Electricity wires and gas pipes strewn across streets which our coach driver successfully negotiated, albeit peppered with a few well-chosen expletives.
Gavin to the rescue... he was not one of those who got literally stuck-in-the-mud or drove into walls, cars or each other.
A bit like going on a school trip with the best bunch of young people ever. Our comrades, translators and friends for a day, inside the Red Settlement. Who are those old fogeys? Alexandra is on Gavin's right.
Sitting down to lunch under a canopy of beautiful autumnal trees.
Peggy in suspension; fortunately the raging torrent below was neither far, nor raging, but a few more side-bars would have been nice...I realise I have been lazy, just putting a few pictures on the blog each day. So today you will get a few (quite a few) added words as well. Sorry...
Gavin has, of course, been extremely busy with work every day; he even worked all day Saturday in the office to try and catch up on some work. Nothing new there... In the evening we had the privilege of being invited to the home of the local 'manager' of the project. Shaheen made us feel very welcome and I really should have taken a photo of his family, but didn't. We excused ourselves at 10pm as we had a long day coming yesterday. We just didn't know how long...
Alexandra, the 'Junior Professional Associate' on Gavin's team, a sweet 25-year-old young lady, had been invited to join a day trip to a place called Quba in the North. She extended the invitation to us and we thought it sounded good. The day would include lunch, games, and seeing some different sights, including a totally Jewish settlement and a mosque used as a place of pilgrimage. It would also get us out of Baku and, by default, Gavin away from the computer, for the day. Great. What we didn't realise was that all the other 'day-trippers' would be Alexandra's age or younger (we were definitely the 'oldies') and that the day would be even longer than the planned 7am departure and 10pm arrival back in Baku, suggested on the flyer.
We left the hotel at 6:15 am to be at the metro meeting place in plenty of time, which was not necessary as the casual departure at 7.30 am proved. We made a couple of stops along the way, including a mosque at the foot of 'Five Fingers' mountain, where pilgrims come to deposit a few coins in a box in the mosque wall which they hope guarantees an answer to prayers. Here we were able to buy snacks, use the loos (another one for my collection of loo photos) and drink tea (glad we had left the hotel with our morning brew in hand, as it meant we had our own takeaway mugs). We then stopped at another mosque (Bebarmag pir) which is another 'holy place'. After that we stopped at a place where there is a totally Jewish settlement called The Red Settlement. Some of the young people pointed at the (two) outrageously ostentatious houses which, they said, only Jews would build. This amused us, as Baku is full of ostentatious buildings and shops and we also passed a few other non-Jewish areas where the houses more than equalled the Jewish ones.
We finally arrived at Quba and spent a lovely, though unnecessarily long 5 hours under a beautiful (nay, romantic) canopy of trees which shielded us from the hot sun. Lunch was laid out on long tables. It was the traditional lunch of cheese, salad, bread and shashlik; barbecued meat, potatoes and tomatoes in this case, and lots of it. After this the youngsters (including young Gavin) played volleyball and went quad-biking and drank tea and walked and chatted. It was lovely, but about 2 hours too long (in the opinion of many others, not just the old fogeys). We laughed as we watched some drive quad bikes into walls, each other and somebody's car and learnt that some phrases don't need translating. I chose not to quad-bike or play volleyball, but spent quite a bit of time chatting to some of the youngsters who were absolutely delightful.
We finally left at 5 pm and that would have been a good time to head back to Baku, but no, there was more to come. We were driven (in a full-sized coach on some questionable terrain and through streets with electricity wires dangling way too low and gas pipes in arches over the road and cars parked in awkward places) to another area called Qachrash. Here we were promised a walk across a suspension bridge and horse-riding. What we got were indeed a suspension bridge (the base of which was made from a few thin tree branches and the sides of which were only half there or functioning at all; but the height was not great, so even I managed to cross it, even though the lunatic Alexandra decided to jump up and down on it just in front of me...) The horse-riding was laughable, as it turned out to be more like a donkey-ride on Blackpool beach, with two tired horses with rope for harness led by two little boys. It was scary enough, though, for some of the girls. When all had had their ride, we then trotted back across the bridge and up the hill to the coach, which departed promptly 30 minutes late again.
The drive back to Baku included stops at the first shop to get crisps, biscuits, cakes and drinks, most of which were amicably offered to all around the bus, then at the pilgrims' mosque again, for more shashlik to fill up any gaps. I wish I had availed myself of the loos again, for as we approached Baku just after 10pm we suddenly found ourselves in an enormous traffic jam, the reason for which we did not discover, but which delayed us a further 2 hours. We finally made it back to the metro station at midnight. Poor Gavin, for whom this was going to be a day of recuperation, out of the office, was by now completely exhausted and we crawled into bed at 1 am, after first catching a taxi back to our hotel. We of course chose the taxi whose driver not only knew no English, but also knew neither where the hotel was (it's a brand new skyscraper in the city, so not easily missable) nor the road (the main street in Baku; a bit like asking a London cabbie to take you to Oxford Street). With the help of a barely legible map from my handbag, a few hastily-cobbled-together long-forgotten words of Russian and Alexandra's eyesight, we somehow managed to get the taxi and us back to the hotel. We crawled thankfully into bed after first showering off the mud and grime of the day and I wondered how many of those young people would be able to enjoy a similar hot bath or shower in their homes.
In all, an exhausting day. But we saw new places and faces, met a bunch of incredibly polite, well-adjusted and helpful young people who were interested in us and made us feel part of the group and were glad we could not understand Azeri, as the coach driver let fly with frequent torrents of abuse at any and all drivers who didn't let him through the traffic. It was amusing and entertained many for the 2 hours of traffic jam, but is probably not printable on this or any other blog... We also learned that the next time Alexandra says "I'm going out on an organised tour on Sunday; would you like to come?" we shall say, "No, dear, we're too old for that sort of thing."
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