Azerbaijan is a strange country. The center of the capital city, Baku, is like any oil-rich capital city: clean, modern, expensive, offering all of the comforts of the developed world. Cranes dot the skyline as shiny new skyscrapers are constantly being built, and a brand new boulevard along the waterfront offers picturesque views of the bay. Posters of Heydar Aliyev are everywhere – Azerbaijan’s former supreme leader and father of the current president. Fancy cars scoop the loop, ignoring traffic laws simply because they can. As part of the government’s effort to reduce unemployment and give a perfect impression to visiting oil barons, old women sweep the streets with brooms and mops, cleaning the city as one would clean their own home. People on the streets generally avoid eye contact except for the taxi drivers and souvenir sales people, excited to triple their prices for passing tourists. Russian is widely known and some people even speak English. Local women strut around in high heels with Chanelle purses, doing their best to look like barbie dolls. You can smell the local mens’ cologne from 100m away as they approach with perfectly manicured haircuts and freshly shined shoes. The gender gap is nearly as large as the wealth gap here.
Walk a few kilometers outside of the center and you’ll enter another universe. The outskirts of the city more closely resemble slums than the modern apartments of the center. Here, homes are built from adobe and holes are patched with whatever scrap metal, carpets, plastic, or other materials are available. Children run around yelling “hello!” as we pass (their only English word) and adults stare with curiosity in their eyes. The streets are littered with trash, which seems to slowly make its way into giant piles on the nearby lake shore. It’s clear that the government has ignored the existence of this neighborhood for a long, long time. This was a typical scene in Azerbaijan: huge contrasts.
We biked up to the northern border of the country to see a bit more. Along the way, we passed both beautiful beaches and horribly dirty beaches, depressed villages and fields of oil pumps. People were very friendly, and if we had accepted every offer to have a tea that we received, we never would have made it anywhere. As soon as we left Baku, the roads were dominated by trucks and old Soviet Ladas who honked and waved as they passed us. On this short excursion, we spent one night camping on a beach, the second night camping in a sour plum grove where we were invited by the owner to pitch our tent and eat sour plums to our hearts’ desire, the third night camping in a small park in Qirmizi Qasaba, and the fourth night in the home of an unbelievably friendly man in Xachmaz who was simply overjoyed to learn about our experiences.
Qirmizi Qasaba was especially interesting – it’s the only 100% Jewish town outside of Israel and the USA. Home to the Caucasian Mountain Jews (yes, that’s their official name), this was another place of huge contrast. Homes here are better described as mansions, everything is new, and again we were in the realm of fancy cars. Everyone on the street spoke perfect Russian; not so in the countryside we had passed to get there. Most families here have relatives in Israel or the USA who regularly send them money, giving them a much higher standard of living than 100m across the river in the city of Quba.
From Qirmizi Qasaba, we rode back to the main highway and tried to hitch a ride to Baku from there. In about a minute, a man stopped for us an invited us to his house. Instead of hitchhiking, we ended up having dinner with him, sleeping in his guest bedroom, and then taking a train to Baku early the next morning. He had lived in Baku and worked in the oil industry for most of his life and explained to us his thoughts on Azerbaijani politics. “The president only cares about oil and money. If you’re not in the oil business, you’re nothing. The government has so much money, every day they’re building multi-million dollar buildings, but they don’t give anything to the villages. People are scraping by with hardly enough money for bread and he doesn’t give a shit as long as he can build another hotel for businessmen to come and tell him how great he is.”
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A week later, we left Baku for the second time, this time headed south towards the port village of Alat. We had spent the last several days in and around the capital, applying for Uzbek and Turkmen visas, wandering the streets, and kite surfing at the super awesome Blue Planet kite beach. Being a kitesurf bum was my summer plan before I bought a bike (ok, not a plan, just a main idea), so I was stoked to have gotten a chance to ride before setting off into the desert of Kazakhstan.
The ferry from Azerbaijan to Kazakhstan runs on a pretty irregular schedule, departing whenever it’s full and arriving whenever the captain feels like. It leaves from Alat, 70 km south of Baku; reaching the port requires several hours of biking. There are a few phone numbers floating around various internet forums like Caravanistan, and these are the only way to find out the estimated departure time of the ferry before making the long schlep to the port. Most travelers simply call these numbers day after day until they receive an affirmative answer that the boat will depart soon. We were lucky, and when we called in the morning, we were told that the next ferry would depart that evening.
We immediately set off to the port and arrived around 5pm to find a large group of travelers, mostly cyclists, already waiting. The port workers told us “yes, yes, leaving in two hours”. This continued for the next 24 hours as another boat was loaded with the efficiency of an Azeri port (I tried to think of a better metaphor for this, but there is simply nothing less efficient). I guess they’re still running on the old Soviet system where workers are paid the same $150 per month no matter how good of a job they do, and, since their profits haven’t decreased, nobody has bothered putting any thought into how to make it better.
During our waiting time, we took a short ride into the village of Alat with the intent to swim at the nearest beach. Once we saw (and smelled) the beach, swimming was the last thing on our minds. Everything from plastic bottles to old syringes to dirty diapers were piled up to a meter high along the entire shore. I asked a nearby babushka what happened to the beach and she told us, “We’re all pigs. Everybody from the neighborhood dumps their trash here. People used to swim here, during the USSR, people were paid to clean it. Since the fall of the USSR, nobody has been paid to clean it. Nobody cares. Everyone’s a pig.” She proceeded to show us her beautifully clean garden, blossoming with flowers, cherries, and ducklings, only meters from the trash dump that was once a beach. Azerbaijan, the land of contrast.
Finally, we boarded the ferry that evening. Detti and I had paid the cheaper price ($70) for a 4-bedroom, but housekeeper on the boat seemed to take an immediate liking to us and gave us a private room with an ensuite bathroom and a front-facing window, meaning that we were some of the lucky few who weren’t boiling hot all night. It was still another 24 hours before the ferry actually left the port, due to either wind at sea or a ridiculously inefficient loading process, but that was totally fine because food was included in our ticket price. We were fed delicious pasta and meat, rice and meat, and again pasta and meat for our meals. Or, plain pasta, rice, pasta for the vegetarians. The one vegan on the boat couldn’t eat the butter on the pasta, so he had pickles, stale bread, and sometimes soup. Trying to explain to the boat workers what “vegan” means was simply impossible; this concept is far outside the realm of imagination in Central Asia.
The boat, called “Professor Gul”, was built in Yugoslavia and must have been sold to the Caspian fleet once Europe deemed it obsolete. The bridge was accessible to all passengers, so we could get a closeup look at the old navigation desk with protractors and compasses, hundreds of switches with Russian labels, and the captain and first mate chain smoking cigarettes all day long. The engine rooms were also open to everybody, as propping the doors open seemed to be their only form of ventilation. Evenings were spent swapping stories with the other travelers and watching borderline pornographic movies in Turkish with the truckers onboard. We finally arrived in Kazakhstan 3.5 days after leaving Baku, passed through a border control with inefficiency rival only to the port of Baku’s loading process, and biked the remaining 10 km into the less glamorous but still somewhat fancy downtown Aktau.
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