Sick, For Once

It had been about six and a half months of traveling with nothing worse than mild hangovers and early stages of colds that fizzled out when I finally started feeling bad. Not a bad run.

It was also right after Jamie and I got off the ferry from Kazakhstan and were standing around on the sidewalk outside Baku port, waiting for a couch-surfing friend of his to pick us up. We had no idea how long it would take, and as we were standing on the sidewalk the headache, bodyache, sorethroat, and general flu symptoms that had been minor enough to ignore started getting stronger.

A semi-truck stenciled with the seductive eyes of a woman pulling a hijab across her face turned in toward the port, and a young man walked by with a baby rabbit in a box, sheltered against the wind. Cars kept zooming by on the one-way street, and it seemed like our ride would never come.

It was early in the day still. I just wanted to shower in hot, hot water and go to sleep. Jamie was joking that he would get in nothing but a Benz or BMW, and that the each approaching luxury vehicle was bound to be ours.

When Jamil finally showed up, he was in fact driving a Benz. A slightly older model, but Mercedes nonetheless. I got my shower and got my nap, and woke up feeling good enough to head out of the house to have dinner downtown and hang out at his girlfriends apartment.

That was a mistake. The good feeling I had after the nap didn't last long. I suffered through dinner in a brick-walled restaurant by fountain square, and when we moved to his girlfriend's bohemian pad, I just took a nap on a mattress in one of the high-ceilinged, empty rooms while everyone else drank cheap wine, beer, and chatted by candlelight.

The next day I went out with Jamie, Jamil, his girlfriend, and one of her roommates on a little day excursion outside of Baku. I wasn't up for it, but felt I had to participate in some sort of social role since I was taking the hospitality of a stranger.

It was a bit exhausting but turned out to be a good choice. We made an unscheduled stop at a showy mosque on the side of a busy road, and waited forever for the girlfriend's roommate to finish taking pictures and asking questions. He was some sort of young journalist.

We made another stop to trudge across industrial wasteland to try to find a large sculpture of Lenin's head out behind some refinery. We didn't find it, but stumbled upon an old Soviet tank graveyard, and crept in past the rusty fence to take pictures, climb over the rusty hulks, and generally fuck around. We waited again for the journalist kid as he ran back to take more photos of shit he could've taken pictures of when we were there the first time.

We finally made it to our original destination: Qobustan, home to a bunch of petroglyphs carved onto ancient rocks in what used to be a verdant forest thousands of years ago, but what was now just rocks on a hillside. It was interesting, but underwhelming.

Then we went to see some mud volcanoes. The pressure of natural gas below the surface caused gray mud to bubble up to the surface and occasionally fart its way out in bubbles and burps. We tromped around for awhile, and I got mildly splattered with mud when I was standing downwind of one little volcano that Jamie threw a rock into.



The journalist kid was last to get the car once again. I hadn't been too keen on trudging all around the Azeri wastelands, behind factories and over dirt hills painted in rust and grays and browns, and his journalistic dalliances had took up a lot of time. Just doing his job, can't complain too much, but I was still sick and had plans to meet a friend for dinner in town that had to be delayed, and was tired and still felt miserable.

I was feeling better when I met Paul in fountain square, splattered with mud in the only pants and shirt I owned. I especially felt better when we decided to eat Indian food. God, that shit is good, and I hadn't had it for too long.

Paul was a champ and paid for the dinner, an outrageous $50 with a couple of beers each. We caught up on our travels. I last saw him in Yangshuo, and now here he was again, living in Baku for an engineering internship making more money on per diem allowances than monthly wages.

The next day, Jamie hit the road early, hitching back to London. I walked around the old city in a state of renewed flu misery while Jamil was out at work. I took in the old sights and tried to enjoy the beauty as best I could. The city was truly a sight for sore eyes after eight days in Aktau, even in my feverish state.

I half-napped in a public toilet, and walked along the promenade which is paved with stones that are exceedingly bright and painful in the sunshine. I went to the top of the Maiden's Tower, and took photos in the alleys of the old town. I did my best.

By the time I got on the train that night, after fearing Jamil wouldn't be home in time to let me in to pack up and make the train, I was ready to sleep. It was a Soviet train, with tiger-print benches and mattresses with a maroon floral pattern straight out of the Victorian era. I had a kupe cabin to myself. It was sparse and simple, but clean and and even had memory foam pillows. I really indulged myself and took two pillows since I had the whole thing to myself. I regret only that I wasn't well enough to drink beer by myself.



I fell asleep to the rocking of the train, and woke up near the Georgian border free of fever and sickness.