Ships in the night: Crossing the Caspian
Baku - Turkmenbashi
August 28, 29 & 30, 2007
By Dan Murdoch

BAKU SHIP 2


THE SHIP from Baku to Turkmenbashi would have been a perfect setting for a horror film. A large, looming cargo ferry with a dozen cabins for passengers, seemingly added as an afterthought. Although only twenty years old, the ship was in a terrible state of disrepair, smashed panelling and flaking paint, furnished with dusty, stinking chairs.
They reassuringly informed us it was the ship’s last voyage before she would be docked for an extensive service.
Azer the cabin boy showed us to our grimy, four-berth rooms then demanded $5 from each of us. We refused to pay. There were no sheets on the grubby, stained mattresses, which had clearly been gnawed at by vermin, and Azer wanted another $3 from each of us for bedding. We refused.
I tried to push the door to, but the lock was smashed where the room had been broken into.
Everywhere peeling linoleum revealed the oily hull. I watched a cockroach sneak across Lovey’s laptop when he wasn’t looking.
It was designed like a labyrinth, but as I explored I got to know the thing. I was thrown out of plenty of areas – the ‘Commanders’ mess, the bridge, a strange stairwell into the bowels of the ship. But things became more accessible at night, when we would sneak into the kitchens to boil water for instant soup.
Deep inside the ships underbelly felt like a level from Doom 2. All rusted metals, greasy chains, scrawled graffiti, half open hatches and metal grills. The echo of my flip-flops chimed against the splash of the sea on the stationary hull. The disconcerting sound of water flowing beneath me. The Trabbis were parked alongside giant trains that I guess would be filled with oil.
BAKU SHIP BELOW DECK

The Azeri customs had told us the crossing would take 12 hours, but a day and night passed with no sign of land. Every few hours our ETA in Turkmenbashi was pushed back. The second night I slept on deck on a broken plastic chair beneath a lifeboat, a few metres from the cool Caspian.
The crew moved me on in the morning and I found a dusty row of chairs in what looked like an abandoned cinema. I noticed that we weren’t moving and looked out of a porthole to see Turkmenistan stretching out across the horizon. We were told that the ship had to wait for a berth to dock, it would be a few hours. But another day and another night slipped by. Supplies dwindled, the meagre rations we’d bought at Baku went quickly, and we began drinking water from the taps.
Where were we? Laying a few miles off the Turkmen shore, pulling against our anchor as the wind and current shifted. We had checked out of Azerbaijani customs, but had yet to check into Turkmenistan. Someone on the boat had our passports. We were document less, identity-less. No nation held our registration; we floated in the international ether, untraceable, uncontactable.

At night jets of orange sparks shot from one of the boat’s twin exhausts. It was a pretty if disturbing sight – as if someone had stuck a Catherine Wheel in the pipes. Tony suggested they were burning the bodies of the passengers who hadn’t made it through the intense heat of the day.
The distinction between passengers and crew was unclear, there were no uniforms, but there may have been half a dozen Azeris or Turkmen along with the nine of us trekkers and the crew. A crowd formed around the sparkling exhaust, though I couldn’t tell if they were officials or just idle spectators like myself.
BAKU SHIP

Is the Caspian a sea or a lake? It is an important question of interest to more than just geographers and academics, as the answer determines how the Caspian’s abundant oil deposits are to be divvied up between the countries around it, Azerbaijan, Iran, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan and Russia. If it is a sea then each country owns the stretch of water off its coast.
If it’s a lake, then the resources of the entire body of water must be shared out evenly. I suspect the arguments will continue till the oil wells run dry.

We managed to get them to grudgingly open a grubby mess where we ate omelette and began to make ourselves comfortable, setting up the laptops and working on ripping footage from the cameras. But the bastards kicked us out when we’d eaten

BAKU FERRY VIEW
We finally got a slot to dock, but the wind changed, making it impossible and again we sat and waited.
When we finally got off the ship, we’d been at sea for three nights, eating into our visa for Turkmenistan.
Good riddance to the good ship Azerbaijan.

Ends
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