're still not moving. We suddenly discover they sell beer in the kafe. But it's $5 a bottle. Ridiculous.
At 3.25 Turkmen time (or 25 past Turkmenbashi's massive pendulous cock in the local lingo), we head back to the cabin for more reading and sleep, till 6pm. Then back to the kafe for sausages. And reading. And backgammon outside on the walkway. Azerbaijani music pipes out through a mesh window, quiet and tinny, its chorus looping again and again for 20 minutes of nomadic rousings.
Steve announces he's 'firmed up', the first time since Bulgaria two weeks ago. That's big news. He wanted that flagged up.
The captain comes past. He's carrying two massive fish.
Then it's back to the cabin for more reading. A thin layer of sweat coats the body. I can see mountains in the distance. The striplight soldiers on by my eye, in its dim electric toil.
Jeff returns to the cabin. 'What have you been doing?' I ask him. It's the sort of thing you ask someone. Jeff laughs at the ridiculous question. 'Nothing.' Oh yeah.
Back to the kafe for dinner. It's meat and rice. We decide to ask if they sell vodka. It's $10 a bottle, which is a better price than the beer. And all are agreed it'd be ridiculous not to drink vodka right now. The woman begrudgingly fetches it. A bottle of Ideal. That is ideal.
We head up to the deck to drink and wile the evening away in the stark shadows of the floodlights. In the distance we notice an orange glow, too random to be city lights, too far away to be a fire. It must be one of Turkmenbashi's statues, given some tasteful uplighting.
We go back to the cabin, where I write this blog with the mosquitos. Surely we'll be moving tomorrow...
... worse than that, we're moving right now. Just when I was settling in for a night's sleep, with a proper bed, albeit a potentially scabetic one, we hear the loud clanking of the anchor coming up. For fuck's sake. They've kept us on this thing for days. Now instead of sleeping we'll be spat through customs and out into a night of driving. No time to dwell on that - a lunatic is storming round rapping on everyone's doors to kick them out the cabins.
Soon we're out on deck, watching the arid town of Turkmenbashi inch closer as we slip up to it in the night. It makes the end of the voyage as eerie as the start, floating out of the darkness dreamlike towards a town of low lights, backlit by that orange fire glow in the desert behind it.
We watch as the ship docks, and people run around the deck pulling frantically on essential things. About 20 people have emerged - they must've been on the boat the whole time, just hiding in their cabins. They clearly knew what they were doing. Bed in, my child, this ride's going to be shit. A cocky youth in a white vest keeps blatantly taking the piss out of us. All his elderly relatives laugh, including a stick-thin woman in traditional garb who's only two feet high.
I suddenly realise the three Azerbiajan truckers have a Three Stooges quality to them. I wish I'd noticed that ages ago. As I think that, one of them hits his mate in the stomach and laughs. He can't be laughing long - it's ages till we're let off the fucking thing. Waiting again, among the hum of engines, the smell of fuel, pockets of chit-chat in foreign tongue dotted around the deck. Transit souls, sharing their low moments with us and the mosquitoes.
Finally they give us the signal - there's no proper way out, so all the passengers trudge down to the train bay. It's 3am. Lorries start their engines early, sending filth into our lungs. The truckers light up cigarettes among the hard metal. Steve goes to reverse Mr W out the bay door - she doesn't start. We give her a push down the ramp and she goes. But we've got a flat tyre. Mr W has slowly started falling to pieces.
In the queue outside the building, we notice that the faces around us have changed once again. There's a definite Asian quality creeping in to the features of the soldiers. Faces are softer, kinder. It's a great thing about the nature of the trip - you may be left with a vague feeling of dashing through a lot of these amazing places and not doing them justice, but you also get to see the span and moulding of cultures, step-by-step, with your own eyes. From china-clay mining villages around a Cornish town built around a shitbag Wetherspoons, to Turkmenistan, a nation built in the image of a complete mentalist whose claims to divinity would surely melt away if someone just gave him a cuddle.
We're getting excited about all this weirdness when the officials deliver the visa bombshell. We' were under the impression we'd paid for the visa like all the others, and that it was just a case of arriving and making the transit visa operational.
Discuss options. Hmm. Thanks to the fact we didn't buy beer on the boat, we happen to have exactly the right money to buy one visa. That person can then go into the country and get cash. But they don't have ATMs. The only options are go 500km to Ashgebat and use visa to make a withdrawal, or to get money sent over from home. There's a Western Union in the nearest town, so that's what we decide: I'll get my visa, and go to the bank when it opens to get Pat&Trev to wire me some bail-out money.
It's weird time. After being stuck on a boat, we're now stuck in no-man's land. Can't go forward, can't go back. Just float. And hope I can get some cash.
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