emilyonearth

I’ll admit, my first impressions of Azerbaijan were not overwhelmingly positive. Maybe it was the lack of sleep having taken a night flight, or perhaps I’d just gotten used to everything being easy, but immediately I found the people harsh and unfriendly, and for a moment I wondered if I’d make the wrong choice coming here. It had been a toss up, too! I read online that a lot of people choose not to visit Azerbaijan as they don’t want their tourist dollars supporting the authoritarian government. In the end I decided I was already giving my money to places like Turkmenistan, so why not Azerbaijan too? Plus I thought that if I was already in this part of the world, I might regret not taking the opportunity to see as much of it as I could.

My opinions improved somewhat upon getting into the city itself. It was still early in the morning, there were only a few people around, and everything was pretty quiet, so it felt rather peaceful as I walked the 20 minutes from the bus stop to the hostel. I suppose it shouldn’t have been a surprise that it felt more European than many of the places I’ve been recently – geographically it’s right on the border between Europe and Asia, and which it belongs to seems to be a much debated topic. 

Anyways, I dropped off my luggage at the hostel and headed out to figure out my surroundings. Very quickly I found myself coming up against barriers, literally. Big, metal fences lining the streets and blocking the way around town. The closer I got to the centre of the city, or to the waterfront, the more of them there were. Eventually I made it down to the Baku Boulevard, a wide walkway along the edge of the Caspian Sea, where it all began to make sense: they were setting up for the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, which was on the following week. I wandered along the waterfront for a bit and took a couple of photos, not having much else to do to pass the time this early in the morning. A family saw me with my camera and asked (not in English, but I understood) if I was a photographer – I said very much no!! They then insisted that I took a photo of their daughter, which I thought was pretty weird, but after some back and forth to ensure I understood properly, I took it and then offered to send it to them.

Knowing that I would be tired after a 2:30am flight, but with no accommodation until later in the day, I had booked a walking tour of Baku for the morning of my arrival in the hopes it would keep me active and, well, awake. It was just me and a Swedish woman on the tour, and our guide was most enthusiastic about his job.

My second day in Baku I went on a day tour of the surrounding areas, visiting the world first commercial oil well, a mosque, the Gobustan petroglyphs, some “mud volcanoes”, a burning mountain, and a fire temple.

The train was pretty uneventful. Unfortunately my compartment mates had little consideration of train etiquette, and were not only talking loudly and making phone calls, but also found great amusement in flicking the lights on and off and playing with the speaker volume. The speaker volume was my breaking point, and I looked straight at the man and sternly said “No.” The talking continued after that, but the lights were only turned on and off once more. The train ride itself was about 6 hours, so after the time it took for us to settle in and establish that the speakers were going to be set to low volume and the lights were going to be off, I only managed a couple of hours sleep before it was time to get up again and get off the train. 

At the train station I met a British guy called George, and we decided to share a taxi into town together. The taxi driver squeezed another couple in alongside us, and then informed us that there’s nothing open in Sheki at that time of day (6am, fair enough), so he was going to drop us somewhere we could buy a cup of tea. George and I sat at a table with two Slovenian cousins who had also been on the night train and who were also taken for tea by their taxi driver. They had interesting stories to tell, so it wasn’t a bad way to fill in a couple of hours in the early morning. 

Day two in Sheki, I was joined by George again, and we started with a wander around the Bazaar. This one was a little less organised than the ones I visited in Central Asia, and had more of a use-whatever-space-you-can-find vibe to it. As we wandered, we chatted to a couple of the stall owners, and we were offered halva and plums to try. One man got us to tell him the names of all his fruits in English, as he repeated them after us, and another tried hard to explain his medicinal herbs to us. Our real reason for visiting the bazaar though, was to find marshrutka #15. A marshrutka is a minivan that is essentially a public bus, but it doesn’t run to a set timetable, it just departs once it’s full. Marshrutka #15 was going to take us to Kiş. 

The drive to Kiş took quite a while, despite it only being a few kilometres outside of Sheki. It’s a small town of around 6000 people, only around 10km from the border with Russia (but no roads go all the way to the border).

In my last post I mentioned having a list of things that I want to accomplish during this trip, and that afternoon I completed another of them: go to the cinema. I messaged a number from the cinema’s Google Maps info to ask if they had English films. They replied telling me to message on Instagram. Whoever replied to my Instagram told me to message another number. Finally, the third person I messaged told me yes, and said to just let them know which screening I was coming to and they would play the film in English. The movie I went with was Novocain, as it was the only film showing that afternoon (alternatively I could have waited until the next morning for Moana 2). The movie was  not only terrible as a piece of cinema, but also far too loud and also 100% pirated – every now and then a website from the Netherlands would pop up across the screen. It was an experience though, and that’s what I was looking for!!

My final day in Sheki I had a blob day. The plan had been to sit around in the hotel room, watch some Netflix, be lazy, speak to no one haha. Unfortunately, something was going on that day, as the power must have gone out over 20 times. I’m not sure whether it was intentional or not, as at times it was on and off and on and off in quick succession, as if someone was flicking a switch. At other times it seemed random and lasted quite some time. Whatever the cause was, it would of course also cut the internet, so the Netflix watching became a bit of a challenge. Luckily I had plenty of journaling to catch up on, so my lazy day could continue guilt free. 

And with that, my time in Azerbaijan was over. It couldn’t end uneventfully though,, and so just before I checked out the next morning, there was a small fire at the hotel. We weren’t evacuated or anything – there wasn’t even a fire alarm – but I did watch out the window as one of the employees put it out with a fire extinguisher, and then just about suffocated himself by not moving out of the rather enclosed space afterwards, thus breathing in the carbon dioxide from the fire extinguisher. The fire of course also lead to the electricity being out all morning. When I went down 20 minutes later to check out, they insisted I had some breakfast before I leave, so I quickly ate a boiled egg, some cucumber and some melon, with another compulsory cup of tea, all in the dark. I then wandered down to the bus station to catch a marshrutka to the border with Georgia, where I met a Norwegian guy, a Japanese guy, and a Dutch guy all on the same mission. We crossed over the border together, and shared a taxi on the other side to the closest town, where it was back on another marshrutka and off to Tbilisi!