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).