05-AUG-A-4

 

FULL TIME BANKING FOR TIPS, PART-TIME HUNTING, AND INCIDENTAL SIGHTSEEING IN BAKU:

THE THIRD “BAKU SIGHTSEEING DAY”

WITH THE LATE START FROM HOTEL ELITE,

 THE SUPREME ACCOMPLISHMENT

 OF THE POSTING OF ALL CARDS,

 A CRUISE ON THE OIL SLICK CASPIAN BAKU HARBOR, AND RETURN TO THE BANKING PROCESS

FOR FURTHER US CASH EXTRACTION

 

AUGUST 3, 2005

 

            What did I get accomplished today in my “Baku sightseeing day # 3?”  I got only one major triumph achieved—the postcards I had been diligently writing have all been posted out of the Central Post Office.  Now, that may not seem like much of an achievement to those of you who simply drop the cards in a mailbox, but for me it was a huge achievement, and not just for those I have been writing since arrival in Baku.  I had bugged them about what had happened to the cards I had written on arrival which were entrusted to the fellow who had picked me up at the Hotel Elite.  Then, what about the eleven cards I had written up in the Tur Hunting camp and on the mountain ridges while sitting among the edelweiss while my guides scanned with my Zeiss glasses?  The answer is that each one of these emissaries sloughed the promise and simply jettisoned the load of cards on passing through.  I found the batch at the front desk which had not been sent out.  When I went to the office again today (I have spent almost more time in that Baku office than on the hunting slopes or in camp!)  I asked about the recent cards and one fellow peeled off and came back with all the cards that I thought had already been delivered last week.  So, a few of these, with luck, may arrive together in the same mailing, telling the story ten days apart when each were written.  At least I have them retrieved form oblivion, unlike the stack of cards I had produced all through the two weeks in the DR/Haiti trip which were delivered to the Haitian post office with the appropriate postage and then dumped—so none were received.

 

            I know that a few friends would enjoy the exotic postage of Azeri stamps, as well as the stories I handwritten in detail on the cards in the usual War and Peace micrographia, so I made a big deal out of the fact that I wanted those mailed without fail.  So, we went to the Central Post Office. Why do you want to send these?  Because I am an odd duck, thank you, and my recipient friends might like them.  Well, it will take about ten to twelve days and you can do better with email, why don’t you try that?  Are you in the business of selling stamps here and posting letters or not?

 

            So, all 36 postcards I had written in the last two weeks that could be found after they had been essentially tossed aside despite solemn promises of posting them were put into the mail by my own hand at about $1.20 in postage each—or a total of fifty dollars US.  I hope you enjoy them, since it is one of the two things that can be distilled from this long waiting time in Baku to be shared as something positive, the other being these pages you may be reading if sent from abroad, or if you have to await my return with the “thumb” mass storage device carrying them across several more borders before the edited tapes reach you in this Jul-C-series and Aug-A-Baku series which is largely a holding pattern since my ten day hunt in the Big Caucasus has been aborted with the spectacular shot on the fourth day—leaving a full week of Baku tourism, which turns out to be only a hour or two per day which consists largely of a kebab lunch as we go to the office to get me to help recruit new hunters as a reference for the “superb arrangements” I am being treated to interspersed with continuing visits to banks to clear the guaranteed certified cashier’s checks or AmEx Traveler’s checks for tips.  I have given them every negotiable instrument I had brought along to lat me through Azerbaijan and the nest three weeks in Africa as well—ALL of which are in their hands with demands for still more, identifying still further employees of Yullat’s Company who might have served me well such as drivers and camp managers (especially Bahlul, the head of the hunting camp, the one who had aborted the TV filming of what would have been the most spectacular shot to be seen on TV for a Caucasus Tur hunt, and the one who had made a four day hunt out of what I had understood would be a ten day expedition into the Big Caucasus Mountains who had already decided the tip he had wanted from me would be the Bushnell Range Finder that was not otherwise available here in  Azerbaijan—until I took the range finder back after he adamantly refused to allow the cameraman to accompany me on the fourth –successful—day of my hunt, and who had wanted me to leave the mountain with the whole entourage as soon as possible after the successful shot.

 

            Now, complicating the demands for still further non-existent checks to be written, is a second “sleight of hand.”  Patrick, it turns out, has been making various purchases of bar bills to laundry and mini-Bar charges on the room, along with the “getting lucky” in trolling through the discothèques and taxing escorts to and form the Hotel –but abruptly has lost all his money.  He says the money George had loaned him was put in his pocket which went into the laundry and disappeared, and now he cannot even retrieve his laundry without my paying for all charges for him, including the Hotel Elite and the charges I warned him were not my tab—like bar and Mini-Bar—but even his stay here and all transportation and his share of all the tips, which now fall to me—on top of the redundant claims for them.  The least enjoyable phrase I had heard throughout Russia when I have pre-paid for the hunting trip is “You must to pay.”  I am hearing that line here now many times daily with the repeated request for the fiftieth time, “Please to write us another of those checks…” after I had explained to them that they have now got every single AmEx and certified check that I brought along for this one month trip for me, which are no all gone before Africa and its needs, and I cannot cover the charges for someone else which seem to fall to me on top of further new expectations of me.

 

FROM OFFICE TO HARBOR CRUISE,

LUNCH AT MIRAVARI RESTAURATN,

AND A STROLL TO AN EARLY CONCLUSION TO OUR

“BAKU TOURING TIME”

            Our tour day began at around noon, as we were brought to the office where I completed the postcard debacle, and may have added three chapters to the story previously sent yesterday by email, which included the story of my first day and the head bonk and the last day and the long range running single shot scored.  I added the Hunts #2 and #3 (although that one was not spell checked and may appear to have been typed up in Azeri!) as well as the brief chapter of the “second day of Baku Touring.”  I could not send a message to my sister Shirley, since each time I tried a message the address was said to be incorrect.  Only later did I see a very encouraging message she had sent to me after receiving the package from me I had mailed before departure dealing with my plans for this trip and my accelerated replacement of missing parts of Derwood, and my checking in on my back problem with an MRI   When I tried to “reply” to her very kind message, the machine seized up and shut down, so she did not get the stories of my Azerbaijani adventures.  She will have to be the first to get the edited and completed story when I can complete it—possibly forwarded from my next destination in Asmara Eritrea.  I did receive a message from Bev Croskery who had apparently received my first two chapters and pleads with me to be careful since there are many people whose survival depends pun me.  I thank her for those kind thoughts, and will do my best to stay intact and useful.

 

            Patrick called George Sevich on his cell phone, as he was in Moscow airport and we told him of my un-filmed spectacular long range shot after which there had been a rush to get me off the mountain and back to Baku, where we have been stranded in limbo until August 5 takeoff.  Patrick told him of his loss of money and how he would need cash now, as George called Yullat who will cover the extra baggage fees to get the trophies home, with a suggestion that he somehow get cash form me if I could get it form a bank.  I found myself in a bank for part of the afternoon, where they were anything but user-friendly, insisting on a specific card—which I had, Visa—and my passport, which I did not carry, although I had the number. They also said that the certified check that I gave as the last negotiable guaranteed instrument for the further tips would only be able to be cleared in two months.  This is in an era of electronic banking!

 

            One suggestion as to how to trade value was gratuitously made on discovery of my new powerful Toshiba laptop—“Oh, those are lots cheaper in the US so maybe you will sell that to us here!”  Right!  After all the efforts to get the right stuff running on which I depend—and without which this enforced idleness in Baku would have been pure torture—the last things I would give up which were the first things suggested for hostaging were my digital Olympus C-60 camera and the Tecra M-2 into which I load the images every night from the card out of the camera for later editing along with the stories I am typing now in the long waiting periods. If it were not for the ballpoint pen and my stockpile of postcards I had brought along, the laptop and digital camera which signifies a new era I have joined in this series of excursions would be the accessories I would be least likely to give up as my most useful tools toward an efficiency that is otherwise eluding me just now.

 

            In the Central Post Office one can purchase first day covers showing the former president Heyder Oliyev, whose portrait is every bit as ubiquitous around Baku as were Saddam Hussein’s in Baghdad or Muamar Qadaffi’s in Libya.  This cult figure status no doubt is a political aura that helps the son who is the current incumbent president.  But, the airport, the large theatre and every street corner seem to be the platforms for the cult figure deification of the recently deceased ex-president.

 

BOARDING THE GOOD SHIP CAPTAIN ASIMOV,

FOR A SHORT ROUND TRIP CRUISE ON THE WELL-OILED

BAKU HARBOR OF THE CASPIAN SEA

 

            We strolled along the Corniche, watching fellows fishing for s herring-like fish both with long slender poles and with cast nets. It is a rather hardy fish that stays alive in the Caspian Sea as we were to later appreciate.  We boarded the Captain Asimov, a motor launch with quiet twin diesel engines, for a simple back and forth ride out into the Baku harbor to look back at the city of Baku, and to cruise on out toward the derelict oil platforms off shore, along with a floating dry dock.  These are the waters where fishermen used to catch large numbers of the sturgeon in nets along the inshore shallows and the Beluga and its caviar were world renowned form this site.  We will indulge in this caviar tomorrow night at the Karavanserai—our sendoff dinner—timed to coincide with leaving the hunter with a very positive feeling about the experience, as well as timing it to be the even number evening of the belly dancer rather than to odd number evening with the singer.

 

            Emil who is very uptight and on a short leash from the office and jumps when called as do the other “gophers” was visibly relaxed by our harbor cruise on the Captain Asimov.  He said it was quiet and peaceful, and—in a phrase I really liked---“It reduced brain noise.”

 

            We then went on to the Miravari Restaurant and sat at a corner table overlooking the Caspian Sea.  It would be better if I waxed rhapsodic about the view along the Corniche from this perspective, since young women were promenading along the waterfront and the Old City was an imposing backdrop.  But, I can say that our cruise on the Caspian Sea quenched our interest in taking a swim in the Caspian Sea.  We saw oil derelict platforms along the Crescent Beach bathing area.  And at all points as we cruised along on the surface of this “fresh water Great lake:” we plowed a quite visible wake through the surface skim of oil slick.  In its way the iridescence on the surface was colorful, and reminded me of the first dive I had made in the Truk Lagoon as a night dive, finding the wrecks of the San Francisco Meru at night by the oil slick emitted from the ship sunk over fifty years ago—and that was just the fuel oil of the ship not a tanker reservoir, or even worse, the origin of the oil being pumped out from deep below the surface of this once fresh water lake.

 

            Baku has a strategic position on the peninsula here in this once magnificent inland fresh water great lake.  Then, the exploitation of being first Ottoman Empire and then a Soviet vassal state has ruined many of the rather good natural resource environments of this quaint and exotic town and its surrounding wilderness. I have experienced both during my visit.  I have been told there is nothing more to see in Baku and that I have exhausted all the potential for my stay here, largely invested in preparing these reports an cataloging the pictorial experience, in preparation for the Asmara Eritrea chapter about to open in the next two days. But, there is only one event coming up for me now that is going to be their send off farewell is the Karavanserai dinner, which is intended as the glow of the departure experience to get us to keep returning.  We will see just how much of an aura a belly dancer can shake and jiggle over the whole Azerbaijani experience to tint its perspective into any rosier scenario.