06 THE CAUCASUS
In the affluent west we have an equation for living; that time = money. Logically, in countries where the dough is a little thinner on the ground (did someone drop a pizza?) You could reasonably presume that time does not necessarily = money quite so much. What’s the point in hurrying if you are not going to earn very much anyway? And so it was; that Uzbek roadbuilders were out there on the incumbent highways, scraping along doing as little as possible because the government had not paid them in more than six months. I could see a viciously circular chicken and egg type stalemate happening there….
Anyhow, back to the point. I had made my way down to the ferry ticket office in Aktau for 9am, the lovely cuddly lady there had given me directions to the specific place in the labyrinthine industrial seaport tangle of train tracks, mysterious pipelines, roads and oily dirt tracks and warning signs pinned up ominously in various forms of gibberish. You must get there by ten! The ferry sails at ten!
So of course, like a fool I rushed and sweated in my all winter weather togs. Got to the port with five minutes to spare. I paid some random man 80 dollars and then waited. And waited. 10am became 10.30 and I checked myself to not panic. Almost nobody spoke English, but a nice man behind a desk assured me that the ship wasn’t ready to leave yet. Please come back at 1pm. So I did. Please come back in one hour. So I did. Please come back in hour. So this I also did. Please return in 40 minutes. Ooh things are starting to look hopeful; a shorter wait. Things must be imminent. I waited 40 minutes. I came back. Please wait 30 minutes. I scratched my chin at him and gave him a comic eyeballing in a why-on-earth-should-I-believe-you? kind of way. We both laughed. Still the ferry wasn’t ready…
At roughly 6pm somebody revives me from playing snooker on my phone and I get funnelled awkwardly with my bike through the slightly tight squeeze that constitutes customs control. Fortunately nobody is in the slightest bit interested in furtling around in my luggage. The woman takes ages scrutinizing my passport. Kharashol? Da, kharashol. Spasiba, spasiba…
This is not really a ferry and this is not really a ferry port. No helpfully guiding signs to direct me to the right point, only a continuation of the slightly indecipherable landscape and Miss Passport Controller’s even more indecipherably vague hand signals to go by.
Just as it’s getting dark I find my way onto the open mouthed gangway of the Mercury, all ready and waiting to receive whole trains and slightly unsure velocipedists.
A soldier checks my passport then another chap takes it away from me. Where’s he going with it? Will I arrive at Baku port sans ID? I am reassured by another that this is standard procedure. Presumably an insurance measure against passengers suddenly turning rogue and pirate-jacking the ship and shunting it up the Volga to ultimate international freedom in reverse Viking fashion.
There are only two other passengers, two train drivers shunting wagons between Gruziya (Georgia) and Almaty in eastern Kazakhstan. Cor I’ve never shared the meal table with train drivers before. It’s a pleasure to share the company of fellow drivers; we are all in it together us drivers of the world… silly working hours, the wide open road/landscape to traverse; a rubbish social life but a certain kind of freedom that other static people don’t get..
Anyway.
My cabin is reasonable (by my standards). The carpet smells of a thousand years of cigarette ends and other spillages(which actually I find pretty revolting), but most crucially the bedding is clean and snuggly. The cabin design is of a gloomy fake mahogany peeling formica type. Very seventies. No enforced central heating. I cant stand central heating, so this is all doably adequate.
Morning of December 7th. A breakfast of cheese and bread jam and very good chai.
Strong wind blows off a distant bumpy ribbon of coastline to portside (on the left!) We have been following it for a couple of hours… this is where I sign off for now. I need to poo. I hope the flush works.
Three days later…
Well I can reliably state that the three day interlude has nothing to do with either the state of the toilet or my bum.
I sit on the upper-most deck in brilliant sunshine and a wildly howling wind. Perfect for my clothes drying purposes; I just hope that without the use of clothes pegs that the wind doesn’t decide to deliver it all into the Caspian.
What I naively imagined was going to be a straight-line zip across the sea has stretched out somewhat. We spent the entire weekend anchored just outside of the Turkmenistan harbour of Turkmenbashi. Being barely able to communicate with the crew, I had been under the impression that we would be making a ‘brief’ stop at the port here. As far as I am aware, I was awoken at 5.45am this morning with the dual clankings of anchors being raised; but rather than heading into port as I had imagined we seem to be finally making that beeline for Baku, as confirmed by my trusty GPS on my phone.
It occurs to me how my attitude to entering new countries is changing. Either this evening or tomorrow morning I will enter Azerbaijan, a country that I know pretty much nothing whatsoever about. It has mountains to the north, they have an economy that is comparable to the Euro and the US dollar and they hate the Armenians. That’s it. That’s all I know, and I’m not in the least bit bothered. I cant speak one single solitary word of Azeri. I have no Azeri money, I have no hotel booked. Never mind; I’m sure it will all be fine.
Actually something else I do know is that having moved a significant degree or so southwards, it is certainly a lot warmer. Maybe it’s because we are in the middle of the sea. Maybe it’s just a particularly sunny day. Not actually warm as such; just nothing like the finger-aching cold that there was in Aktau most days. The wind is still strong and northerly… maybe the Siberian influence has done its worst back north east over Kazakhstan. I was told that Astana was minus 40 last week.
My time in Kazakhstan was the flittiest of any of the countries that I have so far had the pleasure of visiting; one overnight drive of 500kms from the border through the desert followed by nearly two weeks of mildly dull waiting in Aktau for my Azerbaijan visa to become viable. In total, I have now spent nearly a month not riding my bike anywhere… you could reasonably guess that I’m quite looking forward to getting back in the saddle.
Everything changes.
The meals that our lovely cook makes for us are basic but satisfying. Buckwheat or rice with lots of butter. Chicken fried in butter. Borsht! I cant begin to describe how much I am enjoying borsht…. beetroot! Vegetables! Nutrition! Okay then maybe I can describe it.
Also fried in butter or baked, potatoes (kartoshka). Almost every meal features potatoes. Lots of them. Not boiled; fried. In Tajikistan it was boiled sheep’s bum and noodles and stale bread and maybe a fried egg or two. If you were lucky there was often half a potato and one solitary slice of carrot in your sheep’s bum broth. Other forms of presented sheep or goat meat spanned a similarly narrow food range.
In Uzbekistan the likelihood of the bread being at least fresh was far greater. There were significantly more potatoes and more places with vegetables with the meals. Onion and potato deep fried batter things and somsas (basically a pastie). Great piles of sort of pickled salads in the markets (chimchi?).
By Aktau, the city’s food seems to be 70 percent western…
On the ferry, our potato soup amongst other things, has fresh coriander and mint in it. I even keep finding cooked plums in my soup.
After several months without adequate vegetables, I am now somewhat excited about my meals to come.
My allocated cabin stank of cigarettes, it got more revolting with each reluctant breath I took so after spending a cold windy night with rather too much fresh air blowing through my porthole (ooh-err missus!) I re-assign myself the following morning to the windowless but infinitely cleaner cabin opposite.
After 5 days of reading listening to Radio Four podcasts, playing virtual snooker and being almost completely inert I am starting to get tetchy.
Richard Terry 