Oil Money

by Sheila on 15 Aug, 2014 - 2 comments

So far, we’ve been pretty lucky with border crossings. They’ve been fairly efficient and drama-free. Azerbaijan decided to break that trend.

Reaching the Georgia-Azerbaijan border wasn’t difficult. Getting through was a challenge of patience – one I ultimately failed. Mom passed with flying colours. Here’s to hoping patience can be acquired over time??

The Georgia side of the border was no-frills stamp and go. For the Azeri side, there was a long line. A very, very long line. In the burning heat. We decided not to eat breakfast that morning in order to make it to Baku by the early evening, but as we slowly crawled towards the gates of the Azeri border, the heat exacerbated our hunger and made for not-so-fun times. There were older women selling bananas along the road, so I bought a massive bunch with our remaining Georgian lari. This was all we had for “lunch”.

After a solid hour of working on our car tans, we were inside the gates to Azerbaijan. This is where the fun began.

Azeris being notoriously impatient, each driver in every car decided to hound the officials in an effort to have their papers processed first. One guy decided that having one line was silly, so he broke off and jumped ahead of the line and parked as if to assert his importance over all the other plebeians attempting to enter. This same guy later snobbishly requested that I relocate our car so that he could exit as the space was only wide enough for one car (which is no problem…when there’s the one line).

One guard spoke passable English and took it upon himself to guide Mom through the windows as Mom’s spoken Azeri is far from fluent. Near the end of the ordeal as the English-speaking guard brought our car documents to the head honcho supervising the operations of the border, Mom overheard him say to the guard in Azeri, “American? Americans have ‘sweets’, where are her ‘sweets’?” Thankfully, the neither the English-speaking guard nor the head honcho pursued milking a bribe from us, but we were more alert after that.

We thought the border would be the test of the day. Oh we were so wrong.

Rules of the road for Azerbaijan: 1. Screw you.

There are almost no road signs in the entire country, no labels for highways, nothing. If you reach a roundabout, good luck figuring out which direction to go! Due to the lack of signage, we ended up taking the scenic route to Baku, a much longer route entirely under construction. The road was reduced to a single lane each direction, but that was not enough to deter everyone from attempting to drive over 130km/h and making dangerous overtakes on very little road. One sedan who succeeded with a high-speed overtake on us 10 minutes later ended up in a head-on collision that was disturbingly bloody. Frustrations and tensions ran high with the combination of high heat, speed limited to 60km/h due to construction, and dangerous driving from belligerent drivers.

The weather in Azerbaijan was not fun: if you hold a hair dryer to your face for 8 hours, you will have a full understanding of what we dealt with.

Police in Azerbaijan are openly corrupt. The speed traps are placed at regular intervals and are designed to catch unknowing individuals to fleece them for cash money. Approximately halfway to Baku, despite our obvious attempt at slowing down, we were pulled aside by a policeman along with a Russian car. We knew what was coming next. The policeman approached our car and first asked for our documents. The second he saw Mom’s US passport, he demanded that we pay him 100 USD as the “speeding fine” (he took out a calculator to say that we were going 60 in a 50 zone, of course disregarding that the speed limit was 110 not 100 meters previous). As part of our strategy, we don’t hold a lot of cash in our wallets. Mom took out her wallet and, in English, explained that we did not have 100 USD but a limited sum of other currencies mixed with small denominations of other currencies. This did not make him happy. He grabbed Mom’s wallet – not believing that she didn’t have cash – then proceeded to sort through the bills she did have. At this point, during the policeman’s grumbling about how & why Mom didn’t have much cash, she whipped out her Azeri & he became instantly hesitant. He then cherry-picked all the larger bills from her wallet: a 20 Euro bill, a 20 USD bill, and 150 Turkish Lira. He left Mom her 3 Azeri Manats, a 5 USD bill and a 10 USD bill. Gee thanks!

We swapped Azeri police fleecing stories with other Ralliers, and it sounds like we got off relatively easily. Other stories included locking the drivers in the cop car as leverage for more money, and asking for much higher amounts like 300 and 500 USD.

After a gruelling 15 hour drive from Tbilisi, we arrived at our digs in Baku: the grand Hilton Baku! This hotel almost made the earlier torture worth it. Since we reserved our room using Mom’s Hilton points, we were automatically upgraded to a suite on the top floor with a lovely view:

It also featured a glass chandelier that looked like bacon. Mmm, bacon:

A couple Rally teams were staying at our hotel, so we got to compare notes with team Ulaanbanter and Boyz II Mon!

We then spent the next 4 days seeing Baku; well, as much of it as we could see while in air conditioned areas. The downtown core is picturesque: