Crossing the border was unpleasant in a couple of ways;
Number 1 – Leaving Georgia behind when we could have easily stayed there a year without getting bored or tired of the place. Leaving behind the friendly people, familiarity, great food, good cheap wine, lovely weather and brilliant scenery put me in a tearful and then foul mood.
Number 2 – The border guards were a bunch of rude douche bags. The Georgian dudes were good-looking, friendly and not dressed like soldiers compared to the Azeri's who were the opposite in every way. They checked through our bags, we think looking for things from Nagorno-Karabakh (a disputed region previously part of Azerbaijan but enveloped by Armenia during the Soviet era), at first I thought they were just looking through our postcards which was rude enough but he tried to keep our postcards from Armenia back until Djalma got them away from him showing that they were to my friends and family. The border crossing was full of Azeri's bringing across a huge amount of Georgian clementines in black plastic bags, the fat women shouting at the border guards and the thin men standing around smoking.
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| From Shaki, Azerbaijan |
After making it through the border without physically assaulting any of the guards, I was feeling emotional and aggressive never a good combination, we got a lift a few kilometres down the road and from there a couple more lifts along long stretches of tree lined road to the bottom of Shaki, apparently a highlight of Azerbaijan. We ended up getting a taxi to the top of town, which was all uphill a good 3km away from where I gave up, to the Caravan-Saray. These buildings are on old trade routes and are usually beautiful buildings with lots of individually styled rooms, despite it being more expensive than we were expecting we decided to stay for the night and then try to find more affordable accommodation the following night. We rested for a while, washed our socks and pants in the basin (with plenty of washing powder to make up for our lack of effort in washing them properly) and then headed down the road to the centre of the small town. We stopped at a Turkish restaurant for a Turkish pizza and a lamb döner kebab for dinner – both very good and thankfully cheap. It was so cold and dusty that we didn't linger to check out anything else that wasn't on the road back up to the hotel, we stopped only to get some bread, cheese and tomatoes for breakfast and then snuggled up in bed to watch the three hour painfully long My Fair Lady.
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| From Shaki, Azerbaijan |
The next day I managed to haul my body from my toasty bed, have a shower and start writing while Djalma played Sleeping beauty. As it was the best nights sleep he'd had in a while we decided to stay put for the following night. He got up, made us a breakfast sandwich and then washed the remainder of our clothes, which was pretty much everything we weren't wearing. We walked up to the castle, which although tiny and not very interesting was quite pretty, it cost us 2.50USD each to get in (outrageous) and we would have been charged more to use our cameras inside, we left, found the tourist information office closed and wandered down through the town to the local bazaar picking up some locally made halvas on the way (a nut, honey, syrup soaked affair between strong thin sheets of pastry). The bazaar was small and closing by the time we arrived, early afternoon, and all my pictures were so rubbish that I deleted them all. We took a detour through one of the most miserable parks I have ever seen, we sat and drank some awful lemon flavoured water while reading about the capital, Baku, frankly it didn't inspire much, especially as Shaki is meant to be one of the prettiest towns in Azerbaijan. We trundled back to our little room picking up some palatable water on the way.
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| From Shaki, Azerbaijan |
Having had a little nap we headed out to find some piti, a local two part stew for dinner, but no joy, we ended up taking the remainder of our halvas to a small smoky tea shop and eating it there, celebrating our six month anniversary in true Lambert Martins style. The next day we were up and out, the day was beautiful and a night's rain had cleared the air so we could breathe and enjoy the view which was actually quite beautiful. After a couple of döner kebabs for a good balanced breakfast we walked down the road and hitched several lifts along the way to the capital, Baku. Our last lift, with an old lady, Mariam, an old man and a younger guy driving offered to put us up for the night, we gladly accepted – not only because it would have been dark by the time we would have reached Baku but also because not having met anyone in Shaki and no couch-surfing prospects in Baku, we really wanted to meet some locals.
(found out the day after that they were actually 150, but who cares?)
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| From Shaki, Azerbaijan |
They took us back to their hotel, a big work in progress, and gave us tea and something to eat. The men were all outside and labouring away on the hotel so we sat inside with the women. Mariam's Russian was heavily accented and I suspect peppered with Azeri which made it very difficult to understand (for Djalma, me – I had no idea what she was saying), she talked with her two daughters, the older one seemed a bit suspicious of us and the atmosphere was a bit stilted but it sooned warmed up especially with their two young girls. I made some origami, a butterfly and a crane for the girls and a flower for Mariam, I couldn't do much else socially (I really should have learned Russian, oh well). We had soup and tea for dinner followed by several games of dominos, I even won two rounds, but by 7.30 we left for bed despite our hosts protests that it was far too early. An afternoon hitchhiking was quite tiring even though we mainly just sat in different cars being ferried from one point to another. The room was big and cold but nice, Djalma was asleep within a couple of hours and me not long after that, the next day we got up, had bread and cheese for breakfast with them and after another origami session, this time teaching Mariam's younger daughter how to make tulips, we said our heartfelt thankyous and left with Mariam walking us to the main road.
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| From Shaki, Azerbaijan |
We managed to stop a car and negotiate a free ride to Baku, it turned out to be 150km away not the 107km we'd been told the previous evening and a couple of hours later we were in the capital. The road there was long and passed through flat and rolling countryside green enough to make a Surrey farmer proud, other parts were covered in a dark brown grass which neither looked dead nor alive, somewhere between the two and quite uninspiring.
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