After the mountains it was nice to be back in the safe anonymity of a big city. We didn’t attract too much attention until the day Jamie left the hotel in his shorts.  As we walked around town girls tittered, and children giggled. Everyone stared. We figured it was because only children wear shorts, but it may have been a modesty thing.  Azerbaijan is a pious and conservative place - something its easy to forget when you’ve got a hangover and you’re on a street filled with western designer shops.

 

Baku is big and getting bigger all the time.  Its clear that there is quite a lot of money here and people are spending it.  Everywhere you look there are new huge construction projects - just outside our hotel there was a brand new fly-over with another bridge in the process of being built.

 

The shiny centre of town is full of cash, international restaurants serving amazing indian, italian or mexican food were filled with British and American accents.  Azeris that we chatted nearly always assumed that we were working in Baku, but perhaps that was also because there weren’t all that many tourist sights.  The prom along the sea was fun with old soviet amusements and children zooming around in plastic electric toy cars, but we didn’t fancy a dip as the water was a rainbow of colours from the oil floating on the surface.  We did end up floating on the Caspian Sea courtesy of the Merkuri 1 a pleasure that we spent two of our days in Baku trying to book tickets for.

 

HA