Baku, waiting for visa & ferry

Baku, what a city...

We arrived in Baku a day and a half ago. It's a pretty city, noticeably richer than other cities in the region. However, the same chaos seems to reign traffic here, which made our timing (again) around rush-hour unfortunate. Thankfully, drivers are less aggressive here than in other cities we've been to, making driving around at least a little more relaxing. Anna manages this sort of traffic very well, squeezing into the smallest of gaps and generally driving almost as wildly as the locals, yet somehow safely. It doesen't make sense, but somehow works!

Due to Baku being relatively rich, Hotel prices are also quite a bit higher. Our usual routing is heading to a random hotel our GPS knows and then asking about prices, and maybe cheaper places. In Baku, we ended up in a hotel costing about 400$ a night, with the receptionist recommending some 'very reasonably priced five- and four-star hotels, around 200$ a night'. Not really the prices we were looking for. After some blind searching, we asked a cabbie to lead us to a well-priced hotel. After 20 minutes of following and Markus being offered a job because he's German, we finally had a place to sleep.

We spent all of yesterday morning playing 'find the other rallier' with the other left, us trying to find them for 90 minutes and then them trying to find us for another hour. We eventually gave up and said we would each try to find the customs office.

We were told on entry into Azerbaijan that we need to show up at this customs office within 72 hours of entering the country to register our car. Just as we were closing in on the place, we coincidentally found the other left and then headed to customs. With a bit of handwaving and translating from an Azeri doctor, we were eventually shown to wait in front of an office. After the better part of an hour, they had a look at our car's documents, scanned some barcodes and said that we were good to go. They also gesticulated they would show us where to park the cars. Confused, we asked what this meant. Apparently, by handing over the form, we officially exported the cars out of Azerbaijan! This is less than ideal as our cars are now stuck in the customs section, only allowed to leave the country on the ferry to Turkmenistan. But we do not have our visa yet! Our only choice was to unload our cars, lug all of our stuff to the main street, and get a cab to the hotel. Not our most succesful day...

We met up with Blue Skies and are trying to sort out the visa situation today. The Turkmeni visa were being taken care of by the organizers, but apparently someone in Turkmenistan decided to play a trick on them and they still haven't gotten the visa. Sergei's Russian seems to work wonders though, so there is hope of us getting our visa sorted today! We met the Turkmen embassador this morning and he very kindly offered to help, so we are now trying to get a fax from the Turkmen embassy in London (not an easy task, as today is a bank holiday in the UK). If this falls through, the organizers have confirmed they can pick them up on Monday, so if bad comes to worse we'll stay in Baku until then. Sergei also managed to talk to the ferry people and it appears that there's daily ferries at the moment, so that should not be a problem.

All in all, tiring days of trying to work with various officials, but there seems to be hope to get going again soon(ish). It's a shame we do not have our cars to explore Azerbaijan more while we're here, but Baku has plenty of sights.