Applying for Refugee Status

22-Aug-08: Café Mozart
Azerbaijan: Baku – Travel (Waiting) Day

After a nightmare of a day yesterday sitting in the dusty and hot conditions at the ferry port to no avail, today all bar a few refused to leave the comfort of the hotel and other locations until we received word by mobile that the ferry was actually leaving.

Accordingly we ended up spending 7 hours straight in Café Mozart in the old town of Baku whilst we ate breakfast and used their free wi-fi connection until lunch rolled around and soon enough 4pm. The staff at the cafe did not seem to mind us staying put and using their facilities, which included air-conditioning, and so we made no attempt to move on anywhere else until we had cause to.

However, by the time 4pm ticked over we had exhausted our internet needs and decided to head down to the ferry port just to make an appearance and get the latest story on the pending departure time if any. Not surprisingly the ferry was not going to depart today either…and the latest TDA news was that we were to wait another couple of days at the least before considering the option of flying. And so we returned to the hotel in the old town to stay yet another night before the prospect of waiting yet another day for the ferry to depart.

23-Aug-08: Goodbye Azerbaijan
Azerbaijan: Baku – Travel (Waiting) Day

After a bit of a sleep in and wandering aimlessly around the city looking for somewhere different to go for breakfast, we returned to Café Mozart hot and sweaty and resigned that we had managed to stumble upon one of the only decent restaurants in Baku and that we should not have taken its existence for granted. After another breakfast and a couple more hours of internet use we finally got the call at about 10am to get ourselves down to the dock asap as the ferry was leaving…for real this time! Whoo-hoo!

The remainder of the day’s schedule went a bit like this…

1.30pm-3.30pm: We go through the customs procedure of passport checks, baggage scanning and payment of a small bribe to a customs official to allow our bikes through, despite our already having paid for 2 tickets per person in payment for the bikes…gotta love the way things work in this part of the world.

3.30pm-7.00pm: We sit aboard the ferry after having been very rudely welcomed by a lady loudly barking instructions at us regarding our passports and tickets…she is dubbed from this moment onwards as ‘the crazy lady’ and continues her antics for the duration of the trip. We are shown to our cabins which are not anywhere near as bad as we had anticipated given the write up on the ferry in the Lonely Planet guidebook…although we may have been ‘lucky’ to get one of the better ferries, which FINALLY departs at 7pm.

At 9pm the onboard kitchen opens up for meal service. Dinner costs US$2 and is served on a you-will-get-what-you-are-given-and-like-it-and-please-return-the-plate-and-cutlery-when-you-are-done basis…chicken and rice…hard to complain really, especially considering that we were not expecting food service of any kind onboard. So far so good.

My solo attempt to sleep inside the cabin, whilst all my roommates opted for the cooler option of sleeping on the roof deck, started out badly and ended even more badly. Despite the strong wind outside, only a small and intermitted amount of breeze managed to make its way through the cabin porthole window and as a consequence the room was oppressively hot. As I lay there in my underwear, in a lather of sweat my cabin door bursts open and the captain (who had introduced himself earlier as we boarded) and his second mate poke their heads through asking for ‘Paul’…one of our fellow riders who spent the night helping the captain consume a few bottles of vodka!…needless to say I was not impressed by the intrusion on my privacy and I told them to leave in no uncertain terms, although their lack of English and drunken state probably meant they did not get the point. So, after they did it again about 5 minutes later, this time with a torch, I decided that I would be more comfortable and safer up with the others on the roof deck.

And so I took my mat and my scarf (the only ‘sheet’ I had accessible) and headed up to the roof, where I spent the balance of the night getting snippets of sleep whilst battling the cold wind huddled up behind an engine stack as a wind break…the degree of cold was less than the degree of hot inside the cabin, but was not exactly comfortable either.

24-Aug-08: Adrift at sea…
Turkmenistan: Caspian Sea – Travel (Waiting) Day

The Lonely Planet guidebook states that the Caspian Sea crossing can take anywhere between 12 and 30 hours depending on how long the ferry has to wait for a free berth to dock in Turkmenbashi. After a restless night at sea we cruise on and land comes into view by 9am and with it the hope that this nightmare will come to an end sooner rather than later. No such luck. The ferry drops anchor and proceeds to wait for a free berth in Turkmenbashi…and the day continues…

…and continues. As the hours pass, the sun rises higher in the sky and intensifies and we move around the ferry from one shady spot to another in a failing attempt to escape the unbearable heat, which now that we are no longer moving is reflecting off every concrete and steel surface on the vessel, turning the whole machine into a floating oven. By mid afternoon most people had depleted any food and water resources they had brought aboard with them and the kitchen has only offered up lunch, being a repetition of dinner the night before and served in shifts so that we did not eat it until 2pm. I start to develop real empathy for the plight of refugees, particularly those ‘boat people’ that are processed off-shore of Australia.

Most of our group spend most of the afternoon in a particular shady spot on board and so our presence attracts a bit of attention, if it had not already. Our position was directly outside the ‘crazy lady’s’ cabin who spent the afternoon leaning halfway out her porthole window to observe us, grinning with her gold toothed smile and dropping cigarette ash onto us and occasionally making an appearance on deck to hang out new laundry for drying and chastising Paul as she walked by for having caused trouble with the captain the night before.

By 7pm the dreaded news is delivered that we will not be going ashore tonight and that we will spend at least one more night adrift. We start to worry about our food and water supplies but are not too perturbed by the prospect of another night aboard, as we have now all accessed our luggage in the hold and have proper camping equipment sufficient for a comfortable night on the roof deck…and we know that the alternative is to spend the night in the ‘worst hotel in central Asia’ in Turkmenbashi, so none of us are particularly keen to experience that either. After purifying a 5L communal water supply from the on-board tap water and having dinner of chicken and pasta, we set up our beds under the beautiful starry sky and manage to get a reasonable night of sleep.

25-Aug-08: Customs Nightmare
Turkmenistan: Caspian Sea – Turkmenbashi

We awoke at 6.30am to the sound of the anchor being hauled in and all thought this to be a good sign that there may be some truth to the crazy lady’s claim that we would ‘arrive’ before lunchtime. By 8.00am we were docked…by 11am it became clear that this would be a long day and we joked that we could be here all day getting through Customs…little did we know that would be the reality. We spent 3 hours sitting on board the docked ferry waiting for it to be cleared by customs…and a further 5 hours in the baking hot dockyards waiting to simply enter the customs hall. There were in the order of 100 other passengers who all pushed and shunted their way in an attempt to get through customs faster. At one stage we thought there was going to be a riot as air and emotional temperatures rose.

In the first hours the customs guards would not allow us to sit anywhere in the shade as the few shady spots were too close to customs buildings…in the end we ignored instructions and sat in the shade…the risk of arrest the lesser evil to potentially dying of exposure as the temperature was easily 45 degrees in the shade and simply unbearable in the sun. To once again quote the Lonely Planet guidebook “only the insane or deeply unfortunate find themselves in Turkmenistan in the months of July and August”…we deemed all the locals to be certifiably insane and ourselves to be deeply unfortunate!

Miles our chef and official tour leader, after having driven our support van through Iran, has been sitting in Turkmenbashi for 5 days waiting for our pending arrival and thankfully arranged for water to be passed over the customs barrier to us so that we would not die of dehydration. But no food was allowed to pass through to us at any stage. So by 4pm when we were finally allowed to enter the customs hall we were ravenous…but still not allowed any food until we had been processed by customs.

The visa process was as equally backwards as everything seems to have been so far in this process. The immigration officer did the visa paperwork and issued us with an invoice at one booth…at another booth the cashier took our money and issued us with a receipt, which involved filling out 3 receipt books and us signing 11 copies as the carbon paper in the books did not work…we then returned with our receipt to the immigration window where our visa was inserted into our passport. Visa in hand we were allowed to pass with our bags through the security checkpoint and finally through to where Miles was waiting for us on the other side with food.

For those of us at the end of the queue it was a long process…and for the last of us, ie. ME it was a nightmare…my day ended at 6.30pm with a Tuna sandwich and a 4km ride to the ‘worst hotel in central asia’, which despite the threadbare to the point of non-existent carpet (which I wore shoes on at all times), sagging mattress, cold shower and bucket flush toilet, does have air-conditioning and so in our minds surpasses the velodrome hotel in Baku and as such is not the worst on our list.

To re-cap the Travel Schedule of the past few days:

23-Aug-08, 1.30pm-3.30pm: Departure Customs
23-Aug-08, 3.30pm-7.00pm: On Ferry, in dock, Departure Formalities
23/24-Aug-08, 7.00pm-9.00am: Caspian Sea Crossing
24/25-Aug-08, 9.00am-6.30am: Anchored and Waiting
25-Aug-08, 6.30am-8.00am: Docking
25-Aug-08, 8.00am-11.00am: On Ferry, in dock, Arrival Formalities
25-Aug-08, 11.00am-4.00pm: On Shore waiting to enter Customs Hall
25-Aug-08, 4.00pm-6.30pm: Visa & Customs Processing

Total Time Wasted Trying to Get into Turkmenistan: 53 hours!!!
PLUS the 2.5 days we sat waiting for the ferry to depart!

We are now well behind schedule and will spend tomorrow on a bus to Ashgabat to get us back on schedule and back on our bikes…hopefully until we reach Beijing now!!!

26-Aug-08: Last Long Haul
Turkmenistan: Turkmenbashi to Ashgabat
11.5h bus time

The fact that today started with no running water in the hotel surprised no one as our expectations lower with each passing day. We rose to our first ‘breakfast ala Miles’ in over 2 weeks and were pleased to have cereal of any variety back on the menu. As we ate breakfast on the front steps of the hotel we saw a decrepit looking bus which clearly had no air-conditioning parked out on the street and lamented over the painful day we were about to endure. 10 minutes later and much to our relief a modern air-conditioned coach pulls up out the front of our hotel and things begin to not look so bad after all.

We are now all accustomed to amusing ourselves for long haul transportation journey’s and get on with the business of enduring the day long bus ride ahead of us. As we cross through the country I for one am pleased that of all places that this is the one we are skipping ride time in…the place is completely desolate…flat, hot, barren and desolate desert…in the space of 500km we only passed through one town and by a handful of roadside cafes, one of which we stopped at for lunch and in the absence of anything else had the usual chicken ‘shysh’ kebab. The temperature rose to easily in the mid to high 40’s and the thought of the upcoming prospect of riding in such conditions is nauseating…and camping in them even more so.

On our right was the Balkan mountain range, on the other side of which lies Iran. To our left for as far as the eye could see was nothing…to have seen a windswept tumble of hay or dust tornado would have been fitting. We did pass by quite a few Arabian camels grazing on what little burnt grasses covered the ground but other than that the signs of vegetation or habitation of any kind were nonexistent.

Since our entry into Turkmenistan we have been constantly under the watchful eye of police…they are to track us for our entire time here to ensure we don’t do anything we are not supposed to do. Accordingly we had a police escort the entire way from Turkmenbashi to Ashgabat with the lead car changing over at each police checkpoint at the border of each province we passed through. The police rule in this country is oppressive…and it is prohibited to take photos in the presence of a police officer without first asking permission or risk having your camera confiscated and being fined. There is an 11pm curfew, after which if found on the streets you will be asked to explain yourself and if in the company of a woman she will be assumed to be a prostitute.

As we drive within the vicinity of the capital the environment starts to change dramatically. Trees start to appear lining the highway and the road surface, which had been bumpy the whole way, becomes smooth tarmac. We pass by extravagantly decorated mosques and other public monuments and are once again aghast at how such polarisation can exist within one country. From the worst hotel in central asia we are treated for the next 2 nights to what must be one of the best. With grand staircases, chandeliers, lifts and porters we see this as the turning point in the journey…beyond which things can only go down in quality. Hotel Nessa in Ashgabat has all the presence of a 5 star hotel for the price of a 2 star one…the rate is somehow subsidised by the government…and our explanation is to ensure all foreigners stay here and can therefore be easily tracked. On checking in to the hotel we had to undergo registration of our presence in the country, which involved handing over our passports and 2 passport photos. Did I mention the police rule is oppressive? After settling in to our room we decided to go to a walk down town to find something to eat…

We walked to the corner intersection outside the hotel and went to cross the road which had traffic lights like any other, but the pedestrian crossing signals were not working and there was a police officer in the centre of the intersection directing traffic to move in every which way despite what the signals were saying. So we stood for a few minutes deciding upon the safest way to cross, after which we were approached by a well dressed man (an officer of some kind perhaps) and told that we could not stand there, ie. loiter, and told to cross, so we did. About 200m beyond the intersection we walked past a military soldier and 10m beyond him a man who looked like a security guard, who both tried to direct us from our intended path and up a driveway into the forecourt of a nearby building…at which point we decided walking anywhere after dark all too hard and turned around and hightailed it back to the hotel. Where as it turns out is the best Italian restaurant in town and so we indulged in some ‘normal’ food and went to bed, leaving the task of sightseeing for the daylight hours!