They would have you understand that Baku is crawling with western oilmen. Besides the Hyatt, where harried, unhappy or uneasy young guys in ill-fitting suits rode elevators to meeting rooms, we found neither Texans nor cowboy hats.
In fact, Baku, of the three South Caucasus capitals, easily filled the bill as the most Soviet city. With a bonus – head scarves.
Down at the waterfront, atop the Maiden’s Tower (originally dating from the 11th century, complete with an inside-the-fortress well), there’s a fine view of the old town and the harbor, and a ferris wheel enclosed in a strip of trees.
A concrete bund stretches down the Caspian waterfront, the waves in full chop, and families promenade. Beside an amusement park full of kids and moms, you could enjoy Efes beers from Turkey under shade trees in the fine sea breeze.
Maybe not explicitly, outwardly, but Baku’s still a company town. Oil wealth provides a fine mix of consumer "stuff" and ethnic restaurants. Baku has built an urbane and modern pedestrian plaza called “Traders Street,” reminiscent of its glory days. In the 1890’s, Baku pumped half the world’s supply and Europe’s finest architects clambered for commissions to build signature buildings.
Stay close to Trader’s Street and you’re in Europe. Head out of town, though, and it’s a little different.
*****
The arriving guests filed into the Gyulyustan palace between double rows of male and female dancers clothed in national dress. The hall was garlanded with roses and orchids delivered from the Netherlands. Proclamations were read from presidents Bush and Putin, to a crowd that included the Prime Minister, the Speaker and the heads of the ministries of Foreign Affairs, National Security, Emergency Situations, Culture, Economic Development and Health Protection, and the Mayor of Baku.
The Moscow guests included well-known couturiers, a composer, a humorist and other entertainers, notable for their extravagant dress. National cuisine was presented at the wedding, to which guests, oddly, were warned in advance not to take photo or video cameras or cell phones. Instead the entire event was recorded by the “personal shooting team” of the Azerbaijani president, and by NTV Russia.
The bride and groom left the hall at 2:00 a.m. Two weeks later Leyla and Emin would celebrate their wedding in Moscow.
Leyla is Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s “senior daughter,” and Emin Agalarov is the son of Moscow developer Aras Agalarov, heir to his $730 million fortune, and fancies himself something of a popular singer.
We listened to Still, a sort of spoken-word song by Emin as we sat in the back of Rashad’s Lada sedan. Rashad had downloaded Still from the internet (he gave me a ‘Where else, stupid?’ kind of look) and was acting proud to have it.
We hired Rashad and his Lada to drive us out to a derelict drilling island called Artyom, both a world away from, and the very reason for, Baku’s busy oil-driven affluence.
*****
Baku is a contraction of its ancient name, Badu Kuba, or city of winds. All our time in Baku, its best feature was a stiff, unrelenting wind off the Caspian Sea, that sent up a hard chop offshore every single day. Several dozen photos I took out there at Artyom were blurred worthless by the wind.*****
Rashad, in slacks, fashionable shades and a red T-shirt, didn’t pay much attention to politics. He knew, though, by a posse of cops in the road, that President Aliyev would be coming in past us from his country place, and sure enough, the motorcade that swept past us included the president.
Maybe he knew it was because his family had a summer place out this direction, near the president. His father had been, he told us, a mushroom farmer, but that business was done.
Once Rashad drove with a friend to Germany. They bought a Mercedes and drove it back and sold it. They didn’t make much money because they had a great time on the way back, but they enjoyed the hell out of it.*****
The drilling towers, in groups of twos and threes, mostly long abandoned, cast skeletal shadows on the scrub and brown of the earth, or on pools of oil and grease. Heavy metal poles jutted from the ground, all canted at odd angles, and if they were longer they would have converged. Maybe these were drilling masts begun but abandoned, or which had fallen or been dismantled, and the rest of which had been carried off.
Along the causeway that connects the Abseron peninsula to the island of Artyom (since renamed Pirallahi), an abandoned drilling mast stood alongside the broken bases of others, and their rusty remnants laid on their sides in the water beside them.
A man stopped his car. His passenger climbed out and glared at us as I took pictures of the gloom. Oil spread at random in shallow pools, and it wasn’t clear if it was there through neglect or if it rises spontaneously from the earth.
The remains of concrete buildings had crumbled to expose rebar. The equipment itself, even if the “nodding donkeys” were still slowly pumping, was rusted brown through and through, and the entire enterprise stretched nearly as far as the eye could see. Some drilling rigs were tied down with guy wires, and they combined with high tension power lines to describe a crazy random etching across the haze, which was merely a lighter shade of the blue-brown earth.*****
When a bore hole doesn’t produce adequately, one way to get more oil is to employ a submersible pump. The part visible above the ground is the familiar “nodding donkey.” The entire assembly is called a rod pump or beam pump, or thirsty bird.
A power line ran to each rod pump that still slowly raised and lowered its head, with a transformer on a pole, tied to it in the crudest way. There was a salt pan lined with household trash – maybe because of tidal action. Two rough green trucks lumbered through the mess; One looked implausibly like a logging truck, with big metal brackets at the front and at back, which trailed a distance behind. The truck following held a pumping device on its flat bed. The back left of the bed was jacked up way higher, so that the whole rear slanted awkwardly down to the right. It had six brand new, formidably-treaded tires.
People actually lived in two places on the island, at the village of Artyom at the northern tip, and at Ostrov Artema, a collection of block housing. Here an old round bus gasped for air at the curb. It was blue and white, with blue curtains pulled completely shut in each of the four windows along the side. All the windows were surrounded with corrosion, and streaks of dried rust ran down the bus from the bottom of each.
Hundreds of meters apart stood a tree or two and a low fence surrounded a tin-roofed building that looked, improbably, to be somebody’s house. Pipes ran along the salt pans, and the road, and off the island along the causeway, and coming and going, signs, paint peeling, quote, “Heydar Aliyev: Oil Is Our Treasure, and Azerbaijan’s Future Is Bright Through Oil.”
Photos: Top to bottom: 1.Teapots in the bazaar at the foot of the Maiden's Tower, Baku 2. The Caspian Sea at Baku, Azerbaijan 3 & 4. The oil business on Artyom Island, Azerbaijan 5. Words of wisdom from Heydar Aliyev. Click each photo to see a bigger version, and see many more photos of the South Caucasus in the Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan Galleries at EarthPhotos.com.
This
is the latest in a series of excerpts from the eventual book Common
Sense and Whiskey. Previous entries: Madagascar,
Greenland,
Patagonia,
Sri
Lanka, Tasmania,
Paraguay,
Climbing Mt. Kinabalu, Tibet
Cambodia
and Malawi. Next: Ngorongoro Crater, Tanzania.
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