Quick and easy way to get deported from Azerbaijan (or maybe not)

Story about a registration (it would make Franz Kafka jealous)

In 2017, getting a visa to Azerbaijan is surprisingly easy for a European. It just takes money and a few clicks online. We had the visa overnight and we believed that as for red tape, that was it. We couldn't be more wrong.

Visa is not the real issue. A so called registration of an address is. It's a true quest for heroes. First, it is hard to find any clear info about what the hell it is, what it is good for and why you need it if you travel throughout the country and don't have, of course, any address.

Stories go about a paper with a stamp you need if you stay in Azerbaijan more than 10 days. If you don't have it, the border guards in their uniforms with shiny buttons will be mean to you, will want your money, deport you to hell, put you to gulag forever or let you be eaten by tigers. Or maybe not. (I just think that the whole thing exists for getting people's money for no reason.)

The most reliable info can be found on the Caravanistan website, a traveler's Holy Bible. It's not much reliable anyway, though, since it mostly shows a collection of travelers' stories whereas the administration can change any time and might or might not be enforced. (Which means that by the time I'm writing this, things might be different again. In a positive way, I hope.)

There also is a web portal where you could get the registration done according to legends. Maybe. It didn't work when we were trying to use it - or it was maybe so slow that it would take the whole 10 days to get registered, and when we started trying, it was too late to wait ages to see if we would get through in the end. It may work now.

　
Properly follow proper protocols

The Caravanistan website said that if the online portal failed, the magical paper could be bought at any post office for an indeterminate amount of money depending on how corrupt the post person was and how valiant the traveler was. You can register any address - if you camp, you can register an address of a random hotel you don't actually use.

This video quite faithfully illustrates the procedure:

So on a hot, sunny Thursday, four days before the feared 10-days deadline, we set off to the main Baku post office. It took us some time to find it because our map application pointed us a different place than where the address really was.

When we finally reached it, the post people told us they no longer did the registrations there. They sent us to a place called "ASAN Xidmet" since that's where the registrations were done. (Spoiler: they weren't.)

We found a bus, put our backpacks in it, drove across half of Baku and arrived to the second office. The office people told us they did not do the registrations there and sent us to a third office. (We had already spent for hours on the quest, so I was swearing at them in Czech that they were idiots. It didn't help.)

We found a bus, put our backpacks in it, drove across half of Baku and arrived to the third office (I think it was the main immigration office). The office people told us they did not register hotel addresses in there because only hotels themselves could do it. We needed to either bring an ID card of our host or go to a hotel. I felt like shitting mushroom clouds.

It was now clear we would spend at least the whole day on the bloody registration - if we would ever get it. We could hitchhike back to Rafael, beg him for his ID card and try to register in Qobustan. We would probably just have Monday to do it and if it failed, we would be at mercy of the customs officers with shiny buttons. Or we could change our plans completely and run to Kazakhstan before the 10 days deadline - except that we only had 3 days left and the boats were setting off with no schedule every 3 days to two weeks. So the outcome would be the same.

Or we could compromise the idea of punk traveling and never paying for a place to sleep, and to buy a hotel to be registered there.

Vain capitulation

Eventually, we surrendered and decided to to buy the paper in a hotel. We googled the cheapest hotel in Baku and faced an outstanding moron of a receptionist. Not only he had no idea about the registration, but also was exceptionally unable to understand any kind of explanation or stick to a topic and seemed to speak no language whatsoever (not even Rafael on the phone managed to get the message across in Azeri). After a lot of offtopic and the receptionist's effort to persuade us to stay for a week without getting the paper at all, we gave up and went away.

In an expensive hotel nextdoors, the clerk seemed to have a dim idea and told us - in a rather unclear way - that he would maybe do it for us if we bought a room in the hotel, but didn't know how long it would take and seemed not to know how to actually do it.

We gave up again and walked couple of more kilometers to another, a bit cheaper hotel (that was still way too expensive for a stupid registration). The first glimpse of hope appeared - finally, the receptionist seemed to know what we were talking about. He told us he would give us the paper if we buy three days (not necessarily in a row) in the hotel (it was 120 Manats, as far as I remember).

We are still not sure whether it was a rule of the Immigration Office or whether the guy knew we had no other option left, and took advantage of it. We will probably never know. (And I still don't know how ordinary tourists who stay in a different hotel every day are supposed to get registered.)

The asphalt pond

Eventually, we decided to give the guy the money, and got stuck in Baku for three days. (Most of the time, I was drinking Russian beer, writing my blog and was pissed that this time, I had completely lost the fight with the red tape aimed to control and limit travelers.) We also walked to an asphalt pond in the suburbs and Vojta bathed his arms in the asphalt, and we found an oil field which was apparently very strategic and very much forbidden to enter except that there was a village on it and people had the oil pumps in their gardens. We also found out that Baku was a very rich and modern city with real architecture - not with the Middle Eastern aesthetics I just don't understand and find utterly kitchy, or with a lot of Soviet concrete, but like real urbanism with things that look good and fit together).



Oil fields on the outskirts of Baku

Downtown Baku

The reception guy kept his word. We got our Holy Grail, one of the bloody papers on Monday, and the other e-mailed on Tuesday when we had been already gone. They looked like random letters from the Immigration Office, without any stamp, with a number code.

...

When we later arrived to the Alat cargo port to get on the boat to Kazakhstan, the customs officer didn't ask for the registration at all.

So the whole ordeal had been useless.

We met a guy there, though, who was just being deported for not having the paper when he had been trying to cross a land border (they had told him he could either pay several hundreds of Euro or to get deported and be banned from entering Azerbaijan for several following years, and he had chosen the latter). I also still don't know whether just Baku Post Office changed its rules in May 2017 or whether the registration is no longer possible at any post office.

So the registration requirement remains as mysterious as at the beginning. If you are a traveler who doesn't use hotels, the only advice I can give you is this: get some alcohol and a lot of patience, read the updates at the Caravanistan site, possibly get an Azeri friend who will lend you their ID card, and start doing the registration on the first day you arrive (even if you are trying to do it online).

Burning water, petroglyphs and our first friend in Azerbaijan

We always stay in every country longer than expected but it took us more than two weeks to leave Iran. We were just hitchhiking around and saying goodbye to our new friends, and we always stayed with them longer than planned.

Missing Iran

We went to the mountains with Azad, were observing tadpoles and were making nerdy jokes about eating them. We also saw his workshop and met Samir. We visited again Tahmineh and her family. (When we arrived, we only found her parents at home, so we were trying to help them in the garden - they didn't let us much - and succeeded to have almost something like a conversation in Farsi with them.) I got a real haircut from her sister, so I got rid of the horrible mullet that was growing on my head. Tahmineh was even planning to hitchhike with us to another city, but then she changed her mind because she was afraid her parents wouldn't like it. We went to see Amir and were driving with him around the city at night. And we visited Atesh and stayed with him almost a week instead of a day. We were talking about philosophical stuff, playing cards and he was poking fun at us all the time (he seemed to had lost his polite inhibitions, and he was trolling both of us the same way he was trolling other friends). He also convinced us to go with him and his friends to a trip to the countryside. We climbed up a castle and on the way down we were sitting on a cliff, staring into the valley, singing songs and talking about traveling, and I knew I would miss these talks so bad and I would miss his poking fun at me.

The Zahak castle

Eventually we hitchhike north, camp on an Iranian field for the last time, are offered our last Iranian tea and cross to Azerbaijan.

I get rid of my hijab just after the Iranian booth. I'm happy it is not annoying me and sticking to my neck anymore. Behind the border, there is Latin alphabet, Soviet-style statues and Soviet-style buildings and cars. It feels familiar. People have gold teeth - that's familiar from my childhood as well.

We withdraw some money and start walking along the road. Vojta wants to buy a lighter.

He gets one for free.

In another shop, we get ice-creams for free. "Welcome to Azerbaijan," the shop keeper says. The khareji power seems to be working here too. (I realize how mean I am, and I start rather being grateful that people keep being nice to us.)

We get to a spot where there is a big red star on our map, marking an interesting place. There is a water spring you can put on fire.

Yanar bulaq

We ignite the gas coming through the water a couple of times, fill our water bottles and hitch a ride to Lankaran, the first bigger town after the border. We realize how lucky we have been - there is civilization and houses everywhere, not a single field along the road. It would be hard to find a hitchhiking spot here.

When we get to the city, it's raining. We hide under some trees and stay there until the shower stops, like in any normal country. Nobody comes to invite us for tea in the meantime. We are not in Iran anymore.

We find a camping spot, put up the tent and eat a sausage with bread. It feels like our journey is restarting again after a long break. In Iran, it didn't feel like a hitchhiking trip. It felt more like a one long party in Wonderland. I realize it's been a long time since we've last camped two nights in a row. In Iran, we camped maybe just ten nights out of almost two months - the other nights we just got invited. I miss Iran. I miss Tahmineh. I miss Atesh. I realize how weird it is - I got used to missing my boyfriend and my friends and family back in Czechia, but missing Iran is new.

Tea with guards in the middle of nowhere

In the morning, we buy internet (we are not supposed to have it without an Azeri ID card but the shopkeeper uses his ID instead). Then we keep hitchhiking north with a dim plan to find the Chinese embassy in Baku to get the Chinese visa and some kind of Azeri registration we need.

We are surprised people not always understand the concept of hitchhiking or the Russian word for it, "avtostop". But it's quite easy to explain them in pseudo-Russian, and the word "pa putky" sometimes works.

In cities, there is a lot of big squares with only few people compared to Iran. There are soviet-style statues of the president and his family members everywhere. There also is a striking difference among the cars we pass - we can either see 40 years old Ladas that barely have all four wheels, or brand new luxury offroads I would never be able to buy. There seem to be no normal cars. Also people seem to be either awfully rich, or just poor. Nothing in between.

Aliyev the Great

I try to speak Russian and I mix it with Croatian, Polish and also Farsi hopelessly.

A driver gives us home-made pirogi. A Turk who lives in Azerbaijan tells us this country is a harsher dictatorship than Iran. We have tea with a guy who was among the soldiers sent to occupy Czechoslovakia by the USSR government during his military service in his youth - he probably still believes that he was helping our country, as the official Russian propaganda then was saying. We meet two Austrian cyclists on their way south. We have our first beer in a couple of months with them and we get drunk with one pint. I realize I have got my arms and my head sunburnt ("Do you need more signs to start believing in God and wearing a hijab?", an Iranian friend is laughing at me through Whatsapp).

We don't know what we want to do in Azerbaijan, so we randomly hitchhike to a town called Qobustan - our map shows some rock carvings in there. Our driver brings us directly to the gate in the fence that surrounds the area. It's in the middle of nowhere and there is a booth with two guards. They say that it is closed today and that we can camp near their booth.

We are not in a hurry, so we put up our tent on the steppe. There is a water tap and a toilet nearby - all we need.

The cops also let us cook a meal and charge phones in their booth (the electric installation would make a Czech safety technician faint) and they insist on sharing their dinner with us. They don't let me take picture of them because it is forbidden to take pictures of people in uniforms and round hats but they are very friendly. They keep giving us tea the entire evening and we have a conversation in a mishmash of Russian, Turkish and English.

We are slowly getting used to being in a new country even though I still put Farsi words in my Russian and Vojta just keeps speaking Farsi to everyone.

Toilet in the steppe

Mud volcanoes, Rafael and troubles with the Chinese visa

In the morning we hear somebody calling at us from his car. It's one of the museum staff. He mistook us for his French acquaintances, but he doesn't mind and offers us a ride directly to the museum. So we go with him.

He tells us his name is Rafael ("like one of the Ninja Turtles"). He shows us all the petroglyphs - they are bettre visible and more diverse than I expected, and he seems to love them and know a lot about them. He also presents us his colleagues. For some time, we are sitting on the top of the hill with him and Leyla, his relative who also works at the museum (she has an elegant hat and a thick Oxford dictionary in her hands). We are looking at the sea and the Qobustan prison (what a nice scenery) and talking about life. Leyla's plan is pretty clear. She wants to earn money and buy a house - and she says it's not that usual in Azerbaijan; people just look for a rich husband. She also mentions the conflict between Azerbaijan Armenia. She doesn't like Armenia much - the blame is mostly theirs.

Petroglyphs of Qobustan

Raphael and his colleagues then agree to call the Chinese embassy in Baku for us to ask about visa requirements in a better Russian than ours. The Chinese tell us to go stuff ourselves - no visa for foreigners in Baku. The Fortress China seems to be fortified really well - Baku was the only glimpse of hope in the whole Caucasus and Central Asia. We will have to try going through a Czech agency then, using our spare passports that we left at home.

It also means that we don't need to hurry to Baku anymore, and Rafael offers us to meet up again after work.



A music stone

In the meantime, we visit the actual museum (it is very modern and except for a large poster glorifying the president and his family it has no Soviet feeling). We then hitchhike 10 kilometers back south to see mud volcanoes Rafael suggested us. We are already quite confident about hitchhiking - it's quick and easy, almost like in Turkey. The difference is that we need to tell we travel without money, and one in two cars that stop agrees to take us for free.

We hike a curvy path from the main road to the hills and we find the volcanoes. There really is mud in them and it bubbles. I'm wondering whether it is possible to drown in it.

Rafael comes for us with his car. (It's a Lada that holds together by magic. Our friend starts it by joining two cables, usually opens the trunk with a screw driver and doesn't lock it.)

He brings us home, shows us his kids and a little pet goose, his family offers us a delicious soup and then we look at photos.

We now know somebody in Azerbaijan. We are not complete strangers anymore.

 

 

Rafael's goose (R.I.P.)

 

Police Academy Iran Style

If you travel, especially if you hitchhike and especially in countries where people are not much used to see foreigners, sooner or later you come across cops. Sometimes they want a bribe because they believe that foreigners poop a gold egg every morning, sometimes they come to tell you something you are doing is forbidden, sometimes they bother you because they think you wear not enough or too much clothes, and sometimes they just come and you don't really know why.

In Iran, most of our encounters with cops fell into the last category. They were usually fun. In a way. 

Agent 007 and a grandpa with eggs

We had our first encounter with police (if I don't count the nice police guy who gave us a ride when we were going to the Persian Gulf and who later even invited us to his place) after more than a month in Iran. We were thinking it was about time. But it was still quite unexpected. And creepy. 

The outcome was a bag of candies, so I'm not complaining, though.

It started in a rather unsuspicious way. 

We are walking along a street to get at the end of the village so that we could start hitchhiking, and cars are stopping next to us. We always give them our hitchhiking sheet and it always reveals they are cabs. With one exception; this time it isn't a taxi, it is a plainclothes cop. 

He tells us he is a cop and asks us if we need anything. We tell him we need nothing and he drives away. 

A couple of minutes later, another car stops. It is another plainclothes cop. This one also has a badge and cool black glasses. He wants our passport and asks us what we are doing. We show him the passports and tell him that we are walking along the street.

He says hum and drives away. 

As soon as we made few hundreds meters, he comes back. He is telling us something that isn't on our list of Farsi sentences and that we, therefore, don't understand, so we tell him Iran is kheili khoob, very nice, and he goes away again.

Two other cars stop to tell us hi and ask us where we are from. 

Then the cop comes back. 

He doesn't ask us anything and gives us a bag of candies. (My mum would always tell me I shouldn't take candies from strangers, but this guy isn't that much of a stranger as it is the third time he stopped, though.)

It is weird but I think that will be it. 

Except that it isn't. The officer just turns around somewhere in front of us and then behind us and then comes again and tells us things in Farsi again. I am getting a bit paranoid and am imagining a police convoy rushing from the closest city at our cop's order to put us in jail or to gulag or wherever you put arrested people in movies.

In that moment, a guy comes running from a garden nearby and offers us eggs. Before I even have time to say hi and politely refuse, he stuffs five raw eggs into my bag with camera, and runs away. (It probably means he isn't taroffing and is dead serious about the eggs.)

We politely, but assuredly tell bye to the cop and keep walking, faster than before. The village seems endless. The cop drives past us again. This time he doesn't stop, though, but goes to a roundabout we will have to go through and is parking there. We walk past his car very quickly and start waving at drivers. 
Very soon we hitch a ride and a family drives us away from the wicked cop's territory.

So we still don't know what was the cop's plan and what was he actually doing. No police convoy caught us and we didn't go to jail. 

We managed not to break the eggs and after offering them to two of our drivers (they refused, surprisingly), we gave them to our next host. We ate the candies.

Troubles with Latin alphabet passports and illegal immigrants from Europe

When we are hitchhiking back north a couple of weeks later, we have to cross several road checkpoints. The crew of one of them finds us interesting and decides to keep us.

I show them the very page with the Iranian visa in my passport and the extension stamp. They don't find it cool enough, take our passports and disappear in their building with them. 

This doesn't make our driver particularly happy. He is in a hurry (at least I suppose so since he has been driving like crazy and once he almost got ejected from the highway. He also is carrying weed but we only learned that later.)

Then the cops come back and involve the driver. After a lot of pantomime we understand they want our Farsi letter we use for hitchhiking. When we give it to them, they are staring at it, looking important, and they take it along with the passports. 

I want to help them, so I show them the sentence "We are hitchhiking to Mongolia" on another paper. Even though I explain them three times that the other sentences on the phrase sheet aren't meant for this moment, they carefully read all of them and take the sheet too. It seems that they are making a collection of our belongings but nothing else is happening.

The next five minutes, they are trying to decipher the message on the rear side of the sheet, written by a truck driver in a different region one month earlier. It makes them pretty confused and we can't help them because we also don't know what the message means. I am pretty happy I didn't show them the second part of the phrasebook that has things like "You don't have the balls to do this" written on the rear side. 

While we are waiting, I climb across a bar to go among some locked booths because I need to pee, and I get myself escorted by a cop to a bathroom inside the police station. When I come back (again with the police escort), I see nothing has changed. (Except that our driver is looking more and more sad and nervous.) 

Eventually, we call our friend the police officer from Shiraz. Immediately after that, the guards give us their collection of our documents and vocabularies back, copy Vojta's Iranian phone number (to ask Vojta out, probably) and let us go. Our friend then told us something about idiots that get confused by anything that is not an Afghan passport.

Alarm für Cobra 11

Another meeting with police, this time with some action, comes just one day later. It is initiated by an overly helpful gardener at 3 AM.

We have made more than 800 km in just one day. A truck driver leaves us in the middle of a city where we want to visit Azad, our hitchhiking friend. He is expecting us tomorrow. It is few hours after midnight and we are dead tired. We just want to pitch our tent anywhere and sleep like a dog.

Except that we can't find any park or just a little area with trees. All the places that look green on the map are gardens surrounded with fences and walls. We walk to the end of the city. It is totally empty, there is not a single person on the street. We finally find at least a field. There are no trees, so there will be hot in the morning. We start walking along a wall to find a better spot, and suddenly a guy on a motorbike catches us up.

He starts chatting with us in Farsi but we are too tired for a conversation, so we just tell him hi and to his questions we just answer that we are pitching a tent here.

He starts telling us that it is too dangerous. He is not really able to tell why. The field doesn't look dangerous at all and I don't care and I just want to sleep. The guy starts explaining that we should go to the other side of the city. That is of course out of the question. 

He is standing his ground, though, and it seems that he will never stop bothering us. I'm wondering why we had to meet the only person who is awake in this city now, and why he has to be so annoying. He even calls his colleague, another gardener - this time with a car - and asks him if he speaks English. He of course doesn't, so the same Farsi conversation repeats. They eventually tell us they will drive us somewhere - we refuse - and they go dump some branches in the field.

We slowly walk away and finally find a hidden spot among three buildings. We pitch the tent, put our mattresses in there and unpack our backpacks. Some cars with blue lights are driving around. Why the hell a police party is starting here now when there was nobody awake except for the two gardeners ten minutes ago? 

When everything is ready and we are just about to crawl into the tent and pass out, one of the cars enters our hole between buildings and shines its lights at us. It's police. What the hell do they want? Then our gardener comes and he looks very happy he and the cops finally found us. Oh thank you, that was very helpful, you bloody moron. 

Another car stops - I can barely see anything with all the lights flashing into my face. Cops with Kalashnikovs jump out and start asking for our passports. We give them the documents and the same conversation repeats for the third time. We are travellers. We come from Europe. We just want to sleep here and in the morning we will go away. We are tired. We are really very tired.

It's apparently not enough. The cops want us to pack the tent and go with them. Oh great, we will just not sleep tonight. Tiredness is making me pissed. And rude. Vojta is just resigned, and that's pissing me off too. I'm packing the tent, throwing stuff violently to my backpack and swearing at the cops and the gardener in Czech. 

We are thinking of calling our friend Azad to save us and explain our new company that we are neither illegal immigrants nor drug dealers but we just find it too cruel to wake him up at 4 AM. So we decide to deal with it ourselves.

The cops want us to sit in the gardener's car and drive somewhere with them. In one of their cars, another detainee is sitting and waiting. They still have our passports and that's making me nervous. I keep asking about them but they won't give them back to us, so we have to do what they want. So we sit into the gardener's car (he is still very friendly and it's making me want to punch him) and our convoy moves. There are two police cars, our car and a cop on a motorbike, all with flashing roof lights like a casino. 

We are speeding through the sleeping town like in an action film. We cross half of it and stop at a police station. They bring the detainee and our passports inside and we are made wait in the courtyard. There is a couple of cops who want to talk about soccer. Nothing else is ging on. Suddenly a loud bang pierces the air as the guard at the door dropps the magazine of his Kalashnikov on the concrete ground. He picks it up and throws it elegantly to the air to make it seem on purpose, catches it again and sticks it back to his gun. 

The cop with our passports comes out and tells us we are going somewhere else. 

Oh no, they are looking for somebody who knows the Latin alphabet again. It reminds me of one of those police jokes - how many cops does it take to read a European passport?

Our next convoy is less cool than the first one. There is just one car and one cop on the motorbike besides us. We drive through half of the city again, this time less like in an action movie, and stop at another door. 

The guard drops his car keys. 

It seems that we are successful this time - our cops wake another cop up; the next cop is looking at our passports for thirty seconds, then he gives them back to us and we are free to go. It's almost five in the morning. The gardener looks very content and tells us he will bring us to a good camping spot. 

We don't care anymore so we don't even protest when he drives us 10 kilometers away from the town and releases us on a concrete parking lot where we are apparently supposed to camp.

He wishes us good night. I'm wondering whether he is making fun of us, and I wish him good morning. When we are pitching the tent under the trees next to the parking lot, sun is already shining and Azad is already up and at work. We send him a message to call us at noon, and we finally go to sleep. (Exactly at noon he's staring into our tent and telling us that the picnic is ready. I'm so happy to see him again that I can't be mad at the cops or the gardener anymore.)


.....

All in all, considering the unusual things we were doing, everything went quite well. We didn't get any fine, we weren't asked for a bribe, we weren't detained... The only trouble seemed to be the alphabet in which our passports were printed. I expected it would be worse.