A Caspian Ferry Saga

The unique way in which the Baku ferry port works, or more accurately doesn’t, is that you turn up and wait, being told every couple of hours that a ferry is just around the corner, but it never arrives. On day one, still full of optimism for an exciting trip across the Caspian, we turned up bright and early, putting the car through customs so as to avoid overstaying our three day allowance in Azerbaijan. Now that the car had effectively left the country, we couldn’t really go anywhere else, so set up shop along with a handful of other teams in the car park. Despite the 40 degree heat and distinct lack of shade, the mood was generally positive.

The jovial atmosphere didn’t last long. Rumours were soon rife that some teams had been paying an infamous fixer, called Ishmael, who claimed to be able to get cars onto the ferry before those who weren’t on his ‘special list’. Those who hadn’t paid were angry that they were being queue-jumped (to be seen conversing with the man was to run the risk of being completely ostracised from other ralliers), while those who had were equally incensed by the realisation that Ishmael had almost no influence at all, and no intention of using it in any case. Multiple teams were told to meet him at McDonalds, but he never once left the vicinity of the car park. Meanwhile, the one ticket lady in the entire port, Victoria, appeared to have no more information regarding the arrival of ferries than she could gleam from simply looking out the window to see if there was one sitting there, and so kept herself largely looked away in a cabin, thus avoiding having to answer difficult questions like: ‘When might there be a ferry?’, ‘Are there actually ferries in the Caspian Sea?’, ‘Why is anyone employing you?’

After a day or so of this palaver, things calmed down somewhat. Ishmael, the pantomime villain, had been banned from the port by the police, although there were still occasional sightings of a shady character lurking in the shadows. Now that he was supposedly gone, the rally camaraderie returned in full force, as it became apparent we were all in it for the long haul. A Norwegian team formed the Republic of Tarpistan and started issuing passport stamps, while we made a cricket pitch and others set up a tarmac croquet lawn. We spent our days escaping the brutal heat in the local mall, where a medium size pack of Coco Pops would set you back the equivalent of £12.50 (we stuck to bread and water, still at laughable prices), and slept under the stars around the car. There was a brief inquiry to try and charter our own freighter to carry all the cars and teams across, but apparently international shipping requires more than a few hours’ notice. Ferries were continually promised, but never arrived, and by this point no one really expected anything different.

On day four, to everyone’s utter disbelief, an actual working ferry, with a crew and an engine and everything, arrived in port. Such was the eagerness of the port authorities to be rid of us, an entire deck was devoted to Mongol Rally cars, and we didn’t even have to deal with the Vicky/Ishy double act – tickets would be sold on board. It was a miracle. Of course this didn’t actually mean we would be leaving anytime soon. Boarding took an entire day, and once aboard we waited a further ten hours before the engines finally started up and we were mercifully on our way.

The ferry crossing to Turkmenbashi, Turkmenistan, is said to take ten hours. Ours took over forty. We were moored up just outside the port for a night, waiting for there to be space for us to enter, and even once docked, the army wouldn’t let us disembark for many painfully slow hours. In the later stages of the crossing, with food supplies on board running dangerously low, we took matters into our own hands a fashioned ourselves a fishing rod out of a golf club, an empty 10l water bottle, some stripped down para cord, a ball from the nursery ball-pit, a couple of nuts, and a paperclip. To everyone’s complete amazement, we were unsuccessful in our endeavours to catch dinner, but it did help pass a few precious hours of tedium.

The elation of driving off the ferry and onto solid ground lasted all of 10 seconds as we were quickly ushered into a car park no more than 20m away. Here we did some more waiting (we’ve become exceptionally good at that) before being relocated to another car park where we would begin the long, arduous process of actually entering the country. This was made all the more difficult because the whole ferry debacle had taken so long that everyone’s Turkmenistan visas were to expire in a few hours’ time, and so we all needed new ones. Completing the relatively simple task of entering the country involved no fewer than 15 different windows, checks, stamps, and of course fees. Fees for the visa, fees for insurance, fees for tax, fees per kilometre of road we intended to drive on (with a healthy rounding error, of course), fees for stamps, fees for the transactions involved with paying the fees, fees for absolutely everything. Even once we were finally in the country, we had to pay a man to change currency so that we could pay for a ticket to leave the car park. Thankfully they generously spared us the $12 an hour parking charges, though, as they only applied after midnight. Now that would have been ridiculous.