Never buy a pair of shorts in Baku

Baku at night

Firstly, let me reassure all well-wishers out there that I am recovering and not to believe everything you read in the papers. No chicken products were purchased or consumed by either of us. Ha ha, it makes for a good story though.

It has been a testing day or two over here in Azerbaijan. We are now at a bottle neck with at least twenty other rally cars all desperately trying to get a ferry across the Caspian Sea to Turkmenistan, apparently one of the most difficult countries in the world to visit. Before the rally started I asked Andy P if we should book the ferry but he insisted that this wasn’t possible. I wasn’t prepared to take this at face value and so at the leaving party in Goodwood I asked every rally team we met if they’d booked the ferry from Baku to be told by all of them exactly the same thing. So this stage was always going to be a bit of a waiting game as we tried to sort out Turkmenistan transit visas (they will only issue a visa for five days duration and on a specific start date), and try to get on a ferry (a freighter really) as and when there was one in port with space available.

So it was an early start this morning for Andy P and me, and we ordered a taxi through hotel reception that the receptionist said would take half an hour to arrive. Seemed a long time to me but I was ‘going with the flow’ and we had got up really early so I wasn’t overly bothered. I started to get a little agitated once 45 minutes had passed and there was still no sign of our lift. I imagined all the other Mongol Rally teams ahead of us in the visa queue whilst we kicked our heels in the blazing sun.

So I felt a little more relaxed when the white Kia with the Taxi sign turned up. Now I don’t know why but in my experience taxi drivers in other countries do not possess such a thing as ‘The Knowledge’, something which all self-respecting London cabbies spend years learning. But, the driver assured us that he knew where he was going and so off we set racing through the traffic in the kind of direction that we thought we wanted to go. I realised it was all going a bit ‘tits up’, when he started ‘playing’ with his phone and googling maps of Baku and that it was going even more badly when he started phoning friends to get their views on where the hell the Turkmenistan embassy was. The thought of spending the whole day randomly scouring the streets of Baku on the off chance we might come across a Turkmen flag fluttering in the breeze loomed large.

With not a little inspiration from somewhere the driver eventually turned up a back alley and hey presto, there were parked an assortment of rally cars and the start of a queue of like-minded, though considerably younger, adventurers. It was whilst we were waiting for the Embassy to open that I made the discovery that all may not be as straight forward as I hoped.

Some of you will know ‘THE’ passport story and this suddenly looked as if it might shape up with equal difficulty. My Letter of Invitation to Turkmenistan (a must for getting a visa), had my birthday down as 30^th June whereas it’s the 6^th August. Worse and something that caused me particular offence is that it listed me as Australian! Clearly I should have checked the details before leaving but I’m a ‘big picture’ rather than a ‘details’ man. There was nothing for it but to brazen it out.

There were two Turkmens in the room issuing visas. A youngish guy who appeared very friendly and an ice maiden who never smiled and rarely spoke and whose job was to draw horizontal lines in a notebook and then meticulously record the details of the passports. I think if you’d ever managed to catch her eye you would have been turned to stone. When the guy looked at my passport and the computer screen he seemed to dwell on it longer than on the previous ones and then asked me for my date of birth. He seemed satisfied with my response because he gave my passport to the ice maiden and she carefully wrote down the details in her book. I couldn’t help thinking that I wouldn’t want to be sat on the ‘naughty step’ by this particular lady.

We then had to go about 2 miles to the Turkmenistan bank and pay our $85 US fee and then return (to the back of the queue) to be issued with the visa. Having got over the first hurdle I thought I was home and dry but when it came to getting my visa the fact that I am British and not Australian (something that I am eternally grateful for) was clearly an issue. Whilst Andy P sailed through the process, the friendly man said that there were some ‘discrepancies’ with my passport and that he would have to phone Turkmenistan to clarify things. He said it could be resolved and smiled. I have heard that sort of talk before!

The outcome was that I waited for an hour and a half (during which time I came up with all number of contingency plans — the most practical of which was for me to swim across the Caspian sea), but was rewarded with the issue of my much coveted visa and a profuse apology from the man for keeping me so long. The ice maiden’s face never cracked a smile.

We hailed a taxi to take us back to the hotel and the driver took out a range of magnifying glasses to look at Andy P’s map on his phone to see where to go. I remarked to Andy that I hoped his long distance vision was considerably better else it was likely we had spent six hours obtaining Turkmenistan visas that we would not be alive to use.

One useful piece of advice I would like to give you is to never try and buy a pair of shorts in Baku. We went into a shop which to my credit I did say to Andy P looked a bit too upmarket for me and asked one of the besuited salesmen if they sold shorts. To his credit he kept a straight face when he replied yes and somehow managed to refrain from adding ‘but not to the likes of you’. He showed us to a pile of fairly revolting designs and when I looked at the price I was delighted to find that they retailed for £185. He saw the look on my face and proffered the explanation that they were by Armani as though this justified spending the sort of money that some people in the world have to look after a family for several months on an item of clothing that frankly looked tacky . I thanked him and asked him to pass on my compliments to Georgio when he next saw him and decided that I would just make do and stock up at Primark on my return home.

So, IF we manage to get a ferry today we will probably be out of wifi for a wee while so you may be relieved to know that this is probably the last of our blogs for a while. In the meantime I leave you with a phrase that has become dear to us during this trip and whose meaning is only now realising its true significance: ‘We should have booked the ferry.’

Cheers, Andy Coe

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