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Travels with Lloyd in Azerbaijan
by Chris Braithwaite Oh Momma, can this really be the end? — with apologies to Bob Dylan Lloyd woke me out of a deep sleep at about seven in the morning. The train had stopped, and official voices were barking commands up and down the corridor in a language I didn't understand, but assumed was Azeri. I'd been awake most of the night, but it hadn't been the long, fretful night of an insomniac. It had been a fine thing, lying on one of the two narrow beds in a first-class compartment on the overnight train from Baku to Tbilisi. Lloyd had slept soundly on the other bed while the train clattered and rocked through a dark landscape I had never crossed before, and probably never would again. We'd finished our seminar with journalists in Baku on Friday afternoon, and hurried a bit to catch the 8:30 train to Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, where we would begin another seminar on Monday. Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, sits on a peninsula that juts out from the western shore of the Caspian Sea. I like trains a lot, and dislike flying over new territory from one crowded, chaotic airport to another. Lloyd, a thoroughly seasoned traveler, humored my strongly expressed preference for the train to Tbilisi. He was a little concerned that we didn’t have fresh Georgia visas in our passports. But Georgia is working hard to make its exotic borders open to travelers, and had begun issuing visas at its points of entry. Just days before, arriving by car from Armenia, Lloyd had been able to buy a Georgian visa at the border. Ten minutes, ten dollars, no problem. At this stop, however, we were officially leaving Azerbaijan at the last small town before the border. Georgian border officials waited about five miles down the line in Gardabani, the first town on their side of the line. Western travelers may be surprised, the first time they travel east, to discover that getting out of a country can be almost as serious a matter as getting in. Passports are checked as you leave, and if you’ve overstayed your welcome by letting your visa expire, you’ll have to answer for it. Our Azeri visas were in good order, however, and a border guard returned our passports with a new circular stamp showing we’d left his country by train on March 5. So far, so good. A few minutes later, when the Georgian guards climbed on the train at Gardabani, Lloyd explained, in Russian, that we needed to buy visas. The border guard explained, in Russian, that visas were not to be had in Gardabani, and ordered us off the train. This put us in an interesting position as we humped our collective six pieces of heavy luggage down off the train, across some trucks, up onto the platform and into a tiny three-room complex that served as headquarters for the border officials. As a legal matter, we were not in Georgia, and couldn’t get a visa that would let us proceed. But we had left Azerbaijan, had no visa to return, and couldn’t obtain one at that border. As a legal matter, we were nowhere. For me, this was something of a nightmare come true. From time to time over the past eight years, my travels have taken me between countries in the Balkans that are not on good enough terms to link up with scheduled connections by plane, train or even bus. From Montenegro, for example, to Albania, its uneasy neighbor to the south; and to Croatia, its unfriendly neighbor to the north. And from Macedonia to Bulgaria. In such cases one takes a taxi to the border, walks across the line, and looks for another taxi in which to carry on. But there is always a moment, as one schleps the luggage a few hundred feet from one small border post to the other, when the question occurs: Where will I be if they don’t let me in? The answer, in a word, is nowhere. And now, on this last day of my sixty-first year, I had finally arrived at that destination. We were invited to sit on a narrow cot that sagged under us, bringing our knees up toward our chins. In front of us a senior official sat at his wooden desk, leafing through a heavy ledger, presumably checking off the penciled names of the lucky travelers he had let into Georgia. Ours were not among them. This man made it clear he was far too busy to talk to a couple of foreigners who had put themselves in such a ridiculous position. But a younger man in civilian clothes, the man who had ushered us off the train, was curious. Had we served in our respective armies? No. Why not, and why was I not in Iraq? Too old, Lloyd explained, this man has sons in their thirties. And why are they not in Iraq? They don’t support the war. America is a powerful country, said our interlocutor. America can do as it likes in Iraq. I need to explain that this conversation was conducted through Lloyd, in Russian. Though born in New Zealand and a naturalized citizen of Australia, he learned Russian in St. Petersburg, where he helped found a successful English-language newspaper in the 1990s. He’d sold out profitably and moved with his Russian bride and her daughter to London. There he works for the Media Diversity Institute, the nonprofit outfit that had hired me for this quick series of two-day seminars for minority media in Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia. All three countries were part of the Soviet Union, and the Russian language is a link among them that has survived the collapse of that empire. At home, their citizens speak their native languages, which don’t share so much as a common alphabet. But when they travel, businessmen, journalists, and government officials must fall back on Russian to make themselves understood. But for Lloyd’s knowledge of Russian, I might still be sitting on that spavined cot in Gardabani. Pleading that she needed to mop under our feet, an elderly cleaning woman in widow’s black had us moved out of the office and into the sleeping quarters, where there were half a dozen cots and a small television set playing American rap videos. Officials joined us from time to time to discuss our fate with Lloyd. We had consulted the small map in my lonely planet travel guide, and determined that the nearest highway border crossing was just ten miles distant at Krasny Most, which translates to Red Bridge. The plan was clear. We needed a ride and an escort to Krasny Most, where we could buy our visas and hire a ride to Tbilisi. This, Lloyd was assured, was not possible. The grim alternative seemed to be to wait in this tiny space, listening to the rap music, until we were put on the night train back to Baku. Assuming we could get back into Azerbaijan, we would wait there until Monday, when we could obtain Georgian visas at the consulate, and finally proceed to Tbilisi. That would leave our Georgian minority journalists sitting in a conference room, waiting in vain for enlightenment. It was not, all in all, an acceptable alternative. So Lloyd set to work, ever calm, ever cheerful, trying to convince a succession of officers of the wisdom of our scheme. Finally help was offered. Two officers would drive us to the bridge and try and get us visas. The cost would be $100. I want to say quickly that I did not regard that as a demand for a bribe. Lloyd and I had put ourselves in a very bad position, and these people were willing to go to considerable lengths to get us out of it. Not unreasonably, they were not willing to do it for nothing. So off we went in the back seat of a private car, weaving around enormous potholes on a broad street past vast, abandoned factories. Were the roads this bad in America? our driver asked. Only during mud season, I replied. A road sign identified the next city as Rustavi, and I remembered that I had visited a newspaper there four years ago. Rustavi is a short drive from Tbilisi. We were tantalizingly close to our objective. And we were still nowhere. In fact, we had underestimated the favor we had asked of our guards. There is no direct road from Gardabani to Krasny Most, and we had driven deep into Georgia only to turn back east at Rustavi for a long drive through a splendid landscape of rolling, treeless hills. Lloyd said it looked like New Zealand. I thought it looked like northern California. We descended, finally, to Krasny Most and the chaos of the huge, idling tractor-trailers, the crowded buses, the lines of private cars and patient pedestrians that mark a busy border crossing in this part of the world. Our keepers had become our advocates, and they pleaded our case with the Georgian visa official. A polite, soft-spoken man with excellent English, he studied our passports and shook his head sadly. We had clearly left Azerbaijan by train, and to enter Georgia by highway was, quite simply, a bureaucratic impossibility. If we could get back into Azerbaijan and get stamped out a few hundred feet east at the highway crossing, he said helpfully, there would be no problem. With a fine sense of justice, our two guards cut their fee to $50 and drove us back to their station in glum silence. Lloyd, of course, had not given up. If they could drive us a few kilometers to that last station in Azerbaijan, he urged, we would try to get a ride from there to Krasny Most. A ride was not possible, our mentor said thoughtfully, but we might make the trip on a freight train. A long string of oil tankers was waiting in front of the station, a green electric locomotive panting at its eastern end. We stuffed that wretched luggage back into the car and raced to the head of the train, where the border guards conducted a furious argument with a deeply reluctant engineer. They prevailed. Lloyd scrambled up a ladder and the luggage disappeared into the locomotive, followed by myself. Our unhappy host ordered us into his cab, moved a big lever, released his brakes, and we were on our way back to Azerbaijan. This, said Lloyd with a smile, this ride makes the whole day worthwhile. Indeed, he confessed, he had thoroughly enjoyed the entire adventure, his delight only diminished by a fear that I did not share his enthusiasm. I was fine, I assured him. If not quite delighted, I had settled into that "let’s see what happens next" fatalism one develops after logging enough miles through the Balkans and the Caucasus. Now, however, I was a bit worried that we’d see the inside of an Azeri prison before the sun set. Were we not, after all, smuggling ourselves into the country on a freight train, without proper documents? If I chose that mode of travel from, say, Montréal to Newport, I would not expect a warm welcome from the U.S. Border Patrol. Indeed, the train had no sooner eased to a halt in the big freight yard than a young Azeri soldier climbed aboard and ordered us out of the locomotive. We were the objects of considerable local interest as we carried the luggage over a difficult quarter mile of coarse gravel and tracks to the train station’s waiting room. There we were clearly in custody. But it was a cheerful enough custody, under the curious eyes of a few legitimate passengers and a group of very young soldiers. None of them seemed to carry any weapon more dangerous than a knife. Lloyd set to work again, up a chain of command of officers who, in turn, shook their heads firmly. To drive to Krasny Most was impossible. We must await the eastbound train to Baku, and start this journey all over again. Our carefully constructed three-country itinerary would collapse into a shambles. But after hours of futile negotiation, a senior officer had a mysterious change of heart. He marched us out behind the station and had us load the luggage into the small car of a civilian he clearly knew and trusted. Working on the hood of the car, he opened our passports and wrote something across those exit stamps we had obtained so many hours before. We hoped he wrote, "This stamp is void." We hoped he didn’t write, "I’m tired of these idiots, throw them in jail." The officer gave careful instructions to the driver, told Lloyd to pay him $40 at the border, and sent us on our way. Again, a short distance across the map turned into a 35-mile ride toward Baku to the first bridge across the river, and a 35-mile return on the highway to Krasny Most. At the border our driver took our passports and disappeared into the chaos. While we waited a traveler from Baku spotted us as likely customers, and we accepted his offer of a ride to Tbilisi for $25. Our driver returned in triumph, and we got the Azeri exit stamps we so badly needed. Just up the road, the polite Georgian visa official was still on duty, and greeted us like long-lost friends. Ten minutes, ten dollars, no problem. As we climbed into the new car for the final leg of the journey, the driver explained that he’d meant $25 each for the ride. At that Lloyd launched what must have been one of the finest torrents of fury, insult and outrage ever to grace the Russian language. I don’t know what he said, but it worked. The atmosphere in the car was heavy with resentment, no doubt mixed with shock at this westerner’s command of Russian invective. But we were, at last, headed for Tbilisi. "I’ve had to smile and be polite to people all day," Lloyd muttered, still fuming. "I don’t have to be polite to this guy." It was about 7:30 Saturday evening when we pulled up to our little hotel in Tbilisi. It had taken us 12 hours to escape from nowhere. The hotel manager greeted us like prodigal sons in her excellent English. After hearing of the day’s adventure, she had just one question: "Why in heaven’s name didn’t you take the plane?" |
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