I doubt it is an accident so chances are that if you hitchhike to Azerbaijan too, you might end up on their TV as well - until the world realizes that there is some stuff to see in Azerbaijan besides oil pumps, and tourists flood the country. (And until the Azeri government cancels the stupid registration thing, I would say.)
"We came to Azerbaijan because it was on the way"
We came across our first TV crew in the mountains.
We were driving with a family we had hitched a ride with to a waterfall. Rahib, the father of the family and oil mining engineer, had good English and was talking about how he was doing revolution against the Soviet Union when he was about twelve years old. (He burnt the USSR flag in public and ended up in jail and was about to be sent to Russia for re-education when the independence revolution started, and he became a hero instead.)
We were driving up a narrow, curvy road along a river deeper into the hills. In one of the curves, we suddenly saw a bunch of smartly dressed guys. They were all wearing suits and office shoes and looked as if they had been going to a conference and ended up in the mountains instead, and they had a huge camera. Rahib wanted to know what they were up to, so he stopped and asked them.
They were making a show about the countryside of the region we were in. They found out Rahib had some foreigners in his car and decided they wanted to have us in their show too. Rahib agreed to become our interpreter. We thought it might be fun, so we didn't run away.
I got a microphone in front of my face, and they asked me why we had come to this region. Hard question. I was not exactly sure what was the name of the region and where its boundaries were. We had seen a red dot in the map, marking a waterfall, and we wanted to find the waterfall and see if we could take a shower in it. I didn't really think this would make the crew particularly happy and I didn't want our friend to be ashamed of us, so I babbled something about mountains.
Next question: why did we choose Azerbaijan?
I gave up:
"Because we are hitchhiking to Mongolia and Azerbaijan was on the way."
Then it was Vojta's turn. Whereas I was interested first and foremost by people, he was also interested in looking at touristy stuff, so he told something that sounded almost poetic even though it was about a different region.
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| Us telling very smart things |
"How long do you think we should be staring at that rock?" Vojta asked.
"I'm not sure. I think I've just seen enough."
And we started just laughing.
The crew seemed to find it fine, though, and then they took a video of us disappearing with the backpacks over the corner.
Rahib didn't seem to be mad at us and he took us to the waterfall and invited us for lunch and told us a lot of interesting stuff about Azerbaijan and about oil drilling. So in the end I almost forgot about the TV because I was thinking more about the liberation of the country from the USSR, corruption on all levels of the the society's functioning, young people studying abroad because they didn't generally find Azeri universities good enough, huge gap between the rich and the poor (and completely missing middle-class), and illegal houses built on oil fields.
However, TV reminded us of its existence the very night.
"You have the same president for a very long time"
When Rahib and his family left, we went camping in the hills. We were making fun of our media performance on internet and sending our pictures taken by Rahib's wife to our friends ("You look like experts on something", Atesh commented on it.)
In that very moment, we got a message from a guy we met in the morning while we were hitchhiking: "Are you going back to Xachmaz? My friend, a TV journalist, called me and he wants to make an interview with you."
I was staring at the message for several minutes. WTF? What kind of joke is that?
After some confusion, it became clear that he wasn't the one making fun of us - the universe was.
We didn't manage to make our acquaintance tell us what on Earth the TV wanted us for but we ended up thinking again that it might be fun. And we had to go through that town anyway and we were too curious to mind sounding like morons on air again.
So the next day, we went back to the town of Xachmaz. Our acquaintance kept us asking when we would arrive and we kept telling him we didn't know because we were hitchhiking. We hoped that the TV people would speak English and wouldn't ask us why we came to that region because we had no idea.
Three young guys came, without suits, they spoke English and were actually nice. For some time, they were looking for a restaurant that was fancy enough for the video. Then they were asking us quite a lot about our journey and about hitchhiking, and they were writing everything into a small notebook. They also asked us what we had known about Azerbaijan before coming, so I again had a chance to sound like an idiot because I had known nothing.
Vojta said: "I knew that you had oil - and only one president for a very long time..."
The journalists then took a short video of us answering several questions (they didn't ask us anymore what we had known about Azerbaijan before arriving there).
They later sent us the show - I got a cool new name and we got Azeri dubbing so I have no clue what we are saying, which is probably good.
Meet us in the harbour
For a while, it seemed that we were done with TV for good. We hitchhiked all the way to the Georgian border to meet up with Nina, our Georgian friend. On the way, we got invited home by A., a construction engineer with two smart kids; they all could speak good English and perfect Russian. We met with Nina and went making barbecue on a burning water spring. Nina decided to hitchhike with us back to Baku instead of going home, and we hitched a ride with two mafia guys who then let us stay in their super fancy apartment in downtown Baku.
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| Barbecue on the burning spring |
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| Flat of the gangsters |
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| ...and the view from its window. |
On our way back east, we got a message from an unknown Azeri number: a totally strange journalist was asking us to come to his TV. We were not even shocked anymore and were just wondering where the hell he got our number (he saw one of our previous interviews and probably found us fluffy enough to want to film us too, and got our contact from his colleagues).
In fairytales, things always happen three times, so we decided to make the same mistake for the third time as well. We were rather in a hurry, though, hunting for a cargo ship to Kazakhstan, so we set a meeting at the ticket booth in the harbour (I felt as if we were picky popstars).
To get to the ticket booth, one must pass grumpy guards at a bar and a special turnstile that is opened by a special person even though the booth is just at the bar. We found there a cyclist from Norway and two Dutch guys with a Landrover who were also trying to get to Kazakhstan.
The TV crew arrived when I was still buying the tickets, so they had to wait for me. The turnstile person was gone so I ran past the bar even though the grumpy guards were shouting at me. Fortunately they were too lazy to follow me so I managed to join Vojta, Nina and Naila the journalist.
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| In the TV company car |
For a while, we were sitting with Naila in the park and chatting about hitchhiking and other things (for a moment, also Bjorn the cyclist joined us and I tried to convince him to go with us to TV, but he didn't want). Then, the meeting turned out even fancier than the one before. There even was a car that took us and our backpacks to the TV headquarters. We made quite a long interview with a big camera, so we had a lot of occasions to say stupid things.
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| Chat in the park |
Later we got this video too and it turned out that we had been making an advert to Azerbaijan. The part where Vojta was complaining about the red tape had been of course cut out. There still was fortunately the part where I had been trying to thank all the friendly and hospitable people we had met in Azerbaijan.
....
The next day we set sail across the Caspian sea, leaving all the Azeri TVs behind, so our TV career was finally over... until we reached Kazakhstan.
