Yunus. Polished moccasins of roughly worked black leather, black formal trousers with leather belt, striped casual shirt, gold watch, clean-shaven, neatly cut, bright green passport peeking out of breast pocket. Turkmen passport. He stands resignedly at the entrance window of the harbour gate.
“Are you going to Turkmenistan?” I ask excitedly. “Nothing’s going today.” He replies resignedly. The officials at the window insist that we leave and call tomorrow. Yunus moves into the shadows. It’s 48 degrees and the air smolders over the highway leading to the crumbling post-Soviet town where soldiers took the train to the front with Hitler during World War II. Abandoned barracks tower over the wasteland and rusting trains wait patiently on their tracks for natural decay. Yunus flicks his lighter for the twentieth time. I lend him mine. “My visa expires tomorrow. Then it’s deportation.” He looks sad. He shows me pictures of his children, his dogs… “What is life like in Turkmenistan?” “Well, normal.” Nothing could be closer and further from the truth at the same time. Another round of phone calls. “The boat is leaving today, but there are no seats.” I learn again from a phone call to the ticket office. We already know each other, addressing each other by first name like old friends. We call each other every other hour. Well, maybe there will be seats. In an hour or two. We make our way from the tiled area outside the port gate to the air-conditioned waiting room inside the complex. Fenced in. Closed by a chain link. Oh, what a win!
*
The waiting room is packed with people. Some people are waiting for tickets for the third day. It only goes to two places: Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. In the area for mothers with children, a lady is breastfeeding her newborn. Most people sleep lying down on chairs. It’s forbidden to go beyond the fence under a $700 fine. Besides, there’s no way out anyway. There’s water and tea in the kitchen. Apparently we’re finally going to have a few days of rest.
**
“Hi, it’s Lucy. What’s up?” another round of phone calls. “How many are you, two? I’ve got them for you, come to the checkout.” I wipe my eyes in surprise and announce the news to my buddy with shaking hands. In a roundabout way. In Czech. We beat about thirty people waiting, so someone doesn’t get there first. It’s like taking an exam with that idiot professor who throws out every classmate, being the only one who passes – with a monstrous two A4 notes paper. I’m gonna go get Yunus. He shits in the toilet. “Yuri? Yuri!” I yell in the men’s room. “Come on, come with us.” But the security guard at the gate intervenes once again. Yunus is intercepted like a groupie running with a soft toy from Corridor B to Corridor A at a Kelly Family concert for the chance of a lifetime and turned back. “My visa expires tomorrow! Deportation! Deportation!” he screams hysterically. I take his number, telling him not to worry, we’ll buy him a ticket too.
***
Buying tickets for Yunus is an impossible task. The gentleman at the ticket counter shakes his head dismissively. “Nelzja, nelzja, nelzja.” “But they’ll deport him! We’ll give him ours!” With a stony expression, he just utters another “nelzja”. I don’t understand why we have this protection. Just because I call in a nice voice every two hours? I feel guilty. But it’ll show when we get back to the waiting room. Our ship doesn’t leave this morning. It doesn’t leave until tomorrow night. A normal ship sails for seven hours. Ours sails for a beautiful THIRTY-FIVE hours. No other boat is coming. Take it or leave it.
****
It’s a 1984 Amir Azimrov. It used to be a modern super-fast military cargo ship. Today it has a rusty roof with flaking chunks of faded paint crunching underfoot – moving around the ship sounds like walking on salted potato chips. Her sister sank three years ago, killing 76 people on board and saving only nine.
*****
Take it, there’s not much to choose from. But it’s the best value for money and time on the boat. For a handsome $55, you can ride for anywhere from twenty to thirty hours. The modern Turkmen boats Berkarar and Bahtiyar cost $55 for Turkmens too, but a staggering $150 for tourists and Azerbaijanis. Hence the strange skipping of ticket sales by nationality. By simple math, we can arrive at $1.5 per hour for the Azerbaijani veteran boats, while an hour of cruising for a Turkmen boat comes out to a staggering $21.4. And that, Horst, is worth it. Plus, you get it with a free cabin sauna and, in the event of a nighttime thunderstorm, an adrenaline rush at no extra charge. We’ve experienced both, and we recommend it.
******
For a transit visa to Turkmenistan you need a pre-approved application from the embassy, a printed A4 invitation letter from the embassy and a receipt for the fee. We have neither. I mean, we applied for and received the visa in advance, but only in the form of a numerical code. As of May, some embassies have a new electronic system. Unfortunately, not all of them. Azerbaijani border customs officers spend thirty minutes making phone calls to all sides. “Well, come on, I’ll let you in then, but I haven’t seen this yet, it’s at your own risk, IF THE TURKMEN DEPORT YOU, THEN DON’T COMPLAIN WITH ME!”
*******
You know what, I’ve never used the word deport in my entire life. Nor have I ever heard anyone use it live in conversation. It’s one of those forgotten words in the dictionary that has been dusted off for a century. These are words for criminals, not normal decent people. Well, in Turkmenistan, it’s used every day. A car mechanic uses it, as does a lady with three kids. Deportation is one of the main scares for all people in the country. For everyone in the country. Even for you in the country. Everyone has one foot in deportation, at least verbally, all the time.
********
I started committing crimes, too. Again, it’s not that unusual – you just have to go exchange money or light a cigarette to do it. Both are actually forbidden. But absolutely everyone does it. They originally banned even going out on the street after 9 o’clock, but then lifted it because it was unsustainable. Maybe. Maybe it’s still in place, but nobody’s enforcing it. As well as a bunch of other official bans and orders. In fact, even those who are supposed to enforce them don’t follow them – so logically they don’t enforce them on others either. A cop with a cigarette in his mouth won’t give you a fine for smoking. He’s as pissed off about the ban as you are, and unlike you, he has to buy his cigarettes secretly and expensively.
*********
In fact, a popular Sunday activity is to buy a “kusovka” (for the less knowledgeable: it’s a single cigarette) and bring it to the family for an evening get-together, where it is ceremoniously lit and smoked together. One. One per week. It’s easy to spot a shop with just-imported cigarettes: there’s a queue several hundred metres long, and no one can tell you what they’re waiting in line for. Cigarettes are smuggled in from all the surrounding countries and their value increases almost fiftyfold by crossing the border: in Azerbaijan a packet costs about 14 (czech) crowns, in Turkmenistan a packet costs about 30 crowns. That’s 20 times 30 is 600, divided by 14 is: 42 and something. It reminds of an old story when, just after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, the Turkmens had no banknotes printed yet, so they had no way of transporting cash out of the country. However, they decided to donate one of their best breeding horse to the British government. The horse had to be transported by train via Moscow to London, and instead of money, the same train carried an official Turkmen delegate and with her several carloads of large sweet Turkmen melons. The melons subsequently paid for all the expenses incurred by this strange delegation – the train journey to London took over a month due to quarantine and customs regulations. Well, guess how the horse turned out. He was so temperamental that he was thrown out of the Royal Guards ride for being unmanageable and taken somewhere to a regional race in the British countryside.
*********
Anyway, cigarettes (two packs are allowed across the country) are an easy thing to bring in for zero and then donate at a high value. However, this again commits a criminal act: it is illegal to donate tobacco products. But we are all criminals. People offer us their smuggled cigarettes in the car, we offer them our imported ones back. As any proper ethnographer in the 1980s would say, there is no better instant togetherness than breaking nonsensical regulations together with the locals. And there’s no quicker way to pigeonhole a “white tourist” as “so-local” than by participating in a general, not-quite-legal, custom.
**********
Yunus didn’t wait for his deportation; we took him to the Georgian border with the joint efforts of the entire waiting room, and Ayna, a stocky lady with the appearance of something between a black gospel singer and a blonde baroque opera singer, arranged for a new Azerbaijani visa for him through her daughter within a few days. Resignedly, he drags his suitcase behind him into an arriving taxi three hours before the border crossing closes.
***********
On the boat, we meet Spanish videobloggers who are taking a similar route on a motorbike. They say they made a great deal. A trucker who, judging by his tattoos and facial expressions, has been in prison many years for at least medium crimes came up to them and traded fifty bucks for half the rate. To make it more interesting, there are old manates and new manates. People count in the old ones, but the notes are in the new ones. The exchange rate is somewhere around five million old manats to one new manat: so if they count 200 on your calculator, that’s 200,000,000 old manats, and so you have to pay something around the value of 40 in new manat notes. Easy as fuck. Actually they were still lucky, half the amount is still better than the official exchange rate. It’s five times lower than the unofficial rate. So you get three and a half new manats for one dollar in the bank, seventeen to twenty new manats on the black market. Needless to say, any foreign trader importing and exporting goods in and out of the country simply does not use the local banks voluntarily. My buddy refuses to participate in the rising youth crime rate, so that leaves the dirty tasks (like smoking on the street) to me.
************
“What?! Hitchhiking?! Don’t be silly! People in Turkmenistan are bad, there’s a crisis, they’re desperate! They have no food and there are queues for bread and basic foodstuffs. But there are deserts, there’s nobody there, they take you in a car, drive you somewhere in the middle of the desert and there they rob you of everything and leave you alone. Nobody gives you a free ride! Don’t be stupid, take a taxi! I’ll pay for it! Where are you going? I’ll call you one! You’d get a lot of attention as a foreigner. Don’t trust anybody!” laments Mrs. Aýna in a hysterically hoarse baritone. She’s a Turkmen, that is, one of those wicked robbers.
*************
Well, that’s how it is with all Turkmens. They think of themselves as a bad people, that other Turkmens are bad, that there is crime and filth, but it’s completely untrue. They are all incredibly nice and hospitable. It’s a bit of the Czech syndrome of constantly slandering one’s own nation. Mrs. Aýna would not let us hitchhike, plain and simple, because she is worried about us, so we have to lie to her that we will not go until tomorrow by train. We have exactly two thousand thirty-seven kilometres to go in five days – that would sort of ruin her for a taxi. Although… not as much as in the Czech Republic. Petrol here costs exactly ten crowns a litre. But until March 2019 it was completely free, as was bread, salt and water. The national crisis, however, demanded budget cuts and so prices were raised from zero to the minimum.
**************
Turkmen border guards check passengers already down below on the boat. It’s about forty-five degrees. We’re going to ask for a possibility of exit off the ship for air while we wait. A pair of soldiers in green camouflage uniforms look at our plain number code with considerable suspicion (everyone else on the ship has a decently printed A4 invitation letter). The green uniforms are very respectable and their design is said to be from 2013. “You know, they’re nice, they just forgot that it’s all sandy desert around here, so now they’re shining for miles around!” laughs the stocky, bearded gentleman in the blue T-shirt, Ayna’s husband. We watch as the young cadets secretly borrow a lighter from him and sneak off to smoke inconspicuously behind the guard booth. So that’s how it is here with the bans and orders!
***************
After endless hours of waiting, a bus finally arrives to take us – FOUR foot passengers to be exact – to the border checkpoint. It is half past eight at night. We decide to wait until one minute after midnight to cross the border so we don’t lose a day of our visa. The incredibly nice border guard approves us without blinking an eye. “No problem, sit here.” and disappears. We roll around on snow-white seats with gilded edges in the marble hall like smelly homeless people, eating Czech muesli bars. We haven’t slept properly for two nights, and that’s not a good start for the next five extreme days.
****************
A minute after midnight, a sleepy border guard emerges. “Let’s go!” Poor guy, the whole border control is waiting for two morons from the Czech Republic with their sleep. We subsequently wake up the lady from the visa window, the lady from the ticket office, the lady from the escalator, the lady from the x-ray machine, two gentlemen from customs and one lady from the main entrance. Like a touch of a magic wand, we wake up the whole station with a Mexican wave, which slowly falls back to sleep behind us. It’s 1:30 in the morning and we’re finally in Turkmenistan.
