Baku to Bukhara

Starting with the ferry. I was lucky that the owner of the hostel I was staying at (the only hostel in Baku) knew the person at the ticket office for the ferry, so I had a head's up on when the ferry was arriving. I ended up waiting not even a day after getting my visas before taking the ferry. I bought the ticket for 90 manat at noon, and we had left by about 2.

The ferry wasn't actually as bad as I thought it might be. I shared a cabin with some old russian guy, and there were meals for about $4. We arrived in Aqtau the next morning but as there was no room to dock at the port we were stuck waiting for 3 days, anchored a few miles outside the port. We finally docked at about 6am on Sunday, where we had to wait until about 10am for a customs officer to board the boat and check our passports. After that we went a few hundred meters to a passport control area to get our passports stamped and waived through the actual customs point.

After arriving in Aqtau I promptly proceeded to the immigration police who were of course closed because it was Sunday. However there was still someone there who assured me I could register in Shetpe, so after seeing a bit of the city, resupplying, and waiting out the hottest bit of the day, I started on the two day ride to Shetpe.

Kazakhstan wasn't as flat as I thought it shouldv'e been.

Some random Kazakhs bugged me when I was resting in the shade and forced me up on one of their horses:

I arrived in Shetpe and stayed in a hotel. I went to the police in the morning to register, only to found out that as I suspected, they couldn't register me and I had to go  back to Aqtau to register. So I left my bike in the police station and took a bus to Aqtau for a few dollars. Once there I headed back to immigration and spent almost two hours waiting to register. I wandered across the entire city on the way back to the bus station and again paid to sit in a hot, cramped bus for two hours. The buses seem to run on the same schedule as the ferry: you buy your ticket, then sit in the bus until it's full, then the driver will show up and you'll leave. I ate another plate of shashlik for dinner before heading out of shetpe in the dark, only making it about 20k before hitting a pothole, giving myself a pinch flat, which is when I decided to fix it and go to sleep.

Shortly after Shetpe, the road deteriorated. I wasn't afraid though, since I had expected this. In fact these roads were half the reason I brought a mountain bike with a front suspension.

One thing I didn't anticipate though is that while a front suspension helps quite a bit, you still need a death grip on the handlebars, and you still can't take bumps too fast for fear of pinch flats on the rear tire. Also, all the bouncing really makes your butt hurt a lot.

Back to covering my mouth because all the cars and trucks kick up so much dust on the road. There was enough wind that it wasn't too hot to wear. I thought I would be on my own completely in this desert the whole way, but in fact there were some teahouses along the way. I had brought 20 liters of water with me to start, but I bought a few extra along the way, as well as having my first taste of borsh in 4 years. I was waking up at about 6am to ride until noon, then find an underpass in the road to sit in for 5 hours, cook and take a nap and start up again. After about 11am all my water was 100 degrees so it was disgusting to drink but I had to drink it anyway. The constant bouncing on the terrible road combined with the head combined with the annoying schedule and lack of real sleep tired me out. Also, most of the cars and trucks were still honking at me.
Finally I made it to Beneyu where I resupplied, this time with 25 liters of water, a few liters of ice tea, lots of food, and a bunch of fresh fruit.
This is how I role through the desert (slowly):

From there it was 90km to the uzbek border. I deliberately stopped just shy of the border because I knew it was a long way to the nearest town in Uzbekistan and I technically only had three days after entering the country before I was required to be registered with OVIR. I started towards the border around 8am and was across by about 10am. Again I was able to bypass most of the lines, but since they didn't speak much english I ended up milling about a bit and answering the same questions over and over  from all the other people crossing the border.

Since I had entered Kazakhstan by ferry I skipped hordes of people all wanting to change my money there. At the uzbek border I wasn't so lucky and I was instantly swarmed by people trying to sell me cold water and wanting to change my money. I opted not to change any of my dollars or tenge at the border since I wasn't sure of the exchange rate.

I found out after crossing that it was 350km to Kungrad, the nearest large town, so it was lucky that I had plenty of food and water. As it turned out the slight headwind I had in Kazakhstan coming from the northwest stayed strong and turned into an amazing tailwind when I turned southeast in Uzbekistan. The roads also drastically improved and I was able to break my all time record for mileage, in the middle of the desert no less. I rode from around 10am after crossing the border to 12:30 where I set up my tarp for shade and cooked some pasta for lunch. The wind was so strong it was tearing my tarp to pieces so at 2:30 I decided to just go. When the wind wants you to ride, you must ride. By 4pm I had done over 100km, so I decided to roll with it and see how far I could go. By 8pm the wind had slowed, but I figured I would be a failure if I didn't make it to 200km, so that's exactly how far I made it before camping.

The next day I again awoke early and rode another 120km, to end just before Kungrad. The next day I started heading into town, hoping to find a hotel, bank, and the migration police in kungrad before resting for the day, but on the way into town I met up with two German cyclists who were headed into Nukus, so I figured I might as well ride with them if they were planning on making it to Nukus in one day. When we made it to Nukus I started a frantic search for a bank or a place to change money. It turns out Uzbekistan is a silly place and they have no idea what they're doing with money. There is no such thing as an ATM. The only way to get money is to change dollars or get a cash advance on a credit card and only about one in ten banks will do this for you.To top it off, the government seems to be in extreme denial about how worthless their currency is and they refuse to print bills larger than 1000 sum. This means that the largest bill available is worth less than 50 cents, and when you go to pay for anything you end up counting out at least 5-10 bills, only to watch the cashier count them again. This also means you're forced to walk around with a huge stack of bills unable to fit into any normal sized wallet, and you waste hours of time in each transaction. I heard for the first time the english phrase "prepare your money" which seemed ridiculous until I realized that if you're paying $20 for something, you get to enjoy counting out 50ish bills. Efficiency!

This stack is worth less than the single bill in front of it:

The one worthwhile thing in Nukus, other than a shower, was the Karakalpak art museum which had a number of pieces formerly banned by the soviet union, as well as art and artifacts from the region.

After seeing that and relaxing a bit, it was off towards Khiva, where I arrived after two days of cycling and checked into a hotel. Most of the interesting bits of Khiva are contained within the old walled city of Itchan Kala.

The gates into the city look like this:

Inside Khiva are all manner of historic buildings and museums.

From Khiva I rode back to Urgench to pick up a minibus to skip a 4-5 more days of riding through the desert, mostly to save time since I have 12 more days on my visa. It turns out that even though there are no towns for 300+km there are plenty of teahouses. Also there are shops at most of the road checkpoints. The buss dropped me off at 10pm just outside the old city of Bukhara so it was easy to ride into town and find a hotel.

Genze to Baku

Leaving Genze I stopped at the Nizami mausoleum just outside of town. He was apparently a famous Azeri Poet, and the mausoleum looked new and quite well done.

All along the road I continued to see these fake castles:

Though the majority of the road was just boring desert scrub:

I ended the day in a cheap motel at the edge of Guychay. Since I've been forced to buy bottled water at markets I get stopped and questioned a lot, and most everyone wants to ask me questions. My favorite question seems to be the equivalent of “why are you here?” As if for some reason I shouldn't be in Azerbaijan.

I turned north to save some milage into Baku, but that took me off the nice main highway (which was apparently incredibly boring to cycle through) and onto roads that weren't paved, and up a bit into the mountains.

This was probably the worst day in Azerbaijan, where I had to deal with the awful roads, awful drivers, a bit of a run in with some dogs, and a few kids sellings things by attempting to get themselves hit by jumping in front of myself and other drivers on the road. I had a decent shashlik meal before camping just outside of Shamakhi.

The following day was a Thursday and I wanted to make it to Baku so I would be able to deal with visas on Friday before the consulates closed, so I rushed through the countryside and made it to a hostel in Baku, but not before meeting a group of british cyclists headed towards Georgia.

 Over the last few days there have been tons of Cyclists in and out of this hostel and I have helped or been helped by most of them.  I was able to pick up my Uzbek visa fairly quickly on Friday and I applied for the Tajik visa the same day. He said it would be 3-4 days, so I decided to stick around and wait rather than try to apply in Tashkent.

In the meantime I have seen a bit of Baku. In the old town there is the Maiden’s tower currently under renovation so you can’t go in:

The Shirvanshakhs’ palace is also in old town. It’s an old complex of tombs, mosque’s and a bath house:

Probably the most noticable buildings in Baku are the three flame towers:

At night they light them up with flames, the Azeri flag, and an image of a guy waving the Azeri flag back and forth.

There is also quite a nice park/promenade along the Caspian which you can see as the green along the water in this photo:

I also made it out to the Zorastrian fire temple which wasn’t that impressive. Apparently an earthquake in the 1700 or 1800s caused the natural gas to stop, so now they keep these fires lit artificially.

I was finally able to find some tubes that fit my bike so I have two more spares now. I registered with the Azeri OVIR so hopefully I shouldn’t have trouble leaving the country. I got my first haircut since Budapest. I’m stocked up on food and water for the ferry. Today I picked up my Tajik visa, so now it’s just a waiting game until the ferry with no schedule decides to show up again.

Some thoughts on Traffic:

In London there are tons of cars on the road, but at least they move fairly quickly through the city.

In Geneva there is tons of traffic because the engineers designing the lights had no idea what they were doing so entire lines of cars sit waiting at red lights for no reason.

In Istanbul there is lots of traffic because everyone, particularly taxis, love to pull over to the side of the road and block traffic.

In Baku, almost the entire city is gridlocked because no one knows how to drive, and everyone blocks every intersection. People honk constantly at everyone to move, but no one can move because no one in front of them can move. It’s actually quite hilarious to watch as long as you’re not stuck in the traffic yourself. Also apparently the practice here is that you can park in lanes where you’re not supposed to by giving a tip to a guy beside the road, who definitely pays the police to not ticket your car. So three lane roads become two lane roads because corruption. You also don’t need to pass any drivers test to get your license. All you need is about $1000 in bribe money and to know where your car horn is, so go figure why the traffic is terrible.

Kutaisi to Tbilisi to Genze

So I left Kutaisi and headed towards Gori, 140km away. I spent the first day mostly slowly climbing through the mountains and mountain passes.

Around 6ish I stopped at restaurant and fumbled my way through ordering without a menu. I ended up with a great salad, bread, cheese, and french fries. When I went to pay, they wouldn't let me, and they sent me on my way with a free dinner. It was during the meal that I noticed they had some type of brown bear pacing back and forth in a small cage in front of the restaurant.
I continued riding and pushing my bike up what I thought would be a long mountain pass. About 3km later I was stopped by a group of Georgians sitting and drinking at a cafe on the side of the road. They offered me free food and vodka while I tried to figure out how to say in Russian "I just ate not 10 minutes ago." They ended up offering me a place to stay, so we loaded my bike on the top of their car and they drove me the last ~10km into Khasuri where I spent the night. I was surprised to see that the one driving didn't seem to be drinking with the rest of the group.
The next day was a fairly easy ride into Gori, Stalin's supposed birthplace. They have a bunch of Stalin statues still standing as well as a museum dedicated to him.

Most of the rest of the city still looks very soviet, with 50+ year old decaying block housing everywhere.

I left Gori the next morning heading towards Tbilisi. On the way I detoured to see Uplistsikhe which is an ancient rock dwelling. I was fairly interesting, but I'd seen very similar dwellings in Turkey

I stopped again in Mtskheta which boasts 3 monasteries. Number one: Svetitskhoveli Monastery

Number two: Samtavro Monastery (not a great picture but they all look the same anyway)

Number three: Jvari Monastery

That would've been a 15km detour and about a 3-400m climb which I decided to skip at the end of the day. Near the monasteries I met up with a polish couple who were also cycling towards Tbilisi, so we rode there together, though stayed in different hostels. We decided to meet for lunch, and spent some of the next day wandering around Tbilisi together. Tbilis has more churches than I can count. It's an interesting capital, with all kinds of old buildings drastincally contrasted with some incredibly new ones.

I left Tbilisi in the morning, and made it into Azerbaijan without any trouble. In fact I had sort of a royal treatment as I guess Azerbaijan is fairly strict on cars coming into the country and it took me approximately 20 minutes max to cross the border as I was waved through all the long lines. This was the second time my bags were searched, but it was a sort of half-hearted attempt as the guard just pointed to each bag, said "open", and when I opened it he only spent about 3 seconds looking at the contents.
First impressions of Azerbaijan: They really love this faux castle motif, as they use it everywhere.

I had loaded up on food and water before leaving Tbilisi because I knew it might be a while before I reached a town with an ATM. Anyway, along the way I pulled up to a gas station and began filling my water bottles with tap water only to be stopped by a local who said that there is literally no potable water in Azerbaijan. Apparently the entire country drinks water that is bottled elsewhere. Well luckily since I had expected to wait until the nearest major town I had enough to last. I rolled into Qazax around 7pm and started asking people where the nearest ATM was (apparently they also speak Russian quite a bit in Azerbaijan). It took 5 tries before I found an ATM that worked, but I was finally able to resupply before heading out of town and camping in a field. I was woken up by the sun, as usual, only this time I was also facing some curious goat herders, so I started riding early.
It turns out the drivers in Azerbaijan are worse than any I've so far encountered. Constant honking. I continue to go slowly insane. Here I'm even afraid to retaliate because if I'm mean to the wrong driver I might get arrested. Queue statues and posters of this guy everywhere:

Anyway I made it to Genze (Ganja) which is a fairly unremarkable town except for the fact that half the roads clearly haven't been paved in 50 years.