05-AUG-A-3

 

SECOND BAKU DAY IN TYPING UP HUNT REPORTS

AND SEEING A FEW SIGHTS AROUND BAKU’S OLD CITY AND CASPIAN SEA PORT ALONG THE CORNICHE

AND AN ATTEMPT AT EMAILING AND POSTCARDS

 

August 2, 2005

 

            This day might be considered a bit of a bummer and would have been a disaster, but for my laptop and ballpoint and the fact that I had carried postcards with me that had been sent to me by Jack Hardy from Saipan.  I had written a number of them from the mountain, and had given them to the clerk at the desk who said she would do what she could do at the Hotel Elite, whereas others had no idea what to do with them.  So, that was encouraging.  Today, I asked what had happened to them and a second clerk opened the desk drawer and found them all piled in the same place they were tossed.  Since this represents a to of work—you are probably well aware that I can write all of War and Peace on the post card format—I was very keen that they not disappear.  So, I carried a stack of blank cards today and every time I heard wait just a few minutes (which was most of today) I would pull out another one and write a card, so that someone else was not totally in charge of my life time and I might reach out and touch someone somewhere to  make up for the two full days of delay we have had here in “the week of touring Baku,” that was occasioned by the foreshortened hunt since I scored so spectacularly and so well even if the success was off-camera, the putative reason a cameraman was brought out here to film my hunt

 

We were to be picked up at 1:00 PM, so that gave me a morning to have breakfast and then to prepare two complete reports—05-Jul-C-4 and 7.  These were the complete accounts of my first day ending in the head bonk after starting with the long climb, the bear charge, and the mist-Tur; the second I had hoped to send out is the account of my day in the hills when I scored the spectacular long shot and collected my trophy Tur. Both of these along with the outline of the others of the Jul-C-series should be on their way to you just now, since I believe I was able to “attach” them along with a brief note that I am back in Baku.  The computer account refused most of the addresses I had put in there, so I hope a few had got through

 

I was ready at 1:00 PM but we received a call that there had been a delay in picking up two hunters at the airport, just recently renamed after the ex-president, father of the current president.  The Russian young hunter Vladimir and the American Gary Parker from Nebraska had been delayed and their pickup would be several hours later.  So, our day of sightseeing began just when the previous day’s had begun, at 6:30 PM, after a long lunch in a restaurant and a brief trip to a place of requested interest, followed immediately by tea in some other restaurant.  We canceled plans for the Karavanserai dinner, since it would not make sense to go out dining in thirty minutes following our big lunch

We went, once more, to the office, where few if any of the people we had to see were around, as the big boss Yullat had flown off to Moscow.  As I tried to get the emails to send attachments 4 and 7, Patrick woke up long enough to see the DVED on the TV in the office.  There was a scramble once again about my written but as yet unmailed postcards, and then the most recurrent theme yet heard: Can I write them still more checks since they are not at all certain about this money order; yes, all the AmEx traveler’s checks had been cashed but they would like still more tip cash available, and “I must to pay.”  I had explained infinitely often that they had every negotiable guaranteed instrument I had bought for this trip and that the tips were generous and complete, and there were no more traveler’s checks to give them.  Yes, but you will have to produce just two more, one for us and one for the guides.   This is getting quite unfunny and the monotonous subject of two full days of obsessive attention to details that are already cleared out, since the AmEx is changed into cash money, but they hope their might be more than that which was promised and fulfilled.  I am not the Russian Mafiosi who walks around with rolls of US $100 bills and scatters them to the wind in batches of twenty at a time.  I am not even covering the expenses of anyone other than me, which I have to remind Patrick as he sends out laundry by putting his whole pack out the door or pops anything he wishes from the MiniBar ignoring the breakfast buffet that is included in the room rate.  I have charged nothing to my room and I may need to remind him of that since he is regularly down at the bar accumulating large room drafts.  The only intensive activity I have pursued in my room is the typing up of reports, the filing away of pictures and not the entertainment of ladies of the evening.  It is getting to feel altogether too much like a reversion to Russia and their favorite English expression ---“you must to pay.”

 

AS YESTERDAY, A LATE, BRIEF FLURRY OF BAKU TOURISM BETWEEN LUNCH AND RETURNING TO THE ELITE HOTEL FOR FURTHER TYPING OF THE TRAVEL REPORTS

 

We went to the Macmar Restaurant, a second day we were in the “late lunch” group of solitary diners, in an al fresco outdoor garden.  Dinner was similar, with a variety of veggies, cucumbers, parsley, goat cheese, flat bread, and kebab.  The delightful addition was a tray of shelled nuts including walnuts and hazel nuts, and pistachios in the shells.  After four different kinds of drinks, including the “banana beer” we headed out by Taxi to see the port and the memorial to the Turkish soldiers who had helped the Azeris, and also erected the second largest Mosque in the town.  Most of the Azeris are Shia, but may use the Sunni prayer style.  We noted that the Azeris were independent for only about eighteen months after WW I, when the 1920 Russian revolution and the Soviet Empire gobbled them up.  It was in January 20, 1990 with the deaths of 131 citizens in the streets that independence from Russia was achieved, since when the US is one of their chief sponsors. 

 

WE walked down the steps adjacent to the Funicular that goes up the incline to the Soviet era shops and restaurants in ruins now being redone as is the Intourist Office Building.  We could look out over the harbor, the shipbuilding ports and also see the leaky oil platforms off shore bespoiling the beaches of this large fresh water “Great Lake.”  A Yacht Club for fat cats is here along the Corniche in the center of the town, and the old city where we were briefly yesterday also in the late afternoon as things were closing is marked by a city wall.  As we walked down the steps passing guards we came to the United Nations office building, which I took a single digital picture of and was shouted away by a guard.  We walked amid strolling lovers along the cornice, and even saw clowns dressed like a Donald Duck sailor, horses pulling bedecked carriages for wedding parties or romantic rides.  I saw the Old City from the Corniche, and the Maiden Tower, with the building at street level where Charles De Gaulle had spent his 1941 exile here.

 

With a light rain threatening, we taxied back to the Hotel Elite, where I again retreat to my room to type up the completion of the hunt experience, with the hope that tomorrow we may yet have the chance to bather in the allegedly fresh waters of the Caspian Sea and end the evening in the Karavanserai—but we may now be out of sequence and hear the singer on the odd evening rather than the belly dancer on the even evening.  Ah, well, there are more than enough spectacular looking young women strutting their stuff on the streets to make up for whatever other performances are missing.

 

AT breakfast this morning, an event in which I participate and Patrick does not, I saw a weird sight.  I was having the usual melon, hard boiled egg, breads and yogurt.  The TV was tuned to an American Black rap number, which was unrestricted as it would never have been allowed on the US airwaves where the lyrics may have been understood.  The rap was about “Makin’ Love, Mother-F-----er,” doing strange and wonderful things with various body parts in a gyrating dance on whatever the MTV equivalent broadcast form Turkey might be called.  Passing this screen were six black hulks, whose flowing black abayas swept around the TV set where considerably less clothing was available, and each gathered up some breakfast things, but then had to go behind the TV set to ear in a special area, since it is difficult to eat without exposing your face. 

 

Every once in a while, while wandering the capitals of the world’s cities and continents, I have to ask myself, “What planet is this I have landed on, and which millennium is it today?”