Is The Love Gone?

I noticed a disturbing trend recently. I was in the one-horse port town of Aktau, Kazakhstan, a thoroughly drab and uninteresting place. I realized I had been looking forward to leaving nearly every country I had been in for the last several months.

This is not a good sign for a traveler. Was the love gone?

I'd been waiting for days and days in Aktau for a ferry that runs without a regular service to Azerbaijan. One must rely on some pretty girls that work in the travel agent/Avon beauty shop to call you up on short notice whenever the boat pulls in, which could be today or next week.

The shore of the Caspian is littered with bottles and garbage, everything is expensive beacause it's an oil town, and there is nothing to do. Really nothing. In Aktau, they don't even have street names. Everything is labeled by district, building number, and then apartment. An address reads like a prison number: 22-7-84.

Well I got to thinking. Before I was dying to leave Kazakhstan, I was in China dying to leave for Kazkakhstan, and before that I was in Lao dying to leave for China, and before that I was in Thailand dying to leave for Lao, and before that I was in Lao again, dying to leave for India via Thailand.

It did not seem like a good pattern to me.

But fear not! I simply had grand ideas about how much fun I'd have in the next place. I'm in Azerbaijan now, wishing I could stay longer, but a 5-day transit visa is limiting my choices. Baku is a beautiful city, even in a mildly feverish state.

I look forward not to leaving, but to arriving at my next destinations: Tbilisi, Georgia, where I'll relax for a couple days before moving on to Turkey where I'll be for at least five weeks of studying in Istanbul.

The love is not gone.