There’s a reason this post combines several days together. Because of everything that happened over these few days, Friday morning extends all the way to Monday morning.
Friday morning started out rough. I made the mistake of forgetting to eat dinner. Combine that with a late night drinking session and that makes for a bad morning. An team of Irish kids showed up at the pub we were at and taught us a new drinking game. I was very, very bad at it. Anyway flash forward to the next morning, I’m drenched in sweat because our room doesn’t have a/c. Flash forward 30 minutes, were packing up the car and I yak’ed in the street. In front of a little girl/. That’s totally on her though, she shouldn’t have been staring.
We were hoping that the ferry to Turkmenistan would be arriving today as it was rumored to be. Thankfully we didn’t have to go through the annoying process of exchanging our letters of invitation for actual visas at the consulate. The problem there is that you have to specify what days you plan on being in the country, and a transit visa gives you a maximum of 5 days. If say you write down the 1st through the 5th but the ferry that was supposed to be there on the 28th doesn’t show up until the 2nd you will have to race across the country to avoid deportation and a huge fine. This used to happen all the time, but they managed to change that part of the process for the better.
Finding the ferry is an ordeal in itself. There’s big group chat for the rally on WhatsApp and someone gave the GPS coordinates for where to go but the road is very difficult to find even though this area is extremely nice and developed. We stopped at a gate that looked like it could be it but it wasn’t. We asked the guard and he pointed us down the street, 5-10 minutes away. So we drive north along the coast until we get to a gate that looked like it could be it. It wasn’t. That guard told us to go back to where we came from. What the fuck. Thankfully on our third try we were able to find this little street that winds around and cuts behind a playground. Weird place to put that, right next to the Azerbaijan port customs area…
There were already a ton of teams there, probably 15 or so. Many of them had been waiting upwards of 3 days for the ferry. Ugh. The rumor was though that the ferry would be arriving, and according to the website that tracks boats in the Caspian Sea it was on it’s way back. We were told to park and go into this little air conditioned container (omg what a luxury, didn’t want to leave) and pay $11 which is the port’s ramp fee. Easy. From there we were pointed to a customs office where we needed to hand over a piece of paper that we were given at the border. Easy. Nope. The guy is on lunch. No big deal right? The day before his lunch lasted until 6:30. Flash forward, today his lunch lasted until 9pm.
All you can do is wait. There was a restaurant around the corner of the playground so a lot of teams post up there to soak in some a/c and use the wi-fi. The food is total shit but it’s better than sitting outside in the sun and starving. Up until this point in the trip you will bump into teams here and there but for the most part each car is doing their own thing. The Baku ferry is a bottleneck for getting any further. If you want the full experience of the trip you have to go through Turkmenistan, which means you either take the ferry or drive through Iran. We didn’t go through Iran but I hear it’s lovely. As I mentioned at around 9pm the customs guy showed up to take a piece of paper from us…….that’s it. When it got darker everyone pulled out chairs and just hung out in the parking lot mingling. Some time around 1am someone suggested we do our tire changing competition that someone had donated to. We would each change a tire out and time it. The punishment for slowest time would have to get a body part waxed. I had no interest in doing it because I was tired as shit, but I caved and we did it anyway. I’m glad we did because I didn’t lose. Mitch and I finished within 10 seconds of each other, somewhere in the 2:35 range. Ryan was a full 2 minutes behind us. Hilarious because he has a lot more hair on his arms and legs. Now all we have to do is find somewhere that will wax him.
Sometime after 2am we were told to get in our cars and drive to the boat. Finally! I tried sending a message out to let Rachel know we were leaving, but of course right at that moment the wi-fi in the port office stops working. Because of this we ended up as one of the last cars in line, which ended up being in our favor tremendously. They had us drive through the port and form about 6 lines of cars next to the boat. We ended up as the first car in the line far to the left. They made everyone take personal belonging bags and run them through an x-ray truck. After that drivers were told to go wait in the cars. Then one by one our cars were briefly searched (relatively lazily) by ONE guy. Oh boy I thought it was gonna take forever. Drivers had to then run their bags through the x-ray machine again, and then all teams were told to go wait in their cars. At a little past 4 each team had to go one by one to a customs officer for our exit stamps. That was clearly going to take hours, but luckily we ended up being the first team through and then returned to our car. Then it was nap time. The sun came up and all of the teams still hadn’t cleared customs. Around 7 or so we were finally told to get on the boat. Most of the 18 wheelers had already gotten on the boat, so they basically just jam any passenger car wherever it will fit.
Since we were the first in line to get our car on the boat, we were the first in line to check in inside. The ferry company that runs this operation has 4 boats that run this particular route. 2 of them are new, 2 are old. Thankfully we got a new one, which ended up being relatively pleasant inside. We’re told that the older boats are quite gross to have to stay on. Since we were the first to check in we got the option of having a room, which I didn’t even know was a thing. It was $50/pp just to be on the boat, a room would cost $80/pp if 2 people wanted to do it. After realizing that the guy said $50 and not $15 Mitch jumped on that. We went to the room and how exciting, air conditioning and our own (albeit very small) bathroom. I took a shower and then popped out into the entrance area and told the teams that were gathering at the desk that the room was worth it. A shower alone was worth it. I went out on the deck to see what cars hadn’t made it on yet and saw that our Danish friends hadn’t even moved their car yet. They got in around midnight from Armenia and had made it just in time to get to the port and catch the boat. At least we hoped so. Azerbaijan and Armenia aren’t great friends, to the point where they weren’t allowed to make a certain border crossing when that came into Azer. Even then they were questioned why they had gone there. Turns out when exit customs found out they had been to Armenia their passports were taken and for a good hour or so no one told them why. They eventually were able to explain they were driving through, but how silly is that? Apparently it was harder to get out than get in. I went to take a nap – it’s around 8am now – and while I was sleeping they got on the boat. Yay Danes!
I woke up around 2pm and the boat was just leaving the port. It took 12 hours to get on the boat and leave. Oooof. There were ralliers all over the boat, stuff strewn everywhere and people laying across benches, the floor, whatever was comfortable. Turns out only 3 other teams got rooms, which were in limited supply. Mitch and I decided to offer the people we were familiar with access to our shower, and eventually we just told everyone to use it if they wanted to. I guess the other 3 teams didn’t offer the same which is kind of bullshit. We’re all on this big dumb adventure together and something as simple as a shower can be incredibly helpful with building morale. So how’s that for some good old fashion American hospitality.
The ride across the Caspian Sea was only supposed to be 10ish hours. You might be shocked to learn that it was considerably more. The boat is incredibly boring, it’s obviously there to serve a transportation function and not for entertaining. Oh yeah, an hour into setting sail the toilets stopped flushing. They worked again about 5 hours later, but they broke at least one more time by the time we got off the boat. The only thing you can really do to pass the time is sleep or walk around talking to people. Mitch and I decided it would be fun to watch a movie, which we had tons of on a thumb drive and hard drive. Unfortunately the TVs in the general waiting area didn’t recognize our stuff, so we went to the dining area where there was a newer TV. BINGO! There were quite a lot of teams in there so we watched 4 or 5 episodes of a comedy show until the chairs became uncomfortable. After that we all went back to aimlessly wandering around until we were tired enough to go to bed. The boat should arrive at the port around 2-3am, and we expected it would take a few hours to dock and get the 18 wheelers off. We made a lot of friends that day, which is great moving forward. The boat didn’t actually pull into the port until around 2pm on Sunday, and the cars didn’t pull off until about 5pm. So it ended up taking close to 40 hours for us to get on and get off the boat.
The next step is actually getting into Turkmenistan. I’ve read countless blog posts about how unnecessarily complicated the customs process is. We were all directed to a holding pen area where we waited for instructions. About an hour later someone came over and asked for all of our passports and letters of invitations. This was started off pretty promising as it sounded it was being a little more organized. Because it was Sunday afternoon we were the only people trying to clear customs which was also in our favor. Next they broke the passports into nationalities and they were handed back. Next step was to put $71 (I think) in our passport and have one person from each group collect everything. USA and Canada were lumped together and we had our shit together pretty quickly and handed them back first. Again, this process seems pretty promising at the moment, though I’m not sure why we didn’t just include the $71 fee when we gave them the passports the first time. Oh well. This is also where the chaos began. One by one – slowly – we were called into the customs building and formed a line, and our passports were taken from us again and then handed back about 5 minutes later. Luckily – again – we were at the front of the line. The process for passengers was considerably easier, but here’s how it went down for the drivers:
Go to main window for a basic interview and to declare your route through the country (has to be done and if you get stopped and aren’t on your route you’ll be sent back or ticketed, or both.) They take a picture and hand you your first form or two. From there you go through a metal detector and x-ray machine, then wait. Eventually someone will tell you to go to room #2 where you get another piece of paper. Then you go to room #1 where you get another form and there’s a second guy in there that literally just stamps stuff. After room #1 they tell you to go to room #3 for something, but what you actually have to do is go to the cashiers window and pay the road tax/vehicle registration – $145 + $4 cashier fee. That took about 15 minutes because she’s still busy going through every passport and handwriting receipts of the original $71. When she eventually acknowledges your existence you pay and then go to room #3 but there’s no one there. No idea what this room was for. Then you fill out a customs declaration form which is so poorly photocopied that you can barely see what you’re supposed to be writing down. Then you go stand in room #4 which is the customs office, and wait for them to finish all the paperwork from the 18 wheelers. Then you think it’s finally your turn but no, everyone in the building takes a dinner break at the same time. At some point they will take all of the random paperwork that you have and make more paperwork. From there you go into room #5 where there’s some important person constantly talking to you and then writing all of your info into another big book that will probably go into a fire pit when it gets filled up. Then you go back to room #4 and hand them your new piece of paper. Then you are vaguely told to wait by your car so it can be searched. Actually though you’re just gonna wander around while all the passengers are separated into a different holding area.
Around 2am everyone was finally through customs. Oh yeah, there’s one bathroom for the building, the light doesn’t work, it has no seat and doesn’t really flush. So that’s fun. Right when we thought it was time to have our car searched we were told that since we were there after midnight we had to pay a parking fee of $12. Ok…. So we went into building #2 into a random office where there’s a guy with little slips of paper with all of our license plates. You take that slip of paper to the cashier desk in building #2 where you get another piece of paper, but you don’t pay her. You go to the cashier window in the first building and pay her the $12, but it’s actually $16 because there’s that pesky $4 cashier fee. You get another piece of paper and go back to the cashier window in building #2, but in order to process the paperwork there’s a 4 manat fee. That’s worth a dollar so whatever, but they won’t take a dollar and the ATM is broken. The cashier tells us to check with the exchange desk which has its blinds down. When you knock the woman sleeping inside will tell you she won’t exchange USD for manat. When you point this catch 22 out to the cashier and every guard that speaks English they all just shrug their shoulders. This is where shit started to hit the fan.
To my knowledge what they were doing is insanely illegal. Someone called the British consulate to confirm this but they were told the only way to fight it legally would be to hire a Turkmen lawyer later. In a dictatorship country. I’m sure that will go far. The main guard who spoke English got ganged up on big time, it’s as close to mutiny as you could have at a border. They wouldn’t look at our cars until we paid a fee that we couldn’t pay that only existed because of them. So yeah things were getting testy. Eventually one of the guards gave us 2 options. 1) Find a truck driver who will exchange a few dollars for some manat, pay the fee, then all of the cars would be searched and we could go. 2) Wait until 6am and the fee would disappear. I had absolutely zero confidence this would be the case, and it sounded like at 6am the shift rotation would happen and then we’d have a whole new set of people to deal with. To me the answer was pretty clear, but we had to get everyone on board. I went into the passenger holding area and explained what was going on – I would say worded in a way that stressed the importance of leaving now. Pick a side of the line, 1) pay the fee, get the fuck out of here and figure out where to sleep when we left the border (slightly complicated as camping is technically illegal in Turkmenistan, or 2) wait until the clusterfuck in the morning. 95% of people chose option 1, so that was it.
We did get a trucker to exchange the money for us so then we waited until all the drivers had gone through that process. Next up car search. So we waited. And waited. 30 minutes go by and nothing is happening, so we go speak to the guard. He tells us just a few minutes. 15 minutes later he tells us that we will have to wait until 6am. Aaaaand cue mutiny #2. It was absolutely clear what was happening, the boss was trying to sleep until his shift was over and make us someone else’s problem. The guard explained to us that it wasn’t his decision, so we asked if we could go explain our situation. It’s getting close to 4am which means we’ve been off the boat for 12 hours, a boat that didn’t sell bottled water or snacks. Everyone is getting low on water, food, and of course there is no bathroom. For some reason he said we were more than welcome to go try. We didn’t want to gang up on the head honcho so myself, an Irish kid and a British kid were nominated to go talk to him. When we got inside we knocked on a bunch of windows and sure enough, he was asleep. We pleaded with him to search our cars, again explaining this whole human rights violation thing that is going on. Or for that matter just let us go. He spoke no English, muttered a bunch, and finally said he would come inspect everything. A few minutes later he actually came outside with a few other sleepy higher ups and they did an incredibly lazy job of looking through our stuff. Pretty much just opened the trunk, asked if we had narcotics or bad things then let us go. What in the royal fuck…
A bunch of us were on the same page from the start as far as what our plan was for the time being. It was a 6 hour drive to the capital of Ashgabat. It was unlikely that we were going to make it all the way but it was best to get started at least. About 15 minutes into the drive we hit a checkpoint and had to stop while a guard HANDWROTE all of our passport and car registration info. After about 5 minutes he decided it wasn’t worth it and just let us go. It’s a little after 4 and we’re finally on the way. The time it took to leave Azerbaijan and then clear customs was about 50 hours. What a long weekend.
