05-AUG-A-2

FIRST FULL DAY IN TOURING BAKU, AZERBAIJAN

AFTER RE-GROUPING FOLLOWING HUNT

 

Aug. 1, 2005

 

            I awaken alone in my twin room at the Hotel Elite, with my alleged roommate, Patrick, missing in action.  For a fellow who allegedly has no money, no credit card nor any means of getting any, like traveler’s checks, he has been living rather high, running up big bar bills and sending out for things as well as “dining” exclusively—despite my repeated warnings, out of the Mini-Bar, which he will snap open even while I tell him I am not covering his incidental charges, pop a bottle, take a swig and abandon it.  It is the irresponsibility of any kid—and in this instance, I am sure, the one to whom all those bills will find their way is me, and I have already spent all the cash and checks I had brought for the entire trip to include the next several weeks in Africa.  I have added NO extras to my room rate charge, and he is living off the “credit” extended to him by using my name as the “deep pockets” client who will cover all his accessory expenses, so he had dumped his whole pack of hunting clothes out to be sent out for laundry, while I had simply washed mine out in the shower and dried them next to the window since our A/C does not work in the room.

 

            When the crew comes to pick me up at noon, I tell them I do not know where Patrick is, but the desk clerk woman, shakes her head and says he is sleeping in Room 127 with someone else he found last night in a discothèque.  So, I am brought off to the AYF office in Baku, where I am essentially put to work as a salesman, being put through on a call to someone who had earlier shown interest in a hunt, and they wanted me as a reference to convince him to sign a contract.  I found myself answering their calls, as they continued to ask for further traveler’s checks since they found out that, surely as I said they would, the unfamiliar checks made out to “bearer” were turned into US cash at the bank.  Now, if I could only keep producing more and more of those….

 

            I had now given them ALL the traveler’s checks and cashier’s checks I had carried for the whole month of being gone, and they are still asking for more, naming people who have not been involved in helping the hunt, and especially those who shortened it or ruined the filming of the day of the successful Tur kill.  They have asked that I accompany them to go to banks, or other offices to see if more money can be extracted, or if perhaps, I could leave behind my digital camera or computer—no, thank you.  This is not my last stop on this trip, nor this planet, and this is not my favorite charity.  When I was in the office, Yullat, the president and owner was very expansive and generous with me, promising me to accompany him to exclusive areas in Azerbaijan on still further hunts and getting more opportunities for me on my return trips.  I had thought that the reason we had come down early to Baku was for a “week of tourism” as it was promised, but it turns out that there is little to see here after one has walked around the Old City of the walled UNESCO World Heritage Zone.  So, after we had done further waiting in the office, in a lag period I filled by writing a few postcards reminding them that they had said they would mail these out for me, we went to a large outdoor kebab type restaurant, in which we were the only customers among scores of tables.  A very young boy---as seems to be the rule here—was our waiter busboy, and he had to scurry back and forth.  It is unusual for me to see an eleven-year-old pouring out shots of vodka for the patrons, and Patrick, who was aroused to accompany us for this 3:30 PM lunch, said it is illegal in his experience, since he works as a waiter/bar tender in the season when he cannot be hunting or fishing guide.  But he is a regular consumer of such services as well, and gave us brief details of his evening adventures in which he got “real lucky.”

 

 The name of the Restaurant was Canaq Qala where we would have the slow leisurely lunch while Emil nervously answered the cell phone when called frequently.  This is the name of the large Turkish fort west of Istanbul where the largest defeat of the Turks in the last of the Moslem/Christian battles around 1923, in which Turkish casualties were enormous.  It is this battle in which a young fellow got to be prominent and changed his name from Kamel to Attaturk, “father of the new and modern Turkish nation.”  But the price was high.  Well over 100,000 Turks were killed, and some say that the true figure is closer to half a million.  These are the memories of Emil, who is Turkish educated, and was born to a chemist in the new city of Sumgayit—so he is under the thrall of the last of the Ottomans and the last of the Soviets.

 

            We went through the usual luncheon menu which I now recognize in both sequence and component parts, whether it be a trail lunch on the mountain top, the hillside table of the Gechresh outside Quba on return, or the special courtyard luncheons here in Baku—the flat bread and cheese, watercress and anisette with other veggies such as tomatoes and cucumbers, then a later kebab of mutton or a ground up mutton which is wrapped in a thin flat bread.  It is accompanied by several fluids, a banana beer, a “Budweiser” beer brewed in Turkey, an assortment of fruit drinks such as pomegranate, grape or pineapple, and then the final Chai (tea) course served in a special “hourglass” small glass handle-less cup which is typical of the Baku region. This glass is called the “Amador” glass which is said to serve the tea to advantage as it holds the heat and shows the clarity and color.  Alongside the chai is a small dish of cherries which is essentially the “sugar and lemon” tasted with a small spoon as a sweetener after drinking the tea itself.  Patrick did not get that message, so he stirred this jam like cherry jelly into the tea which opacified it and caused comments all around.

 

BAKU TOURISM DAY BEGINS, AFTER SEVERAL URGINGS,

AFTER 6:30 PM WITH A STOP IN THE OLD CITY,

WITHIN THE CITY WALLS, ADJACENT TO THE

“MAIDEN’S TOWER”

 

            As redundant as their reminders that I had to do something to add further tips in cash to the myriad of employees they would be distributing the moneys we would so generously leave behind, I got a bit redundant myself in the reminders that we had several days dedicated to tourism of the capital and its environs, since our ten day hunt in the mountains seemed to have become truncated, and was aborted after four days in order that we might get done to Baku and see certain sights.  OK, where are those sights to be seen?  After yet another reminder, we drove around the city, as they stopped several times to “wait here just two minutes.”  What the wait was for was for them to check at various banks for how long it would take for the certified cashier’s check I had given them in addition to all my traveler’s checks to be turned into cash.  “Can you write another…..?”

 

            We then drove through the walled city gates into a paving stone covered courtyard into the Old City.  This is a historic area and is under excavation by an archeological trust which is also headquartered here.  It is a series of catacomb-like almost Quonset-style stone arches, with various patterns from a millennium ago.  Dominant over all is a large tower, that would be called a “Norman Keep” if it were inside an English Castle.  This is the “Maiden’s Tower.”  In the 8^th century, the King’s daughter was ordered to marry a man that the king had selected for an arranged marriage, and she reflected her own choice by leaping form the top of the Tower to her death on the paving stones below.  This is a great romance story, of which I could not get further details.  Along the paving stones below were the slick chicks on promenade, and it was an interesting contrast in the liberation of women to see the setting with the two eras of women—or was it all that different after all, as I saw them struggling to navigate with the high spike heels along the paving stones, dressed not particularly practically, with certain features quite obviously augmented---for whose purposes were these lives being led, or lost?

 

            Below at the level of the wall around the city and the main Caspian Seaside street is a building with a special plaque on one corner commemorating Charles de Gaulle.  He lived here in this building in 1944 in exile, planning the resistance and return to France.  I had recalled that Philippe’s wife Federica was a history graduate student studying DeGaulle’s wife, and I had given them the name and address of Charles Proye, whose father and DeGaulle were classmates in school, both having grown up in Lille France where each was born.  I have photos of the birthplace of DeGaulle and now the residence in exile, and had watched his carefully self-scripted funeral ceremony on TV.

 

            As we strolled further along the old shops now festooned with brass pots and the ubiquitous high pressure carpet salesmen I am so familiar with from Kashmir to the Middle East to Turkey, and I could simply nod to them as I was not a buyer of any souvenirs.  I have big bills to pay from a dependent of mine I had only recently met, and who was going on spending as though he had no worries about where the cash was going to be coming from—he was with a client.

 

            I stood in front of the elegant doors of the Meridian Hotel Baku, and took a photo of older men playing checkers or chess with a younger woman sitting on the stoop nearby.  When I turned to the Hotel, there was a familiar couple coming out the door---Philippe and Frederica whom we had last seen in the Tur hunting camp.  Philippe had invited me to come wild boar hunting in France, and we had exchanged addresses and emails.  Their Belgian friend (also Philippe) who was living in London had already left, after getting among his messages that his close hunting buddy at age 45 had had a heart attack and died last week, and he had missed the funeral while in the mountains.  “It is hard to lose a hunting companion,” said the Parisian Philippe, “They are the closest kind.”  We strolled together as they told us of having taken a brief swim in the Caspian at Crescent Beach—hardly to be recommended, as it is polluted between oil platforms.  They had dinner at the Karavanserai the night before when a good singer was there.  We walked to the Charles DeGaulle plaque and I had taken their photo adjacent to it.  We then went for tea as an Azeri band was playing in the Karavanserai, as I sat under a wall hanging of an ancient set of Tur horns.  Even though the horns in this instance were charred from a fire they had barely survived, I am proud to say that my own Tur horns are twice the size of those on the wall.   We promised to hunt again together somewhere, and parted after chai, and we were returned to the Hotel Elite where I could edit and spell check these reports and Patrick could go trolling and run up additional bar bills—on the room I will have to clear with cash.

 

            I am “cooped up” in a charitably “second rate” Hotel without a functioning A/C, shower door or flushable toilet, and it looks like I have already blown the single tourist feature of our week long Baku Tour. So, I will turn to the laptop to use this time to complete the Azerbaijan story of my stay, and hope to get a chance soon to email out at least one or two chapters of the story, and follow up on it with the postcards I had been industriously writing at each mandatory stop and “wait two minutes” (meaning twenty)—but I fear that the mailing out of my postcards is like a lot of other unfulfilled promises, and if I want it done, I will have to try to retrieve where they have been scattered, at the Hotel Elite desk, at the AYF office, in George’s Dopp Kit, and go to the Central Post Office to be sure they are affixed with Azeri postages stamps and sent out directly myself.  That way I can assure you of at least one exotic Azeri souvenir—a colorful bit of a new “Commonwealth of Independent States” formerly off-limits Soviet vassal, now in the throes of over-learning capitalism, starting with all the worst parts!