Russ came into the cabin, looking apprehensive about the day ahead. From the window Azerbaijan seemed a desolate country, grey and flat. It seemed as if there was nothing out there apart from telephone lines stretching out into heavy skies.
‘It’s like the Russian steppes,’ I said.
‘That’s what I thought.’ Russ shifted my case along and hunched on the other seat. ‘Just like Russia.’
So much for my theory that borders always revealed a new kind of landscape.
An hour or so later the steppes were behind us and we approached the coast with the train hugging a peninsula. Across the bay we could see what we hoped was Baku rising out of the hillside as neat sandstone buildings. It was strange to think it was the first place in the world where people drilled for oil - over a hundred and fifty years ago.
Our local guide, Zaur, was waiting for us on the station platform. He was a young, good-looking guy with a shaggy mop of black hair. As well as being a guide, he’d done some work as a model, and later we saw his picture on the back of a bus.
Zaur wasted no time in introducing me to the military-green UAZ-469 jeep I was going to drive to the border. It was Russian built, left over from Soviet days. It looked pretty sturdy, and I suppose it had a kind of charm, but the Russians - they build tanks and weapons, but when it comes to cars . . .
This one had a set of Mercedes roo bars on the grille and a canvas roof, part of which was loose and hanging over the windscreen. The gear stick was elongated and bound with string, the dash a handful of single dials. What looked like the entire car’s electrical innards dangled underneath.
Getting behind the wheel I hunted down first gear; like the old Land Rover from Brighton I had to double declutch. ‘Oh well,’ I muttered. ‘If you can’t find them, grind them.’
We took off into Baku. Gone were the sandstone houses we’d seen from the train; this place was high rise, office blocks and apartments, many of them under construction. Zaur told us the city was split into the downtown area and what they called the inner city, the old part with historic palaces and mosques. We hoped to see them later - once we had the visas.
Zaur jumped in next to me, throwing out directions as we sped off on our way to the embassy. It was a manic city, the roads choked with everything from ancient Ladas to oil tankers to top-of-the-range Mercedes. The brakes on the UAZ were spongy, which was worrying given I was driving it for the first time in a strange city of two million people. They didn’t bite until the pedal was almost on the floor, and to add to that the steering was vague, to say the least. You had to turn the wheel almost halfway before the thing responded.
I glanced at Zaur. ‘How far is the border?’
‘Six, maybe eight hours.’
‘And the road, is it a good road?’
He shook his head. ‘Mostly it’s bad.’
Russ was in the back looking pensive. This was the pressure point. In a couple of hours we would know if those elusive visas would be stamped in our passports. I was pretty nervous myself - there was no back-up plan and I had the UAZ to contend with after a sleepless night on the train.
At last we made it, and without killing anyone, pulling up next to a grimy-looking building in a small side street. The embassy was basically one room with a piece of glass in a wall and a round hole in the piece of glass. The officials perched behind looking out. It was busy and chaotic - no orderly British queue - with everyone trying to shove their applications through the hole at the same time.
Zaur discovered that they stopped processing applications at eleven a.m. and it was already ten-twenty. He also found out that once we’d handed the applications in we had to go across the city to pay the fee at a particular bank. You had to come back with the receipt before they would do anything further about the application.
‘Jesus,’ I muttered. ‘How far is it?’
From Zaur’s reply I worked out it was like going from Fulham to Soho and back again in rush hour. Leaving Zaur at the embassy we piled into a cab.
The traffic was dire, blocked lanes, deliveries, cabs and buses; a million and one other vehicles on the road. The driver was doing his best but it was past ten-thirty and we knew there was no way we were going to make it.
‘This is crazy,’ Russ said from the back seat. ‘Stop the car,’ he said. ‘Stop the car, I’m going back. You go to the bank, Charley; I’m going to see if I can get Zaur to persuade the embassy staff to stay open. I doubt they will but you never know.’ He jumped out, and phone in hand, headed back on foot through the bustling streets.
At last we got to the bank, and, asking the cabbie to wait, Mungo and I jumped out and signed our forms. I kept looking at the clock and thinking - we’ll never do this in a million years. Even with Russ’s powers of persuasion, it’s unheard of for a bureaucrat to hold the door open past the appointed hour.
At ten-fifty-five we were back in the cab and heading towards the embassy. I phoned Russ and let him know where we were.
‘Make it as fast as you can,’ he said. ‘We’ve explained the problem and been on the phone to London. They’ve been on the phone to our contacts in Iran and they’ve been on the phone to the officials here. There’s just a chance so get here as quickly as you can.’
At a little after eleven a.m. we were stuck in traffic with cars blocking us in; all I could do was sit there and take in the hubbub of the downtown area. There was an enormous amount of work going on, buildings being thrown up on every corner. It was a crazy, hectic mix - cars hooting, the rattle of massive drills, ships’ horns blasting down by the docks. Finally we got moving, but we didn’t get back to the embassy building until eleven-twenty-five. Amazingly the hole in the glass was still open and Russ was still there. Thrusting all our documentation together with the bank receipts into the officials’ hands, we had no choice but to wait outside. They still hadn’t said they would be able to process everything in time.
On the street we had a chat about what to do next. There was no point in us both hanging around, so while Russ and Mungo waited for news on the visa, I went to sort out some paperwork of my own.
In order to drive the UAZ to the border I had to be notarised on the owner’s insurance. Zaur phoned the owner, a guy called Edabar. On arrival he immediately jumped up on the bonnet and set about tearing off the bit of canvas roof that was dangling down. It was nuts; there I was by the side of a busy road in Baku with this Azerbaijani jumping about on a Russian UAZ ripping bits off the roof.
Satisfied, Edabar got in and drove me to the documentation place. He told me he used the old jeep to go hunting. Halfway across the city the brakes packed in and we pulled over.
This wasn’t looking good: a six- to eight-hour drive on dodgy roads in a jeep with even dodgier brakes. Edabar, however, was used to this: with a shrug he grabbed a pair of pliers then hunched down among the pedals with his legs sticking into the road and set about the mass of dangling wires.
I wasn’t sure what he was doing but could only assume the brakes were pressurised electrically somehow, because after a few minutes he was back behind the wheel and they seemed to be working again. We drove along the front, where the Caspian Sea lapped low stone walls and ahead of us massive derricks were unloading container ships. The place reeked of oil. Later I found out that over the decades a hell of a lot of oil has seeped directly into the ground, making Baku the most toxic city in the world.
I was having serious reservations about how far this old jeep would manage to take us. I called Russ and he agreed we’d try to find an alternative just in case.
‘Any word on the visas?’ I asked him.
‘Nope, I’m still waiting.’
Half an hour later at the licensing office, my phone rang.
‘Russ?’
‘Hello, mate.’
‘Well?’
‘We got them.’
‘Fantastic.’ I breathed a massive sigh of relief. ‘I can hardly bloody believe it.’
With the paperwork complete we could now afford to chill out a little, so we asked Zaur to take us to Icheri Sheher or inner city - a fortress surrounded by high walls and beautifully paved walkways. It feels as if you’re entering another world and yet you’re still within the confines of the city. Zaur showed us Shirvanshah’s Palace, a self-contained structure with a mosque and minaret as well as a family mausoleum. It’s thought the Shirvanshah dynasty built the palace as a shrine to Seyyid Yahya Bakuvi, a Sufi mystic, in the fifteenth century.
‘Bakuvi,’ Russ said. ‘That must be where the city gets its name then. You know, Azerbaijan is one of the most ancient countries on earth. Apparently every stage of man’s evolution is represented in this country.’
I glanced at Mungo behind the camera. ‘And some are more evolved than others, aren’t they?’
‘It’s the land of fire,’ Zaur said. ‘Azer means fire. Before Islam the people worshipped it. Come on, I’ll show you.’
He took us above the city to a hillside where a fire, twenty metres across, burns; flames leaping from fissures in the rock. They’re fed by natural gas and have been burning constantly for hundreds of years. No wonder the locals used to worship it - in the old days it must have seemed supernatural.
Zaur said there was an old Hindu temple in Surakhani, not far from Baku, where a fire just like this had burned continuously. The buildings, which were constructed in the 1700s, are still there, but the flame itself went out in 1969 when Soviet drilling knocked out the natural gas that fed it.
Thankfully I had a good night’s sleep, and the next morning - 2 May - we were ready early. We had been able to locate an alternative to the UAZ just in case, but I’d start off in it and see how it went. Outside and still yawning I was trying to work out how many different forms of transport we’d been on so far: motorbikes, a fishing trawler, a ferry, taxi, train, a London bus, a lifeboat, an old Land Rover, a dinghy and then a Citroën. In Paris we’d jumped on bicycles then the
Orient Express
and a water taxi. After that it had been a hydrofoil then a Yugo and another bus. The
Balkan Express
to Istanbul and then three days across Turkey in a
dolmus
: was it yesterday we were on the Ural? No, the day before . . . it was hard to take it all in.
Russ and I spread the map over my suitcase and pored over it. ‘The UAZ bothers me,’ I told him. ‘It drives like a pig, the brakes are crap and when you’re idling you have to keep one foot on the clutch and flap the accelerator otherwise it conks out.’
‘Give it a whirl as far as the outskirts at least,’ he suggested.
I looked at the map, tracing a line south from Baku to Astara where we would cross into Iran. ‘The ship for India leaves on the twelfth of May; is that right?’ I said.
‘Yeah, from Dubai. It’s the only one we can get and we can’t miss it.’ He smiled with relief. ‘We’ve got five days to get through Iran, and then we cross the Gulf.’
‘Great,’ I said. ‘Maybe we can relax a little.’
I had a guy called Bilal with me now, a middle-aged man who worked for an oil company, driving in and around Baku. He could fix the UAZ if it went wrong. He told me he had lived in Baku all his life and up until a couple of years ago it had been very hard to get work. He said the place was better when it was governed by the Soviets.
‘I’ve got a job now,’ he said. ‘But it’s hard; nothing is stable. When the Soviets were here we had jobs and everyone had an education. Everyone had medical care. Most of the people I know preferred life as it was back then.’
It was an interesting perspective; it’s easy to assume people were automatically happier after the fall of communism, even with the economic troubles. Yesterday I’d visited a memorial - one hundred and thirty-seven marble graves laid side by side all the way to a flickering eternal flame, housed in a stone pagoda. On the night of 19 January 1990, twenty-six thousand Soviet troops stormed the city following a series of Azerbaijani independence demonstrations, firing on the crowd. The shooting didn’t stop for three days: the graves I had seen belonged to the one hundred and thirty-seven martyrs who died.
It became obvious very quickly that the UAZ wasn’t going to make it: as we left the hotel I noticed oil seeping from the hub on the near-side back wheel and the brakes were definitely shot. It was a shame because I liked driving it. But when I nearly clattered up the arse of another car, that was that.
Our back-up vehicle was a restored 1964 Volga - a proper Russian four-door saloon first designed in 1956, which had undergone many changes since. It was manufactured by GAZ, the Gorky car company; and instead of a winged lady they had a leaping deer on the bonnet. This model had been put together from bits and pieces gathered together by its owner, an enthusiast called Telman, who had owned the car for about three years. Not all the bits he’d used were original: the dash, for example, had come from a series 3 BMW. I didn’t care; the brakes worked, the seat was comfortable and we had a long way to go.
Outside Baku we stopped at the oldest and probably most neglected oil field in the world. Hugging the coast, it was seriously ugly, the ground a mush of rock and sand and seeping oil; the whole area littered with rusty derricks and weary, nodding donkeys. Russ reckoned the first oil had been drilled here around 1846 and some of these pumps were still tapping the dregs of the really old wells. By chance we’d met an English guy called Robert Ashford, who worked in the oil business. He told us that the donkeys might produce twenty barrels a day but no more. At today’s prices though, that was still a couple of grand.
‘Hitler wanted to come to Baku,’ Robert said. ‘Did you guys know that? This place has been the hub of the oil industry for ever and he had his eye on it. There’s a famous picture of him with a “Baku” birthday cake: if he’d made it here he’d have had all the oil he wanted and who knows, he might have won the war.’