Part 3: Baku, Azerbaijan

Writing about Azerbaijan has been difficult, much more so than writing about Trabzon and Istanbul was. When the trip was only about Azerbaijan, I was so excited….I didn’t know what to expect, but I knew that it would be good. When Trabzon was added, I was happy, and when Istanbul was plugged in like a missing puzzle piece, I was absolutely thrilled. In fact, with all my looking-forward-to-ness of going to Turkey, Azerbaijan ended up being completely overshadowed.

My enthusiasm returned, however, once we boarded the plane bound for Baku (Azerbaijan Airlines flight J276). The food in-flight was pretty good; the flight attendant brought us “special wine from business class;” and I enjoyed every minute of the anticipation that was starting to amp me up. I was ready for Baku and I wanted the feeling to be mutual.

After deplaning, I practically bounded up to passport control in my enthusiasm. I didn’t even give a second thought to the color of puke yellow booths the passport control agents were sitting in. I scooted up to an available agent and handed her my passport. She flipped to the page with my visa, gave it a good long look, punched something into the computer, and looked at my passport again. Eventually, she raised her eyes to mine and said, “Your visa expires today.” Grinning, I said, “I know. It’s the last day we can enter.” She raised her hand and beckoned over a mustachioed man who was standing on the other side of the room.

I looked over at Peter, who was two agents down from me, and I could tell he wasn’t getting the green light for entry either. The mustachioed man came and ushered us against a wall, took our passports, and disappeared. All that pent up excitement that was keeping me buoyant turned into lead. When the mustachioed man returned to us, he explained that we needed to leave Azerbaijan before our visas expired (which would be exactly seven hours after we landed), but it might be possible to get an extension and we should go see the immigration office after we cleared passport control. I followed my passport back to the control agent, she stamped it and returned it to me, and Peter and I went immediately to the immigration office.

Usually, I’m on top of details like visa expiration. However, I thought that we only had to enter Azerbaijan by the time our visa expired, not leave the country, too. In the end, the immigration guys couldn’t do anything for us except let us know that we’d have to pay a $300-$400 fine upon leaving the country with an invalid visa, but they did lend me use of their laptop so I could search for flights leaving Azerbaijan before our midnight deadline. Eventually, Peter and I concluded that whether we left immediately or paid a fine a few days later, we’d be out a few hundred dollars either way. With the hotel in Baku already paid for, we figured that it would be easier to stay than to go somewhere else and deal with the hassle of finding accommodation for the night. Two hours after we landed, we left the airport to make our way into the city and to find our hotel.

The airport in Baku isn’t terribly tourist friendly. There is no information about departing flights. There are no internet stations. The information desk doesn’t have maps. There aren’t any signs that direct arriving passengers to transportation into the city center. None of these are deal-breakers, even when they all happen in the same place at the same time. But I have to admit, I left that airport deflated. There was no love there for me. After asking around, we found the right bus to take us to the nearest metro station. Thankfully, Peter understood the metro system of buying a card from a woman at a window then charging it on the little machine and then knowing that you could use one card for two people (what took him a few minutes to accomplish would have taken me forever had I been alone because I didn’t know how the system worked).

We went however many stops we needed to go to get to the old town and exited. We spent the next 2.5 hours trying to find the hotel. Sigh. Peter speaks Russian, which I know made the whole find-the-small-hotel-in-the-labyrinth-that-is-the-old-city a bit more bearable, but by the time we finally checked in, I was feeling no love from Baku. We were hungry and we were thirsty so we went off in search of food and beer. After walking down to the shoreline (Baku sits along the Caspian Sea), we found a little outdoor café, immediately ordered a pair of Xirdalans, picked out some food, and contemplated the fact that we were about to be in the country illegally. It was an emotionally exhausting day, and by the time we got back to the hotel, I was ready for a long, long, long sleep.

To be honest, the next two days are a bit of a blur. We tooled around the old town and visited the Palace of Shirvanshahs. We walked up and down the promenade and marveled at the turpidity of the oily water. We happened into lunch the first day when we stopped into a small market tucked into a back alley in the old town and saw that they had cooked chicken, bread, and sweets for sale (this may be crude, but the cookies looked like perfectly round breasts with a small red candy for a nipple….and the cookies were really good but not nearly as good as the Azerbaijani style of baklava that we also bought which is similar to Turkish baklava except the layers of pastry are thicker and this particular one had a generous amount of cinnamon in it). Lunch on the second day was procured at a restaurant near the train station where we had just bought tickets to leave Baku a day earlier than planned because the weight of the impending fine was seriously bringing us down and we just couldn’t get into being in Baku. (Nevermind that it was more expensive than anticipated and all we were surrounded by street after street after street of high-end shops.)

I do have to say, though, that Baku wasn’t all bad. Lovely sweets and delicious foods were eaten. Tasty beer was drunk. Nooks and crannies in the old town were explored. Cats were pet and nice people met. The issue of the expired visa couldn’t be shaken, though. The Baku-Tbilisi train left at 8pm. Dusk seemed the perfect time to slink out of a city we hadn’t been able to crack. I had no idea when the train would be crossing into Georgia, and I slept very poorly. Every time we would stop, I’d wake up and my stomach would sink in anticipation of what would happen when we tried to exit Azerbaijan.

The train didn’t cross into Georgia until 8am.

I had two tricks up my sleeve to try to circumvent the fine: tears and pregnancy (I’m not, but I was trying to think of ways that would allow the border guard to take pity on me and waive the fine). As it turned out, I needed neither. Along with our passports, we were ushered into another sleeping car where the border guy had a portable passport scanner/computer set up. He didn’t ask us any questions. He didn’t linger over our visa. He did spend a bit of time punching in information into his computer, but he didn’t even look at me until he handed my passport back. All that worry I’d been carrying around and it turned out to be a non-issue.

In the end, I would go back to Azerbaijan. I just wouldn’t go back to Baku and I would double check that my travel dates fell within the validity of my visa. I don’t think I gave the place a fair shake, but it certainly gave me one.