05-JUL-C-3

BAKU AZERBAIJAN, FROM THE ELITE HOTEL ARRIVAL IN BAKU,

THROUGH THE “INDUSTRIAL WASTELAND” OF SOVIET-ERA PETROCHEMICAL PLANNED DESERT URBANIZATION, NOW OBSOLETE,

TO THE CITY OF QUBA FOR LUNCH AS WE LAUNCH UP MOUNTAIN TO THE 34-FAMILY VILAGE OF DARK AT THE ROADHEAD,

TO THE RIDE IN TO CAMP ON HORSEBACK AMID WOLVES, SHEEP GOATS AND RUGGED “BIG CAUCASUS” WILDERNESS

July 26, 2005

After a late night arrival through the Baku International Airport (now named for the recently deceased third president of Azerbaijan since independence from the Soviets, and father of the current president, in a city festooned with portraits of him and with a newly renamed cultural center for him as well.) I then joined a queue for purchase of a visa at the airport, I was picked up and carried to the Hotel Elite—a rather minimalist establishment, for a morning departure to the degree I could understand what was being said among the few fellows who had transferred me around among them. Allegedly they use English, but that means nodding vigorous affirmatives to any question and seeming to be on a scheduled agenda that will become clear at the time it is happening. So, I leaned back and took it all in, since there was not much I could do to change or direct it. I noticed two things rather early, one is that the city types who came to meet me had these ridiculous stylish shoes—which have a woven black patent leather that comes out to a square toe extended out several inches beyond any toe that could reach that far—looking rather as though they have frog flippers with shiny leather clown shoes someone has asked them to wear for my entertainment.

When I checked in to the Elite Hotel, I had to have my passport photocopied, but also had to sign a statement on the back of the registration saying that I was completely responsible for any and all guests and their behavior if I should bring them to my room. I presume that this is to cover the hotel for the kinds of activity I had learned about in Petropavlosk in Kamchatka, and hard working girls how might be working from the same “office.” I went to bed, but did not sleep because of the change in time zones as well as the disruption in sleep patterns from the long flights that had brought me here, so I set about typing up a few thoughts that were related more to events and situations left behind than dealing with those items ahead. I also saw a bit of the TV that seems to originate form Turkey here, with the Turkic language being understood throughout most of the Turkic Republics, the residual of the once Ottoman Empire, then taken over in the Soviet Era, now the “CIS” Commonwealth of Independent States. I walked outside and tire to bring down the satellites to give me a reading on where I was, and I have marked Baku at the Hotel Elite at BAKU + 40* 25.29 N, and 49* 51.04 E. Baku is a peninsula into the Caspian Sea, the furthest inland of the other large bodies of water leading to the Mediterranean such as the Black Sea and Sea of Marmara at Istanbul. The latter are connected to the ocean and are slat water. The Caspian is, or at least, WAS fresh water, in which the like of sturgeon were swimming, akin to the Great Lakes. The size of the Caspian "Sea" or Great Lake is 371,000 kilometers squared--or hectares--which for comparison is bigger than the 307,000 hectares covered by Japan.

I paid US cash for the Hotel at $60 plus another $50 to get converted to Manat ($1.00 US= 4,700 M) and tried to get them to mail a few of the postcards I had so diligently written on my way here, which I suspect they simply trashed, if I can predict on the basis of what seems to have happened subsequently to the next batches I had tried to produce. I was told that I may have been picked up by a Mercedes and the driver of a fellow named Yullat, who is the owner of the hunting company as well as many other businesses here, but in the morning I would be transferred into the Toyota pickup truck that would take me 210 kilometers for the five hours transit to the road head village where I would be getting on horses for the last three hours ride into Tur hunting camp. Some of this information I had only pieced in after the fact since it seemed a rather fragmentary plan as first dribbled out, but I had hoped that someone knew what was supposed to be going on, and the few folk who had rudimentary English around me were not clued in on the big plan.

As we drove along the massive boulevards built in the Russian massive style it reminded me of Petropavlosk, a town that had seen better days and might be started back again fueled this time by the oil rigs still available in pumping around the Caspian especially at the site of Baku, but not working as well as the big expansion plans still to come this time fueled by capitalist enterprise, but not yet fully operational. Young chicks in stylish clothes are strutting the streets, alongside the more typical Babushkas who might be sweeping them—a Turkish/Russian admixture. I was brought around a large office building in the Mercedes, and in the back entrance, I was transferred to the front seat of a white Toyota pickup truck. A rifle was taken in which I recognized as a Russian built Kalashnikov and a few boxes of the Federal 30/06 ammo we had bought at the former Galyans’ now Dicks’ sporting goods store in Gaithersburg. Of all the odd uniforms for a driver, a driver got in with me in a uniform marked “POLIS” and became my chauffeur. I tried to fasten the seat belt, and could not find the recipient female end into which to snap the connector. The “Polis” waved it off, and said it was “Unnecessary!” It certainly was, given the breakneck speed and road conditions we would be coming to shortly, but he was not the one to write me a ticket for not “clicking it.”

We drove around the Baku streets for a bit, apparently gathering some items needed for later. I shot a photo with the “Space Needle” kind of tower with a Mc D’s arches sign in front of it—too much a cliché world wide to be remarkable. Almost everywhere there are huge cult-like portraits of the third of Azerbaijan’s presidents after independence from Russia, all shoeing him in a heroic or benevolent posture, and some with his son as they both gesture out into a rosy future prospect. His son was elected president only two months before his father, the prior president, died, so it seems that the cult-status of the heroic portraits (almost as many as those I had seen of Saddam Hussein on every street corner in Baghdad when I had been there during the Iran/Iraq war) are political posters for the successor in the dynasty. Imagine that! Having a father and son succession to the presidency!

There are small Ladas struggling under the loads of onions and vegetables being brought to market by mechanized peasants. There are also Mercedes and BMW’s whizzing past, and even an occasional Hummer which the hunting company is purchasing for its business interest next year. There is a huge arena and sports complex here. I took a few photos as we seemed to be driving randomly around the town, until we took off north along the Caspian Sea shoreline into a desert—which turned out to be a not-quite-barren-enough wasteland. It is a massive “Industrial Wasteland.”

THE INDUSTRIAL WASTELAND OF SOVIET ERA

MASSIVE PLANNED PETROCHEMICAL COMMUNITY,

NOW DERELICT AND RUSTING AWAY IN AN ECO-

DISASTER ALONG THE DESERT SHORE OF THE CASPIAN SEA

This is a source for much of the fuel of the Eastern bloc, and is obviously subsidized heavily. The signs advertise high test “benzina” (gasoline) at 2,000 M/liter, ($0.40/liter) far cheaper than the price of gasoline in the US, but the “Dizel” is less than a third of the price. It is coming from somewhere other than the huge oil rigging along the coast I had been driven through since all the idle rigs rusting, deteriorating and spilling I saw as we drove through look like a natural disaster of the most wholesale kind.

This was a “new city” designed and brought to be by the Soviets planning a “petrochemical paradise” through their Central Planning—and the results of this workers’ Utopia is rusting in rot in a desert that the very ground is contaminated from its passing. This was a “concept city” built around “Better Things for Better Living—through Chemistry”—at least A LIVING, in a vassal state that could survive only by being what the master wanted. And what it wanted was a giant petrochemical complex here in the desert north of Baku about 21 kilometers and it was designed the way a chemical engineer would go about it. Huge overhead pipes, and wires, and cracking towers and flare off gas spouts and tanks and carboys everywhere. Many are labeled in Cyrillic alphabet—I can recognize “Methane, Butane, and Ethylene” and there is a huge polymerization factory here to maek polyethylene and all the other polymers for modernity. It is open to the wind, with the windows cracked and the train wheels rusted to the tracks with the carboys and their Cyrillic alphabet labels still attached to each. Drifting sand has covered some parts of the complex of pipes—this is the vision of the future in an industrial world run amok. I have seen the future of 1984—and sure enough—it existed, had come and gone, and the ghost town is not as pretty as the exhausted mining towns out west in the US.

We would later be meeting Emil, who is a product of this industrial revolution forced by central planning. His father was an industrial chemist, so he was brought here to the new planned city whose name sounds like Sumniyat. It was a spot on the road one year and had grown with the petrochemical planned expansion to the second largest city in Azerbaijan—the capital Baku has 3 million of the 8 million inhabitants inside the borders, (there are fifty million Azeris, most of them dispersed in Russia, Iran, Turkey and Europe with half a million the US Diaspora) and 700,000 soon lived in the chemical new city of the future—which has now slipped rapidly into the past as the Soviets were departing and they had poisoned the ground behind them. It is a modern parallel of the industrial wasteland And the new international companies that plan to come in to make a more efficient exploitation of the resources that Azerbaijan has would not be interested in starting a massive superfund cleanup project on their own, but would rather start over elsewhere and stay away form the heritage of their soviet antecedents. I would predict that however much revenue is generated by AzerOil, this ground will be forever contaminated by the failed experiment in a Utopian chemistry city, just as the Caspian Sea is no longer a fertile fishery and if one should be so lucky as to catch a non-deformed fish, it would most likely be inedible, just as the Crescent Beach is unswimmable—between derelict oil platforms off shore.

After three hours of driving far too fast in a game of chicken with oncoming cars in the long desert road, we arrived in Quba, a provincial capital and the area where the Resident of AYF Company lives. We stopped to buy large flat pancakes of Azeri bread and also had a red and green rug displayed for the purchase of my accompanying rider, who was still trying to think about it and calling repeatedly on the cell phone to check on other opinions. We went to a small table restaurant overlooking a river valley which had no river in it. We were looking across to Asia, since half of Azerbaijan is in Europe, whose end is marked by the Caucasus Mountains and the start of Asia which is marked by the Urals. Despite getting here at breakneck speed, we sat in complete leisure for a multi-course dinner, which began with a cold yogurt with watercress and parsley ground up in it—“Akroshka” and inevitable sliced cucumbers, the flat bread followed by some form of kebab—including lamb chops and a ground lamb which is wrapped in the thin bread pancakes. There is goat cheese and some leafy greens, and the lunch looks very much the same no matter where or when ordered or eaten. It was preceded by a goat shank soup and a rather good bit of potato and greens floating in the soup with a hearty flavor. When I had finished with what I had thought was the final course, they had brought around “Pastramon”—the dried seasoned meat which I had known from Turkey.

I looked across at Asia as a car draped with red ribbons drove by—the likely wedding of someone being celebrated. About three fourths of Azerbaijan’s 95% Moslem population is Shia, but more along the lines of the Turkish nation which is largely secular. There are some residual Slavs from the Russian occupation and some of those are Eastern Orthodox, and a few Tartars. But I did not hear the blaring prayer calls regularly, even though there are a few mosques we had passed. It seems this area is more like Turkey than the Middle East, and one of our fellows said that the Shia/Sunni differences were magnified by the Soviets to make it easier to divide, conquer and exploit them.

ENTER THE MOUNTAINS OF THE “BIG CAUCASUS”

We turned from the desert road which was paved and headed up hill where we lost the pavement. We rather quickly came into the kinds of roads that I am familiar with from the Himalayan excursions, with rough rutted roads and swerving corners and switchbacks. We came around a corner and saw a hanging waterfall high above us. We popped out to look at it and take a couple of pictures. We went a bit further uphill and stopped at the side of the road to look out, and as we came back to the Toyota I heard the radiator boiling. I could not possibly stop them from the foolishness that followed—they were determined to open the radiator cap, which I assured them would result in a dangerous scalding geyser. They wanted to solve that by talking the empty coke bottle to the nearby stream from the waterfall and dump water on the radiator on the outside, as though that could possibly cool a boiling superheated radiator, and could possibly even crack the block. But, they insisted and kept trying to open the radiator cap by wrapping a rag around it and squeezing it a bit further successively until the result I had guaranteed them blew up full force. They jumped back as the geyser muddied up the windshield and almost caught each of us in the scalding. We had to wait now until many successive trips back and forth with a coke bottle could refill the radiator they had so dramatically and unnecessarily vented. I am not the mechanical engineer here, but I seem to know more about the reasonableness of their compulsive maneuver which they seemed to have thought had saved the day.

We made consecutive switchbacks until we arrived at increasingly distant, scattered and smaller villages. At one, we pulled up and I hopped out realizing we had come to the end of the road. We were in the village of “Dark” where the inter-related 34-families are the ones who will be our guides, wranglers, cook camp manager and overall companions for the Tur camp which I later learned was about a three to four hour ride up the rocky river bed of what I came to know later as the Babachay River. It looked like the yak pens of the Himalayans, with A Tur skull cap for horns nailed to the shed rather than an ibex skull, but otherwise they would recognize each other’s life styles.

I pulled out my camo hat and the gloves, which I never wore, and put on my sunglasses---then noted I was the only one who had them. I made a GPs fix on the village of Dark as they saddled up the horses with Azeri saddles which consisted of a leather frame and a big leather stuffed pillow strapped on top. I was handed a switch made of a fan belt wired to a stick with which to encourage my mount. I had determined that I was at DARK= 41* 06.06 N, 048* 25.01 E, and determined that BAKU was only 88.0 miles on the Great Circle away at bearing 116* although it was 210 km in road distance to get here at 3:30 PM, having started at 8:00 AM with stops at the Baku office and the Quba lunch. With a tug on the reins and a swat to the haunches, I got my horse to move down reluctantly to a steep gravel path down to the wide glacial river bed mostly filled with smoothed rounded rocks –our major roadway for the next days to weeks—that much is not yet certain.

HOSEBACK RIDE UP THE ROCKY RIVER BED OF THE

BABACHAY RIVER TO THE TUR HUNT CAMP,

ARRIVING AS EVERYONE I WAS EXPECTING SEEMS TO BE MISSING ELSEWHERE, AND PLANS ARE CONFUSED OR NOT ABLE TO BE COMMUNICATED FOR LACK OF TRANSLATORS

I got the name Elchin from one of the Azeri guides who went up stream with me, and I believe his nephew whose name might be Harcanyi. We exchanged names and birthdays, since Elchin seems to be a senior citizen guide here born in 1962—the numbers scratched one rock on another, and Harcanyi was born in 1983, about the average age for those who are climbing up in these mountains. They are all scrawny wiry and tough, but have a habit of smoking as they stop for breath in the uphills, which cannot be too good for them, so they must have both genes and yogurt to help them live to the superannuated ages for which some of the Caucasian mountain peoples are famous.

I walked my horse over the difficult roller bearing terrain, and even in evening light I could see occasional sparks fly from the horseshoes on the rocks. I had the horse drink deeply a couple of times when we had criss crossed the stream that seems to be all that this river is now, which must be about a thousand times bigger in spring run off judging from the width of the rocky river bed. I had trotted for a kilometer, which was a fun experience, except that it seemed to jostle and loosen everything I had crammed into pockets, like cameras and tape recorder, which once removed could not ever get rammed back in to protect them. I looked about at the steep walled canyon I was passing through, and came up to a major junction called Kalaj, before turning up for another two kilometer ride to the hunting camp. It consists of a couple of rough buildings with another in construction, with bunks for the guides and three bed rooms for the clients, at a place where a cook has made a kitchen along the main bunkhouse with a table on the porch. It was a convivial enough group considering that no one understood what each other were saying, but there was a note from George Sevich saying I had to be sure that I tested the new Bennelli R-1 Rifle the first autoloading rifle Bennelli has made after a long experience with autoloading shotguns. The Benneli company is an Italian firm that bought Burris scope, and is buying Federal ammunition , so George hopes to have the sponsorship of the Bennelli company by using all the brand name logs ostentatiously as sponsors of the DVD and TV filming he was supposed to have readily available for me in coverage of my hunt. But the cameraman Patrick Montgomery from New Mexico, and the Eurasian Expeditions George Sevich were nowhere in evidence and no one could quite explain where they were or when they were arriving back in camp. They were keen that I should go out and shoot the rifle, since each wanted to see me shoot, and maybe have a chance to shoot a few rounds themselves with this very upmarket machine, which each wanted to carry for me—be my guest.

I mad e a GPS mark of the Tur Camp as TURC=41* 01.54 N, 048* 26.34 E which makes it 89.3 statute miles from Baku at bearing 112* and 6.17 miles from DARK at bearing 33*. I went down to the stream bed, and a target was placed at 100 meters for me which I blew away twice, with the first in the middle of the bull’s eye, and kicked it completely out of the ground at 200 meters with another in the middle of the bull. The group of younger guides looked at me with a great deal more respect after this short demonstration, since they identify with the rifle that can reach out at long range and were hoping to see what I could do. As I would say later: “We have the right equipment; now let’s see if we are made of the right stuff!” I had no idea why I said that nor what it would mean so soon after saying it.

I did not know what was coming up next, and in the information vacuum, I went back over the same thoughts I had been working over too long already, and I did not want to spend my time in a hunting camp looking up at massive mountains and thinking about a heart a half world away which seemed as stony hard. I asked again about the availability of the guides, TV cameraman and George Sevich and was told “8:00 AM tomorrow.” That was encouraging. I figured I should go to bed with the sun setting, and find out what that time actually entailed since I did not know what came next—if I had known, what would I have done differently?

Not much. I prepared to plunge into the unknown first thing in the morning, and did not know that this was almost literally too true. Come on along for the “ride out, since it seems that group here are not easy to understand, but they all do understand hunting, and they are all keen on my getting into these mountains and shooting a trophy Tur, now that they have been told I am a marathoning mountaineer and can shoot straight and long—they are counting on me from advance publicity about my reputation which as somehow preceded me to this remote corner of an exotic hunting world.

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