World Tour - Europe, Asia, North and South America - Entries for: Azerbaijan

The road to Baku was pretty straight and the tarmac was perfect. Because it was Saturday, we knew that the Tajikistan embassy would be closed anyway and since the road was boring, we decided to go on a little detour. According to our navigators there was a small route over the mountains leading to the Caspian sea.
According to our navigators...

The street changed quite quickly into a gravel road and suddenly we had to overcome some small river crossings. The small crossings grew into bigger crossings and the road disappeared from time to time. Only the navigation system stood true to its course and we tried following it as closely as possible.

We struggled further up the small river. The navigation showed 53 km to the next turnoff... whatever that meant. It was shocking as we realized after two more hours of driving that the very same turnoff was now 49 km away. 4 km in almost 2 hours?! All of us expected to spend the night in the mountains...

Concentration was starting to fade and we started dropping our bikes quite regularly. We grew weaker every time we had to pick up a bike but the motivation to overtake the mountains before darkness stayed strong.
The small path eventually got a litte better after a while and we were able to make some progress.
At the beginning of sunset we reached a small village which made us believe that we had almost made it. Fabi instantly bought some bottles of water at the small market while an interested crowd of locals gathered around Basti and Denis.

It got darker and the local English teacher told us that we only had about 16 km ahead of us before the road would finally turn back into a tarmac. BUT we should hurry because we would have to cross two more rather big rivers!
Only a few meters later we saw what he meant. A very wide river bed with many sand banks and varying deep streams was disconnected us from the tarmac we had started to long for.
We managed to get through the first river, thanks to the friendly instructions of the local police. But it was solely up to us to cross the second river. To make things worse we had to cross in complete darkness now. Contrary to common sense we still decided to cross. We were only able to estimate how deep the water was in front of our bikes. Only by the different behavior of the water we guessed a way across the river. I hindsight it might not have been the best Idea to keep going. Still we succeeded through a mix of 1. hope, 2. pray and 3. FULL THROTTLE!!!

After we had overtaken the second river we had a tiny meal and set up our tents as quickly as possible. We fell asleep even before our heads hit the pillows.

On Wednesday, sightseeing was on our schedule again. Since Khalig, an employee of the hotel we staid at, also wanted to show us Baku on his day off. That is why we enjoyed an additional very interesting city tour, but this time during the day.
For the evening we already had plans to meet Vahid and Ruslan for diner and beers. Kahlig joined us with pleasure.
We had a crazy funny evening and later that night even went out to an almost empty night club to smoke some shisha.

Still a bit hungover from the night before we had big plans for Thursday: continue working work on the website, doing some laundry, buy new motorcycle oil and meet the French cyclists. Unfortunately our search for the oil dealer turned out to be quite difficult. Basti and Denis decided to split up so that Basti would have a better chance to be on time for the meeting with the French cyclists. Stil Basti was 20 minutes too late the giant flag on the national flag square.
Sadly the two French guys were nowhere to be found, instead Basti witnessed how the second biggest flag of the world broke down piece by piece because of strong winds. It was a bit dangerous but also very spectacular, so he decided to take a video of it and got instantly into trouble with the countless securities.
Apparently it is strictly forbidden to make pictures or videos of the broken flag! The security guys from Azerbaijan were still very friendly and everything could be sorted out, despite the existing language barrier. The only problem was now that Denis had some troubles to find Basti without the giant waving flag...

On Friday, just before we left Baku, we picked up our visa and laundry. Unbelievably, despite the 4 million residents in Baku, we accidentally met the two French cyclists on our way to Ilgar's restaurant. We seized the opportunity to take a closer look at their bikes. They weight unbelievable 70 and 40 Kilogramms!!
After that rode on the highway until we were close to the Iranian border. In the small village Lənkəran, we were welcomed by a friendly resident that instantly showed us a nice and cheap hotel. In the evening we changed our oil in front of the hotel under the observation by numerous friendly and interested locals. The kids all sat on on our bikes and the fathers help us as good as they could :) Fabi had to borrow an Allen key at the local tool store in order to get his oil screw opened. It was no problem because the shop owner sees Germans as very trustworthy.
We also stayed here for one day to finish our videos and the blog. The next day we couldn't enter Iran because the border was closed due to a public holiday in Iran. We found a small nice hotel and Basti was finally allowed to go for his first swim in the Caspian Sea. In the evening we met a group of Iranian business men in the hotel. It turned out to be a very nice meeting with a couple of beers and we gathered the first impressions about Iran. The next morning we tried our luck at the border once more...