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Other entries in Kazakhstan

An Oddesy with the Azerbaijan State Shipping Comp

My journey with the State Azerbaijan Shipping Company was not a short one. I rode aboard the mighty Azerbaijan, a large Car, Rail, Cargo and Passenger Ship.  She was a queen of the sea complete with rust and the unmistakable decay of everything that was part of the former Soviet Union.

It started in the morning with a visit to the ticket woman, who in and of herself, was something of a legend of inefficiency and bad employee attitude.  There was a Georgian man in front of me who was buying a ticket to Turkmenistan.  He spoke some English and helped smooth things over between me and the ticket woman.  She told me to come back at 3:00 for a ticket and that the ferry would leave at 5:00.  

I didn’t have any illusions that the ferry was really going to leave at 5:00, but + or – 2 hours seemed like a safe bet.  I had heard stories of people missing it.  The weekly ferry to Aktau in Kazakhstan was not something that I was going to miss. My trip to Azerbaijan already felt like a wash and I wasn’t intending to extend it. I had already spent extra days being in Baku just so that I wouldn’t miss the ferry.

So what could I do but go back to my guesthouse, watch one last DVD, and then buy enough food for the ferry trip and then a little extra just in case.  After that I reported at 3:05 only to wait for 40 minutes while the ticket women was busy doing her nails, or having a snack or watching TV.   Normally I wouldn’t care, but I had to be there at 3:00, just in case she decided to go home early, and then with her gone, no one in the whole wide world would have been able to sell me a ticket. And that’s the truth.

After I had a ticket I had nothing better to do than walk 500 meters down to the dock. They had a lovely waiting hall, which consisted of a corrugated metal shack with some pieces of wood attached to the walls and a few large picnic tables in one corner.  I made myself comfortable and spent some time people watching.  I had a couple of broken conversations with other passengers.   I spent time staring at graffiti in Russian and Azeri that was scrawled all over the waiting shack.  I made a couple of bored attempts to talk to a police officer to figure out what the deal was, only to be shooed away like a smelly in-law.

There were at least 10 police officers and another 10-15 officials of various sorts lounging around.  Apparently the other passengers who didn’t have the language barrier started to show up just before 7.  Some of them were actually getting on my boat.  I found two German’s with their BMW motorcycles, waiting patiently.  I had met them earlier.  They told me a tail of woe that Azeri customs robbed them of a lot of money and would only let them have their bikes in the country for 3 days, the rest of the time they had to be impounded by customs at the docks.  Silly and frustrating.  Yeah this is my personal message to everything the Azeri government is involved in, including transport.   You Suck.  There I feel a little better.  But really, getting a visa, the cost of the visa, getting shorted for time on my visa, waiting around for a boat that cant even have a posted schedule or even let you know the day before that it is leaving tomorrow. And of course my Oddessy with the Azerbaijan State Shipping Company, which I am now relating to you, my dedicated readers.  

From my german friends I at least learned that they were unloading the Kazakh ferry and that the Turkmen ferry was waiting outside the port to unload and then embark next.  After hours of nothing happening, a larger industrial forlift came along and started unloading cylinders of sheet metal one by one. There were a few dozen and each one took at least a few minutes.  They started running out of room to put them and there was some yelling and they tried putting some on a truck but they were too heavy.  After another hour of nothing two locomotives pulled up and unloaded the rail cars from the train.  There were two bays for rail cars and they had to be unloaded at the same time to keep the ship balanced.

After the longest time two men tried to load a small tree on a cart into the large ocean going vessel, three men from customs stopped it and inspected the tree for an entire 8 minutes, rechecking its documentation.  When they cleared the tree and started rolling it up the ramp me and my German friends started cheering. One bold and brave tree was on its intrepid way to Kazakhstan. Little did it know what would happen to it on the Kazakh side, perhaps it would require a special interview with the Kazakh version of the KGB.

At some point I went poking around the docks for a toilet.  Just walking around I was pissing off some of the transient seamen who lived there.  I found it, only because I could hear the water leaking from it all over the place from a distance of 20 meters.  

There was also a story circulating about a truck driver with a load bound for Kazakhstan who had missed the last two weekly ferries because of paperwork problems. He essentially had become a refugee another victim of the Soviet Union’s legacy of regulations.

Around 10 o’clock they started processing passengers for my ferry.  That was another exercise in confusion.   Even the other passengers of various former soviet nationalities were confused. For me I just played my role of sheep, along of course with pushing your way through every line like wild beast. A few rooms later after a serious customs check.  There was a hallway that you had to wait on the right side of the door.  No one was aware of this so every single passenger went through the door and was yelled at in a serious way.  Finally I made it to the immigration post.  The guards seemed happy to see me in a way that worried me a little.   I had heard stories about this post causing problems for westerners. After two minutes looking through my passport a few times, the guard asked me if I had been to Armenia, the arch enemy of the Azerbaijan Republic.  I said yes in a definite and unapologetic tone.  One minute later I had my stamp no problem.  I walked 200 meters down the dock thinking we might board the ship.  Instead we spent another hour waiting outside on the dock. I talked with some passengers who spook a few words of English, and I talked for at least 20 minutes in detail from a young Azeri crew member who was apprenticing to be a navigator.  His English was good.

The few crew members around inspired no faith, and I wondered if the sinking of one of these ferries in bad weather in 2002 could have been avoided with appropriate safety measures and a crew who spent more time fixing their ship, than fixing up their own cabins.

When we did board the ship, it was getting late and I was feeling sleepy. I found a passenger place with airline style chairs that smelled like a closet full of clothes that hadn’t been washed in 2 years.  The greedy man in charge of passenger money extraction wanted 20 dollars for a cabin.  I said 10 and after about 40 minutes of sleeping in the seat area, I agreed to 12 dollars for a cabin. They of course acted like I was cheating them, it was a standard negotiation tactic.  It was a small thing with 4 beds, it had thoroughly gross mattresses and really I didn’t want to sleep in there, even with my sleeping bag to protect me. It was a shitty place, but damn it was late and I was sleepy. 

I was sleeping peacefully in the Port of Baku, at 3:00 am two older Azeri men were to be my cabin mates.   This pissed me off, because I wondered what I was paying for.  I saw one of them hand over ~$7 to the crew and I wondered if that was for one or both of them.  At least I had first choice of beds in the closet/cabin with my new friends.  At least the gentlemen were pretty nice and agreeable in a special Turkic sort of way.

The first light of day was just starting to dawn when I felt a lurch and heard the diesel motors change pace.  We left the port at much slower than a walking pace even when we were a few km from our birth.  14 hours after my arrival in the port we had embarked on our small trip across the Caspian Sea.  Soon enough I would be gearing up for my long rail journeys across the endless steppe lands of Kazakhstan, land of Borat, and the Baikonur Cosmodrome

I quickly learned from my 3 new Italian friends that the deck was the only place worth spending time on the ship.  The weather was beautiful and sunny, the sea breeze was steady and the view was at times breath taking.  So for most of the journey including the nights I was on the top deck of the ship.  It was an iron lounge, cleaner than you might imagine.

We played cards and shared conversation and food. They told me about the joy and rigours of the Mongol Rally.  200 teams in sub 1 liter cars driving from Europe to Mongolia. Many of them would take routes through central Asia, and I heard about other sightings from fellow travelers. Their team was quite lucky as they arrived in Baku the day that the ferry was leaving on its merry way.

It was an easy and lazy lifestyle.  Almost like the beach except that you couldn’t go swimming and the deck wasn’t as comfortable as the sand.    The only real bummer was the toilet.  There was one for passengers that none of the crew ever had to lay eyes on. In the toilet only one of original toilets was in any functioning shape.  Towards the end of the journey the fumes were so strong, that you could just choke on the ammonia.  In one year of world travel, including countries that didn’t have many toilets, it was the worst one that I would encounter and I dreaded every visit with a special passion.  Even on the top deck the vent that led to the toilet was also avoided like a passion.  The women’s side was no better, I would have used it, but my first visual inspection convinced me that it was worse than the men’s side.  And this was a ship with only about 40 passengers on it. Really nothing on the ship was maintained in any fashion. It was an old boat and I wonder if they could even effectively deal with the smallest leak.   There was a soviet canteen on board but I avoided it, many of the passengers spent the duration of the voyage hanging out there.

I slept on the deck, there was a dew that seemed to cover many of my things in dampness but I didn’t care so much.  My friends were still happily sleeping when I spotted land from the other side of the sea the next morning.  Our route was mostly northerly, not west to east like you might expect. Two more hours brought us to the port of Aktau, it was about 11:00 am in the morning.  Aktau was a strange place, it came from nothing out of the desert.  It had a nuclear desalination plant as its only source of water It had over 100,000 people yet only one street had a name.

But I get ahead of myself as we spent the rest of the day outside the port, about 12 hours of waiting around on the boat, playing more cards, telling more stories, there was nothing else to do.  Our food was starting to run low, I shared what little I had left with my friends.  I was feeling fatalistic about completing the journey and I wondered if it was a mistake to take the boat.  It was certainly easy to hop on board a daily flight and complete the journey with an airplane.

When we did dock it was already midnight.  All of the passengers gathered in the entryway, it was packed full and not so comfortable.   After about 30 minutes of sitting docked in the port, I was singled out and they wanted to take my passport.  I let the man have it, but followed him, because I was had a bad feeling.  I walked into a stateroom that was quite nice, with a big wooden table.  Apparently they had enough money to maintain the captains quarters quite nicely.  There were at least 10 officials sitting around making discussions.  I was clearly not welcome there, they took my passport and then went for the Italian trio’s passports.   They didn’t bother with anyone else’s passports.

Another 30 minutes and we left the ship.  They had kept my passport for the duration of the sea voyage and they lost the Russian Passport cover that I had bought in Irkutsk many months earlier.  I even asked them to look for it.  My passport was naked.

So 1 hour after we docked we left the ship and put our luggage on a flat bed semi truck and then got into a bus for the 300 meter journey across the port.  For some reason I was nervous about disappearing luggage.  The customs and immigration house along with most of the port was rather new and in nice shape. We took seats on metal chairs and waited for 15 minutes for a drug dog to come and sniff all of the luggage.  Then everyone seemed to go home and they left one immigration man who said that it was his first day on the job.  He didn’t know anything, the port only received and transmitted passengers twice a week, but they still left him to float by himself.  He was asking every passenger about regulations and asked me which one was the Kazakh visa.  At least he was trying, but it was a 3 hour wait while he dealt with the passengers.   That was 12-3 in the morning. The customs check was quick. 

After that it was 3:30 in the morning and Aktau had a rather shitty set of hotels, shitty and expensive.  And by shitty, I mean you would be ashamed to take your mother there, at prices only possible because there is no competition.  So I thought nothing of taking a snooze.

In the morning my Italian friends and this Georgian couple who spoke English were waiting to pay a 12 dollar port tax to the cashier.  She came in an hour late and sat eating breakfast and then started having coffee and gossiping.  She was Russian, and just kept talking about a broken computer.    Broken computer is a common one, really she just didn’t feel like taking 24 dollars from two people so they could get on with their lives.  The poor Georgian couple was irate, they had two kids, the wife was Russian from Almaty and they had a crazy drive through the Uzbek desert ahead of them, but the women didn’t care.   I was waiting around to get a ride into town with my Italian friends because I just hate taxi drivers.  At 9:00 everyone was still sleeping and the cashier was busy having her third coffee I decided to brave Aktau.    In the 57 hours since arriving at the Port of Baku I had covered only about 200km.  It was a safe and easy joke that we could have ridden bicycles faster.  But damn it was still something of an adventure, and if not for that toilet, it could have been a strange languishing paradise.

 For me I was just beginning my long road across Kazakhstan. I was headed east.  Across the endless steppe. My strange route would take me close to Russia and then to the southeastern corner of such a large country.

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