Kazakhstan and Caspian Sea Ferry

Aktau, Kazakhstan.


My bike. With a little bit of the Caspian Sea in the background.


My buddy Orkhan at his parent's apartment. Notice the sweet boombox in the background.

Ivan, Orkhan's buddy, and Orkhan. At night by the sea. Orkhan's buddy was funny. One night we were shooting pool and he started asking me a bunch of questions, with Ivan and Orkhan translating. "Why doesn't Charlie learn Russian? Doesn't he want to be able to talk with locals so he can learn about us and our culture and what are lives are like? I don't understand it?" So I started asking him questions: "What's your girlfriends name? Are you going to marry her? How brothers and sisters do you have?...." Then he said "What the hell is Charlie asking me all these questions for?" This all happened within about 4 minutes....

I don't remember this kid's name. We met his older brother in a bus and they came swimming with us at the sea. This was cool. He has this pony tail growing off the back of his buzzed head. At first I thought it was cheesy mullet asia trash hair style. But, I was wrong....Almost all Central Asian's are descendants of Genghis Khan, and there were several different tribes. This kid's tribe were warriors and at a certain age they grow this tail in the back of their hair to signify they are warriors. He likes hip hop music.

From the ferry. There wasn't a cloud in the sky and it was just blue everywhere.

Uzbekistan Pictures

I think the out hole on my camera is broken.  But I found a card reader....

Bukhara, Uzbekistan.

I love when people use their bikes to haul stuff....Central Asians are fantastic at this.

School uniforms.

Shashlik.  I ate this everyday for about two weeks.

One night I wanted a ice cream, so I walked down the street to a little store.  I told the girl that I wanted the best ice cream she had.  She then determinedly dug through all the ice cream looking for what I assumed she thought was the best.  I was quite surprised that she understood enough english to know that I wanted the 'best' and that she had an opinion on the 'best'.  She was only 15 or something.  Then she pulled out this ice cream:

Khiva, Uzbekistan.

Kungrad, Uzbekistan.

This is that one night I stayed where I stayed at that one guys mom's house and then we rode back to his place at midnight or something like that.

Tbilisi, Georgia

I'm in Tbilisi right now. I just got to town.

I've been in Georgia for a few days now. The food is fantastic and everyone where's dark clothing....

When I was riding through Azerbaijan there were several mornings when the fog hadn't quite lifted yet and everything was green and covered in trees and I kept thinking "it feels like there should be castles around every corner...." Then I got to Georgia, and there's castles around every corner....

I crossed the border around 5 pm and camped about 15 km outside of the first town I hit. The next morning I rode to Signagi, which is a touristy town on top of a hill. It has a fortress wall all around it and all of the buildings are old with cobble streets. It was fantastic. It felt like Italy.

I got to a guesthouse around 10 am and took a shower. Then a group of 7 other travelers (mostly Isreali, I meet a lot of Isreali travelers) invited me to go to David Garej with them. It's a cave monestary about a 2 hour drive away. It was a series of caves built into this huge slab of rock in the middle of nowhere. There were several random churches all over the place. I think it was originally started in the 6th century or something.

I walked around Signagi the next morning and then left in the afternoon. I camped in some field about 200 m from the highway. A shepherd told me I could. It rained all night, which wasn't a big deal, I like the sound of rain on my tent. It alternated between fast rain and slow rain and little rain and big rain, every 30 seconds. I loved it. Then this morning I loaded up the bike and started riding down the dirt trail to the road. Because it had rained all night the dirt road was muddy. I didn't even realize it was happening until both my wheels quit rolling because of all the mud caught up between the brakes and the fenders. So I got off the bike to clean it up. I didn't want to get my fingers all dirty....so I got a stick and tried cleaning the mud off. Then I realized it wasn't mud, it was adobe. And it wasn't coming off. I worked that stick for 5 minutes and made barely any progress. I pulled off both the wheels and grabbed baseball size chunks of adobe from my fenders. I had to use all of my water to soften up the adobe enough to get it off. After 15 minutes I got it clean enough and walked my bike through the grass the rest of the way to the road. But I got more adobe in the fenders. So I had to clean my bike again on the road, though I didn't pull off the wheels this time. I couldn't find a stick so I used a ball point pen I saw laying in the road. When I got the wheels clean enough to ride I realized the ball point pen leaked and I had ink all over my hands. I was sick of cleaning so I just got on my bike and rode. I made it to the top of the hill about 10 min later and lifted up my front wheel and spun it just to see how much the adobe was slowing it down. It didn't turn at all. So I found a big puddle, pulled off my wheels again and cleaned them in the puddle. I filled up a water bottle, from the puddle, maybe 8 times and poured it all over my brakes and fenders to clean the adobe off. When I put the rear wheel back on there was a high spot on the rim, and I realized I had a broken spoke. It was the replacement spoke I put on in China. It broke off right at the nipple, just like the first spoke.... By this time it was pouring down rain. I was soaking wet and I had adobe everywhere. I had just done laundry too. I walked into a little store and fixed my spoke inside. I don't think the store lady was too happy, but she was too polite to kick me out, and I didn't really want to be outside.... Once I fixed up my bike it was raining even harder than before, but to the west, where I was heading, I could see blue skies. So I started riding and a huge cloud rolled in and dumped even more water on me. 30 min. later it slowed up and then I hit the blue skies and rode through the thick traffic to Tbilisi.

I really love cycle touring.

Zaqatala, Azerbaijan

Zaqatala.

I'll probably be leaving Azerbaijan today or tomorrow. Georgia isn't too far, but it keeps raining on me, and that just makes me want to take more breaks. Everything is always damp. I try hanging my clothes up at night inside my tent to let them dry, but nothing does.

I'm done with hotels in Azerbaijan. They're expensive and the last one (the only one I've stayed in besides that night in Baku) grossed me out. I woke up around 5 in the am to the sound of rustling plastic sacks. I turned on my headlamp but didn't see anything. I heard the noise again 10 minutes later and turned on my headlamp again and saw two rats run away. One ran under my bed and one disappeard near the sink. I tried convincing myself they were just mice, which aren't as disgusting, but I still thought they were rats. I closed up all my bags and put everything away and decided to go pee. It was a shared bathroom and the stench hit you from about 15 feet down the hall. When you walk in the bathroom the shower was on the right, with it's own door, then a sink and then two toilets, each with their own doors. The toilets are squat toilets. A sunken porcelain bowl which sits flush with the floor. They're flushies and typically aren't bad, but this one hasn't been cleaned since the Soviet Union existed. I opened the door to the toilet and saw a huge rat run and dive into the toilet and then swim down through the small amount of water and into the pipe. I was glad I only had to pee, there was no way I could have squatted over that thing.

I did something out of the ordninary for me yesterday. I rode into Shaki, which is about the only touristy town in northwestern Azerbaijan, got something to eat and did some sightseeing. I rode 2 km uphill and paid $3 to go into an old palace. I never do touristy stuff, especially when I'm riding my bike. Usually because I never hit touristy cities. The palace was ok. The cities I've been seeing are beautiful. They don't feel Soviet at all. They feel more like old British estate cities or something. Everything is green, all different shades. Most buildings are made of large stones. I dig it.

What I don't really dig are the Azerbaijani's. They're not rude or mean or anything. They've all been nice. But I just haven't enjoyed them the way I've enjoyed other people. I rarely see children, either they're in school or their parents don't allow them to play on the highway (in Central Asia the only place kids played was the highway). I see women but they're very shy and rarely return my 'hello's' or smiles. And the men are irritating. I'll be making eye contact with the driver of an oncoming car, and he'll be staring at me, and then when he's 5 ft away he just lays on the horn.... to say 'hi' maybe? I can't figure it out. They're all very bent out of shape on me acknowledging them. It's like Uzbekistan, but more irritating for some reason. Both my mom and dad can whistle very loudly. When I was growing up and heard one of them whistle, that meant I needed to stop what I was doing and pay attention to them. Everyone in Azerbaijan (and Uzbekistan) can whistle just like my parents. And it throws me off almost every time. Everyone whistles at me. I hear the whistle and think they're trying to tell me something. "You just dropped something" "The back of your bike is on fire" "This pretty lady, who speaks english, wants to meet you and make you lunch" (though, I do get this one quite a bit...oh, yeah...). It drives me crazy. In China and Indonesia if someone gave me a blank stupid stare, I could smile or wave and then there countenance would change completely and they would smile back. If I get a stupid looking stare here, it doesn't matter what I do back, they just keep staring at me as stupidly as possible.

Oil is big business in Azerbaijan, but the wealth is concentrated in Baku. I saw Range Rovers, Mercedes, BMW's and everything fancy all over the place. All the cop cars were BMW's. I heard outside Baku was supposed to be really poor, but it doesn't feel that way. The cities are all very well manicured and the buildings are kept up. I don't see as many nice cars, but the people don't seem to be doing too bad. I do see a lot of men sitting outside cafe's all day. I don't think they do anyting other than sit outside cafe's, which means they aren't working, but the people just don't look as destitute as I thought they would.

The food is still really good, but kind of expensive so I cook my own breakfasts and dinners and then eat bread or snacks for lunch. I eat all the time. You'd think I would be really skinny, but I don't feel it at all. I eat a bag of these little miniature ginger bread things every day. Chips, snickers, m&m's, I don't stop eating.

I changed out my SD card on my camera, but still can't get any pictures off it....I'll be Tbilisi in a few days and will try and get it fixed there.

Ismayalli

I woke up in my tent this morning to a light sprinkling. I ate 4 open faced peanut butter and jelly sandwiches until it let up a little and then packed my stuff and headed out.

Five minutes after I started riding it started raining more earnestly. I was soaked within about 20 minutes.

It rained consistently for the four hours I was on the road. Sometimes it rained hard, sometimes it merely misted, but it came down the whole time. I stopped for lunch after about 40 km and decided to call it a day. I've had a small cold for a few days and I didn't think it was too smart to keep going in the rain all wet and cold like I was (look at me mom, taking care of myself....). Of course, who knows what kind of diseases I may pick up in the craphole of a hotel I found....

I'm on a smaller road now, which is nice because there is less traffic. But for some reason the Azerbaijani's really feel the need for me to acknowledge them. It's not enough for them to just wave as they drive past and hope I see them, they have to lay on the horn. It is so irritating.

The landscape has changed. It's no longer desert nothingness. It's all rolling hills with trees and farmland everywhere. It's beautiful. I'm pretty sure when the engineer designed the road, he looked at a topo map and decided to link all the highest spots with the lowest spots. High, low, high, low, high, low.... I'm climbing as much in a day here as I did through the mountains in China. In China we would spend 4 or 5 hours climbing a pass and then descend for an hour and that would be our day, but we would have a huge pass to show for it. Here it's almost like I just climb all day because the downs are always so short. I'll climb for 15 min, descend for 1 then climb for another 15 min. At the end of the day I have nothing to show for it. I'm thinking Turkey will be the same....I hope you're in shape Ben....

Today I rode past 3 grown men throwing rocks into a tree to knock down walnuts. They were very giddy about it. It was odd. They offered me a handful. Walnuts are way to much work for what you get.

I still can't get any pictures off my camera. Does anyone know how I fix this? Usually I plug my camera in and the computer recognizes it and that's it. But now the computer always says that there is an unknown device plugged in. It's not a driver issue, because the Canon website says there is no driver when using Windows XP, which is what everyone over here uses.

Shamakhi, Azerbaijan

Shamakhi.

I ate lunch with a very hairy fat Azerbaijani guy. He's a cop working in narcotics. They mostly deal with heroin that comes in from Afghanistan via Iran. He asked me where I sleep at night and I told him I usually stay in my tent. He then asked where I bathe when I sleep in my tent, and I told him I don't get to bathe everyday, "I just washed my face in the bathroom 5 minutes ago...". He looked at me like I was some kind of barbarian and said "I bathe everyday." Which is so very different from the rest of the world I've been cycling through. In Tibet we had someone tell us that it's cold in Tibet, so you don't need to bathe.....

When I was in Uzbekistan I met an American cyclist at my hotel who was riding from Lisbon to Hong Kong. He's been on the road since February and when I met him he was ill. Diarrhea, vomiting, etc.... He said it was the first time he's been ill since February. THE FIRST TIME. I couldn't believe it. I've been in Asia since January and I've had diarrhea at least every other week. Welcome to Asia. Though now that I'm moving further west I haven't had it for about a week. I'm seeing lots of flushy toilets, and apparently the people bathe....

Eastern Azerbaijan is way more deserty than I thought it would be. I was expecting forest, for some reason. I've done about 130 km since Baku and I've seen a handful of trees. I have to buy water because I haven't crossed a single stream. And the traffic is awful. But I think the main road turns off soon and I'll take the back roads.

Spencer - Breckan, you two wouldn't like cycle touring here. I keep trying to order omelette's soaked in warm water and they look at me like I'm crazy. The bakery's use sugar in their products. Some people speak english. I don't get to look other men in the eye when I take a pooh. If I get hungry I'm usually only an hour or so away from a cafe. It's just not the cycle touring we're used to. It's not so much adventure cycling anymore, it's more sissy cycle touring. I miss you guys....

Baku, Azerbaijan

I'm in Baku, Azerbaijan.

The ferry wasn't bad. There is no schedule at all. Coming or going. It comes when it comes and goes when it's loaded. I was told to be at the ferry terminal at 5 pm on Friday. The boat left at 4 am Saturday morning and docked in Azerbaijan at 1 am Sunday morning.

It was a large ferry, with only about 50 other passengers and several large cargo trucks. The locals told us that back in the day this boat was super fantastic. It's hurting now. There were toilets, but none of them flushed, just a porcelain bowl. And they started off disgusting, so after 24 hours I couldn't even get near them. I was laying up on the top deck during the day reading when some workers brought out all the mattresses from the rooms and sprinkled some powder soap on them and then hosed down the mattresses... I didn't know mattresses could be cleaned like that.... I didn't pay the extra $5 for a room, I laid out across a row of seats and slept there.

Because there is no schedule for the boat, it has been known to get to the destination and sit off shore for days waiting to be allowed in. Everyone on the boat had at least 4 days worth of food.

I was still hanging out with Ivan from Australia. We got through customs sometime after 2 am. Neither of us had any clue as to where a cheap hotel was or anything. We walked around for nearly an hour and found a hotel. We banged on the door for 2 minutes before we could wake up the manager who was sleeping on a couch in the lobby. We could see him and each time we banged on the door he would scratch his head or roll over. We finally woke him and he told us that he wanted over $20 each for us to stay there. By this time it was almost 4 in the morning and I wasn't about to pay $20 to sleep in a room for 4 hours. We told him this and he gave us the impression that he would go inside and talk to his co-worker (I'm guessing) and come back to let us know if he could bring the price down a bit. After 2 minutes waiting for him we looked inside and he was asleep on his sofa again. There was a bench right there on the sidewalk so Ivan laid down on it, and I pulled out my thermarest and we slept on the sidewalk. The mosquitos were vicious, but I got about 3 hours of sleep before traffic picked up and it became too loud to sleep. Nobody bothered us at all.

Baku is the largest city in the Caucasus' and is very cosmopolitan. Fancy stores are everywhere and they're mixed right in with a lot of old architecture. The old city reminds me a lot of Italy's Cinque Terra, though not as quaint. Old buildings packed in really tight with narrow staircases and tiny alley's winding all over the place. Following a map is impossible, the alleys start and stop too frequently. I just walk in the general direction I want to go and hope I get there.

I'm sure this would be a great town to hang out in for a couple of days, but I haven't ridden my bike in almost 2 weeks and I'm too antsy to hang out or do anything more than run errands before heading out tomorrow.

I think I've got some kind of virus on my camera or something....I can't get any pictures off....I'll try again some other time.

Blogging is getting hard. When we used to roll up into tiny rural Chinese cities, internet was the only thing to do (if the town had electricity). Now the cities I'm hitting are interesting and sitting online is draining.... So if my crappy posts get crappier, that's the reason.

Criminality

Cops in Central Asia are usually quite crooked. Bribes are an everyday part of life for everybody. I don't see it so much in Aktau (yes, I'm still here....the girl at the ferry ticket office keeps promising the boat will get here soon....) but in Dushanbe, Tajikistan it was everywhere.

As a pedestrian I would walk out into the street at almost any place any time and the cars were gauranteed to stop for me. Not because they are responsible polite drivers, but because there are cops standing on the sidewalk everywhere looking for any reason to pull anyone over.

One day in Dushanbe I was trying to find a place to get breakfast. I really wanted a waffle. I didn't find one..... But while I was looking I walked past a large square with a monument in the middle. There were two cops standing in the square preventing anyone from getting too close to the monument, for whatever reason. They approached me and asked for my documents. My passport was at the Kazak Embassy, but I had a copy of my passport and a copy of my visa, so when I showed them that they had nothing on me. They asked me if I had a map of the city (they didn't speak english, but it wasn't hard to get at what they were saying), I told them I was ok with the map I had. Then they tried getting me to go and buy something to drink with them. They wanted me to pay, of course. I told them I wasn't interested and that I was going to go. Then the smaller cop looked at me and said "uh, 10 somoni?" Which is the equivalent of about $2.20. He had no reason to extort any money from me, so he just begged for it. It was lazily pathetic. I said "nah", and then we all stared at each other for about 15 seconds before I turned around and left.

Aktau isn't bad. I'm hanging out with an Australian guy who speaks Russian. We've made a few friends and meet new people every day, all locals, I haven't met any other foreigners. Sometimes they speak english sometimes they don't.

The women in Kazakhstan are surprisingly fantastically amazing. So we do a lot of people watching. The Tajik women are more beautiful, they're Persian. But these women are incredibly gorgeous and they're everywhere. Everywhere. It's unbelievable. I've never been anywhere like it. And I'm in Kazakstan of all places. I try talking to some of them, but it never works....

Aktau, Kazakhstan

I took mostly trains to get myself through Uzbekistan (I spend some time in Bukhara and Khiva, but it's a pain loading pictures on this computer). It's all flat desert nothingness and I don't want to ride my bike forever, so I skip the parts that don't seem as interesting so I have time for the places that do. I'm not at all a purist when it comes to cycle touring. If spending extra time riding through the Pamirs of Tajikistan would mean that I would need to skip the deserts of Uzbekistan, that's fine. So that's what I did. I rode in the Pamirs then, so I ride the trains now.

I hate taking public transportation with a bike. It's way more stressful than cycling and way more stressful than sitting on a train sans bike. I had to make a connection in Beyneu, Kazakhstan, about 2/3 of the way into my total train trip. I arrived at 9 pm and my train was supposed to leave at 1:26 am. For some reason it showed up around midnight. My ticket cost $15. When I loaded my bike for the first 2/3 nobody said anything. No extra charges, nothing. It was easy. So at midnight when I went to load it on the next train I got frustrated when they tried to charge me again.

In Uzbekistan everything is negotiable. I negotiated with a guy to shave my beard for 3,000 som (a little less than $2). Afterwards I decided to give him a $0.60 tip and thought this was a generous gesture ($0.60 would be a lot for a barber). He then told me the price was 5,000 som. 3,000 for the shave, but also 2,000 for using the electric clippers because my beard was so long. It pissed me off. I didn't ask for the electric clippers. I just asked how much it would cost to get rid of the hair on my face. I hate negotiating for everything. But even more I hate re-negotiating.

Because I had already paid $15 for the train ticket, and the person who sold me the ticket knew I had a bike and I wasn't charged when I bought the ticket, I felt that any additional fee was re-negotiating and I wasn't into it. There was a 24 year old kid who spoke a little english and told me they wanted 200 tenge (Kazakh money) for the bike. I didn't know exactly what the exchange rate, but I figured it was close to $2. I balked. Not a chance. I wasn't going to pay a dime. I raised my voice, used some profanities (even if they don't speak english, they understand swear words) and was very obstinate about it. At one point I asked how much that would be in $ anyway. Then, all of a sudden they told me to load my bike. I got it on the train and in place and leaned back out to the english speaker to make sure they knew I wasn't going to pay when he told me they now expected dollars and he wrote it out. He had incorrectly said 200 Tenge when he meant to say 2,000 Tenge. And I was freaking out about 200 tenge. 2,000 is something like $20. I paid $15 for the ticket. At this point it was a joke. I wasn't really mad anymore because there was no way I was going to pay and they were going to have to forcibly pull me from the train (I learned all these skills from Spencer by the way...). But I had to show I was mad because nothing else would have worked, so I unleashed. I just started yelling. I was very loud about it (louder than my usual tone) and I yelled very quickly. I even used very sound logic, though nobody could understand me. They saw I wasn't going to budge, so they just shrugged and left me alone the rest of the train trip. It felt soo good. It gets old constantly being scammed.

I'm in Aktau, Kazakhstan now waiting for the ferry to Baku, Azerbaijan. The ferry has no schedule. Some girl in some office knows my hotel number and will call me when the ferry leaves Baku, meaning I'll have about 16 hours before my ferry will even arrive here. She called Baku today to ask if the ferry left there yet, then she asked if it would leave today, then she asked if there was any plan for the ferry to leave Baku. She got virtually no response to any of these. So I'm just hanging out.

Aktau was built in the 60's or 70's by the Soviets because of all the oil in the area. So it's a very young city and most of the buildings are still in decent shape. It's laid out on a grid in a very soviet style. Not at all organic, not at all appealing, but it's an ok place. I saw the WW II moment today and the MIG statue. Tomorrow is the museum, then I'm not sure what I'll do.

I met this kid, Ohkran, who is Azerbaijani but has lived here his whole life. He's 28 and has Amercian slang down. He took me to a store to help me find some headphones because mine broke. "I don't know man, these leather shoes are cool, I want them so bad, but they cost $100 man. I don't even have a job man. Damn." I really liked him, he's really funny. He invited me to his house for lunch. It's Ramadan so nobody ate but me. His mom made me some soup and some beans with some kind of steak on it. It was delicious.

The other day a small bird poohed on my pants just below my knee. I was sitting on a bench eating something. It was just a little pooh, maybe the size of a dime. All I had to clean it up with was a candy bar wrapper, which I knew wouldn't work, but I tried anyway. It only smeared it into a larger sized pile of bird pooh. That was a few days ago and I just barely got around to running some water over it. I found it interesting that I didn't do that sooner. I had a water bottle in my hand the moment it happened....

Today I swam in the Caspian Sea and ate about 5 waffles with some kind of chocalatey nougat wrapped up inside.

Kungrad, Uzbekistan

I spent a night in Kungrad, Uzbekistan. I ran into a guy named Salamat who spoke a little english, not a lot, but he was bright so it worked. He loves tourists. He told me this about 45 times. He invited me to stay at his mom's house and I accepted. We rode our bikes about 30 minutes out of town to where she lived. He rides an old Puch which is identical to the one I bought 4 years ago at a YMCA auction in Anchorage.

Salamat is 38 and divorced but has a new girlfriend who has a really good heart, he's thinking about marrying her but is unsure. His sister and her two children live with his mom in a small cluster of homes out of town. His sister spoke some english also and I was enjoying myself. I was starving and dinner didn't get served until about 9:30. It was plov, which is Uzbekistan's national dish. It's rice with some shredded vegetables in it and some meat. It's a little oily, but good.

After eating I was really ready for bed, but we sat up and talked for awhile. Finally at 11:30 they made the beds (pulled out some padded mats to sleep on in the dining/living/sleeping/sitting room). I was about to fall asleep when I heard muffled crying. I asked Salamat what it was and he told me that his brother and sister in law had just moved out of his mom's house and hadn't told anyone where they were going, they just left. So his mom cried all night every night. I gave him my condolensces and rolled over. He then told me he was sorry and that we could go back into town and stay at his place. I said the crying was no problem, my mom probably cries all the time because I'm not home, and it didn't bother me at all, I was fine. He insisted and really wanted to leave. I insisted we stay. But I was his guest, I could only insist for so long. So at midnight I loaded up my bike and we pedaled the 30 min back into town. It was a full moon and kind of cool riding by only moonlight.

Samarqand, Uzbekistan

Samarqand, Uzbekistan. This place is beautiful. The architecture is fantastic.

The largest bill they have is worth about $0.60. It was awfully irritating. Counting out 15 bills to pay for a hotel is ridiculous. I'm holding 175 bills.

Boy delivering bread on his bicycle.

Ali from Isreal. I met her and her husband in Tajikistan and we met again in Uzbekistan.,

Climbing stairs.

From a window.

I liked the color of the tiles, so I took a portrait.