Baku was not designed with drivers in mind. We very quickly reverted to the Istanbul style of driving (point towards where you want to be and ignore signs) when we realised that the signs were physically impossible to follow owing to multiple road closures, and no one cared one jot whether you were on the road or in the dirt.
After ascertaining that our information about the old ferry port being closed was, in fact, true, we finally made it to the correct port. We weren’t there long before we were joined by several other teams, from both Mongolian rallies. Some of them had been waiting for 5 days already, which did not improve our optimism about a speedy departure. The guy in the hut told us it would leave “This evening, 80% sure”, so we hung around in the baking heat to find out.
We were eventually turned away and told to be back for 9am. Our translator/helper, who seemed to be a friend of a friend of one the rally teams, told us to camp in a nearby play-park, but this didn’t really appeal. After a fruitless search in the suburbs outside the city we decided to bed down under some trees, which turned out to be near a dead dog in a blood-soaked box. Welcome to Baku.
