Today we are being bussed from Sheki to Baku. It will take six hours and apparently Baku is snarled up with an International marathon!! We have gone over mountains with snaking roads and steep inclines. And we have just paid eight US dollars each for a pIece of bread and three small tough pieces of meat. In other words , this is rip off country. The hotel was fairly awful. As an example, there was no hot water in the wash hand basin but scalding water out of the shower and no cold water. I have never slept in a place with so many cobwebs and someone had an enormous bracket fungus in their bathroom. Not to mention, the dirty toilets. And the guide was awful. The net result is that we cannot wait to leave this country.
Having said all that, the food at the hotel was good and served in little kiosks in a rather nice garden and dinner last night was a real pleasure.
It's the luck of the draw I suppose. A typical ripoff example is my purchase of an embroidered cap for eight maenats. They want to be paid in US dollars and she translated this as 15 dollars which it is rffnot. So. I handed her 11 dollars and told her that was correct. She did not complain, so probably the maenat price was inflated. But it is like that all the time - with every transaction.
The problem with the guide is that we now do note believe anything she says. She wanted to take us to see a mosque and I started asking questions. It turns out it burnt down some years ago and is being repaired so there is nothing to see. So the group is revolting. It was the last straw.
So the palace and the Albanian church were seeing but we saw a lot of nothing special. Baku, on the other hand, is an expensive Western city with branches of Prada, Armani, Porsche et cetera. The old city is very fine and I wish we had been turned loose to wonder. We are flying to Turkmenistan in 30 minutes and you won't hear from me for two days.
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