Baki did not strike me as a dangerous city, and I certainly never felt threatened walking around at night...obviously a female might have a different experience than me, but it seemed fairly safe to walk about after dark. One hazard is the crazy driving of the locals, although it is not as bad as in Georgia...it was never too difficult to cross roads. One thing I don't recommend is swimming in the Caspian...there are beaches near to Baki (the main road to the south passes Shikov Beach, the most popular beach) but to me they were very unappealing. Shikov beach was made to look attractive by building cafes and cleaning the sand evry day, and the addition of sun umbrellas did help, but that couldn't change the fact that a few hundred metres off shore was a whopping great oil rig! If the water in Baki Bay was anything to go by, you are likely to come out of the water with an oily black sheen!!!
Not really a warning or a danger, more of an annoyance, but getting information about transport and buying tickets is a nightmare! I wanted to travel on the night train to Tbilisi, and went to Baki central station to buy my ticket. There were kassas (desks) numbered 1 to 28, none of them with any signs above them, so I picked one with less of a queue. The woman behind the desk was polite and smiled a lot, but couldn't give me any information...she suggested I go to another kassa. So, off I went to kassa 18, and met with the glare of an irate severe-looking woman, who told me I could not travel anywhere because I was Austrian! It took twenty minutes to persuade her that I wasn't Austrian (don't know what she had against Austrians!), then she announced that I didn't have the proper visa, without having even looked at my passport. I showed her my visa...'But we have no tickets for you!'...why?...'because you are a foreigner'...what difference does that make?...'I don't deal with foreigners!' she said in a tone of voice which suggested that this was completely obvious, and slammed the kassa's shutters shut! Off to kassa 12, having been joined by a multitude of translators who had decided that I needed to be told the information in Russian, German and Jibberish which did nothing but confuse me further, not knowing either language. The kassa lady also got annoyed with them, as we were doing just fine misunderstanding each other in Azeri/Turkish and did not need anything translated. She spent the next ten minutes screeching at my 'translators' (one of whom cheekily asked me to pay for his unwanted services!), leaving me to wander off and find a kassa which could help me out. I visited 9 kassas, until one of them decided that I was worthy of a ticket, and eventually it came to boarding time. The train was half empty...more than one of the kassa ladies had assured me the train was full! The thing that got me was the fact that nearly all of the women had been polite and even friendly to me, but completely unhelpful in every way. I noticed this a lot in Azerbaijan, and it intrigued me as well as annoyed me.
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on Aug 26, 2002
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