Mongol Rally 2007 - Windmill Giants official blog

We set out early from Anthony’s place, and set about taking in T’bilisi’s sites as quickly as two legs would carry us.  Those city streets that did have signs were almost all in the Georgian alphabet, so we really just stumbled about hoping to chance on charm and wonder by dumb luck.  We searched in vain for an elusive Zoroastrian fire temple, ultimately making our way to some of the more high-profile sites along the river.  After taking in the panoramic views from a church overlooking the city, we grabbed an assortment of local bready things from a small bakery, and began to find our way out of the city for uneventful drive to the Azerbaijan border. The border crossing itself was painfully slow, though we suspect that we probably could have sped this up with a bribe.  We sat about two hours in line outside of the gate where they process cars and passenger documents, as Rusty turned into an oven under the sun.  We gave cigarettes to the bored teenage border guards, took Polaroids with tem and hoped it might save us some hassles.  The hassles came more with the officials inside the gates who took their sweet time with our documents, probably hoping we’d catch on to the fact that everyone else was handing their passports over with a few banknotes inside.  We jumped through every hoop they had over the course of two hours, even driving over a giant gaping hole just to freak Illiana out and give the guards a good laugh.  We couldn’t play dumb enough to avoid paying a small “Sanitation” fee of about $5, for which no actual sanitizing was performed.   

We hadn’t gone five miles past the border crossing before we hit our first of many police checkpoints, which exist entirely for the purpose of wasting your time and soliciting bribes.   We played as dumb as we could, stopping just short of just standing there drooling with a far-away look in our eyes, though we understood from the officer’s Russian that he was asking for a bribe.  He shamelessly wrote $20 on a scrap of newspaper and pushed it at us, but we weren’t as dumb as we looked.  I had emptied my wallet of all currency, showed him that and asked if he took credit cards.  He pointed at my belt pouch, which contained a few small bills in Bulgarian leva and Turkish lire, which were worse than worthless in Azerbaijan.  He eventually grunted in frustration and waived us on, but not before wasting a half hour of our time. 

We were pulled over five times on the road to Baku, never for any reason other than being in a car covered in stickers.  Each time the police saw our American passports they literally drooled in anticipation of a big payout, but each time we outsmarted them by playing dumb.  One cop was just a little too patient for our hurried time line, so we gave him two I heart NY T-shirts and he let us be on our way.  Worse than the time they wasted pulling us over was the time we wasted driving their ridiculously low speed limits so as to not give them a legitimate reason to fine us.  We learned later from an American friend in Baku that most people (at least foreigners) don’t even stop for the police.  The hi-way patrol doesn’t even have cars; getting pulled over in Azerbaijan involves a fat little man stepping out from behind the only tree for miles and waving an orange stick at you.  

The delays with the border and police made it clear that we would not be getting to Baku at a decent hour, and this was before the roads turned to complete garbage.  We absolutely had to make Baku as soon as possible and get on the next ferry to Turkmenistan.  The three day visa was starting the next day, and we figured that the first day would be spent on the 18-hour ferry ride across the Caspian Sea, after which we would have two days to drive 700 miles through a country that we knew next to nothing about.   Not making the ferry on July 31st would likely put us out of the Mongol Rally.  We didn’t dare to hope that luck would put the weekly ferry to Kazakhstan in port when we arrived and the idea of driving north around the Caspian through war torn Chechnya and Dagestan didn’t sit to well.

We weren’t about to allow a little thing like good judgment and reason put us out of the Mongol Rally, so we pushed on to Baku after sunset along a cratered road through the desert.  A huge blood red moon was rising over the road directly in front of us as we dodged potholes and weaved between the trucks hauling large rocks that would regularly fall off into the road ahead of us.  Half of the team reveled in what felt like a quintessential Mongol Rally moment, while the other just wished it could be over.  The map showed that there was another road leading to Baku through the mountains that might be better, so we headed north through desolate foggy swamplands to meet up with the mountain road.  The prospect of some maniac flying around the next corner was unnerving, but the better condition of the road was a welcome change after hours of running the Azeri slalom.

It was after 2am when we finally reached Baku, and an hour more before we managed to find what we thought was the Ferry building.  It was closed, but we planned to come back first thing the next day to assure that we would be on the next ferry to Turkmenistan.  Though we had showed up to meet our hosts late before, we decided not to drop in on our friend Rich at 3am and opted to catch a few hours parked outside a hotel near the ferry building.