Temperature: 20°C
[For those of you who have kindly signed up to the blog, please forgive the splurge of posts – we have been in and out of a wifi black hole and so with super fast broadband in Baku I am making the most of it before we press on through the Caucuses.]
After a fitful night even with earplugs firmly inserted, I was trying to ignore the scraping chair noises and drivers’ conversations in the corridor and the mildly irritating tapping noise only to realise that at just before 07:30 someone was knocking at our door. Hissing at Murray to answer it he got up and was met by a mild mannered member of the crew who said, ‘You must take you car off the ferry.’ NO!!!!! This was not happening, please God. It wasn’t, thank God. They were asking us to move the car because one of the lorries had not got the correct technical papers – you might have thought they’d have been properly checked in the hours and hours before loading. So, the errant lorry from cargo deck 3, 16 back, had to be removed, entailing all the preceding lorries to be taken off before reversing back on. Painful. It took some three hours more to shuffle the lorries back and forth. We were actually mightily impressed by the skill of the drivers, it was no mean feat to get these massive 18 wheeled articulated lorries on board. So instead of setting off at 07:00, we left at 10:00. Situation normal . . .
Unloading the lorries in the morning. (Note the combat jacket far left – lovely mauve fur collar!)
The sea was flat and calm and we had the most perfect conditions for crossing. The boat was immaculate, so immaculate that there was nothing in the shop, nor the café/bar, nor a promise of any food in the ship’s canteen! Spartan doesn’t come into it, but we had each other, some Army rations and a dubbed version of the Pirates of the Caribbean spurting out in harsh Russian tones. We were not complaining, we were on our way west towards Azerbaijan! Phase One complete!! Turkmenistan was behind us.
We arrived in Baku at 21:30 and disembarked at 22:30 to eventually be greeted by the most charming man, the vessel agent, who took it upon himself to see us through all the procedures to get the car off the ferry and registered for transit through Azerbaijan. He was truly wonderful and his help was enormously appreciated. The Azerbaijanis we met in the port oozed kindness and hospitality – while Murray went off to fill out the paperwork in a far off container I was offered a seat in a heated cabin until it was time for the vehicles to be offloaded. It was bliss. Phase Two had begun, but so had our car troubles.
Azerbaijan just coming into view at sunset
The promising lights of Buku on the horizon with the Flame Towers coming into view
Whitesides on the Road 