Beyond the Vapour Trail Read online

  CHAPTER 17

  Baku on the Caspian Sea

  I finally had a date with the Caspian Sea. It had always held an air of romance for me, but up close she looked a little worn and haggard. Seventy years of toiling for the Soviet economy had clearly left their mark. I could only see that she must once have been beautiful.

  Yet on arrival, being a romantic, and glimpsing the sea not far from my hotel, I noticed the kind of surf that you’d normally expect from an ocean. Bodysurf the Caspian Sea? Cold as it was, the idea warranted investigation. A wander to the sandy beach provided splendid views of oil derricks and platforms not far offshore, and a growing unease about getting tainted by the water. Yes, the sand under my feet was rather grubbylooking. If this were only swept away, they said, it would be grand. But reports suggest that seven maids with seven mops wouldn’t do the trick. The Soviet era had left the government of Azerbaijan with a mess that will require multibillions of dollars and several decades to clear. Nevertheless, some never-say-die people were out on the beach; people were sunning themselves and swimming in the water as though they were dressed for Bali. And it was freezing as far as I was concerned. A little further on I began to see oil sludge.

  Iran threatened to sue Azerbaijan for its oil spills and for allowing BP to continue to dump its waste directly into the sea. Yes, BP – the company that works ‘to manage environmental impacts wherever we do business.’

  Well, perhaps they mean managing the PR, because noone had been ‘working to manage environmental impacts’ anywhere much in Baku. It was recently listed as the world’s most polluted city, and its neighbouring town Sumqayit eclipsed that by being named one of the ten most polluted places on earth, alongside places like Chernobyl, in Ukraine. Rates of cancer, stillbirths and birth defects in Sumqayit are horribly high as part of this legacy. The USSR extracted from Azerbaijan as much oil as it could, as cheaply as possible, and also produced most of its agricultural and industrial chemicals here. And to keep things efficient the toxic wastes were emptied into land, air and sea. The environmental damage to the Absheron Peninsula around Baku leaves you wondering at the idiocy of human systems where decisions can be made by people far away who don’t live close to the consequences. Picture a cocktail of oil sludge, factory chimneys and heavy metals, and then asbestos from ruined buildings a-blowing in the wind. Then to clear the land for farming the Soviets also used toxic defoliants, such as lindane, which is similar to Agent Orange. These chemicals poisoned the soil and then leached into the groundwater, lakes and streams. The peninsula is laden with oil, gas and chemicals. You can smell it.

  During our work we drove around the north side of the Absheron Peninsula to visit a school. Instead of trees punctuating the horizon, there were hundreds of oil derricks. Between houses you could see those oil pumps that resemble drinking-bird ornaments, grotesquely oversized, ducking their heads to drink. Imagine lots of them, slightly out of time. As we left the populated area we began to enter a sector that was an industrial wasteland on a grand scale, collapsed Soviet industry stretching back from the Caspian Sea. Massive factories lay abandoned among decaying infrastructure. In-between buildings and rusting pipes that now headed nowhere. Local herders followed nimble goats and fat-tailed sheep as they nibbled the dried grass that poked out of the toxic-looking soil. In some places, nothing grew.

  We pulled in to one of the huge derelict factories and went inside. It looked like a set for a Terminator movie scene, but oddly the school we were visiting was inside. It was clever use of space, really. Within it they had built small classrooms – an entire set of little buildings inside a huge building, as though it were a school in a glass bottle, dwarfed by the high ceiling of the factory. When the bell rang for play, these children ran around ‘outside’ under the factory roof. Surely one of the world’s least scenic schools.

  This was a school for refugee children of Nagorno-Karabakh, the disputed territory where about eight hundred thousand Azeris were displaced by the clash between Armenia and Azerbaijan in the early 1990s. Tensions had been smouldering, and the conflict blew up as soon as the Soviet Union’s grip began to loosen. More than two hundred thousand Armenians were displaced from Azerbaijan during the war, many from here in Baku and Sumqayit. To this day my Azeri colleagues can’t visit Armenia and my Armenian colleagues can’t visit Azerbaijan, although my Georgian colleagues can. But the Armenian colleagues can work in Abkhazia, formerly part of Georgia, which the Georgian staff aren’t allowed to visit. This region’s relationship status is ‘It’s complicated’.

  There were no classes that day for the tiny school inside the megastructure, so we wandered into a classroom. The children’s work was displayed on the walls. As a former primary school teacher I guessed this was about Grade Three or Four. Their drawings, obviously an assignment, were of a massacre. Armenians butchering Azeris, through a child’s eyes, in coloured pencil, with lots of red scribbles. This was a history lesson, to define for the children who they were. Remember. You are the children of those who were killed and driven out. It was your land. As I looked at the drawings I recalled Yugoslavia – how enmities between ethnic groups had been snap-frozen for an entire generation under Tito. Until he died. And when the thaw came and Yugoslavia’s states began to melt apart, all the virulence and inhumanity returned to exactly where it had left off in the 1940s. And here in a former factory site, young Azeri minds were being shaped, with the deliberation of someone holding a flame to a fuse on a cold day.

  The role of my visit was to assess whether child sponsorship would work in Azerbaijan. I had gradually developed what I’d learned from investigating the sponsorship challenges of PNG into a useful approach for assessing contexts, and so I was often called on to do this. The local office had proposed beginning sponsorship with these Internally Displaced People (IDPs) from Nagorno-Karabakh as one of the neediest communities. They suggested that if the United Nations returned the territory to Azerbaijan, we could move our child sponsorship project with the people because the families would all move back there together. This was the government policy. I had my doubts. And as I spoke to children at a second school, this idea didn’t seem to hold true. Yes, many families were determined to return to Nagorno-Karabakh, and held to the promises of the government. Other children said their parents thought it was unlikely. They didn’t want to return and were trying to build their future here.

  We met with government officials and departments. As in many developing countries, the local government had good intentions, but lacked budget. They valued our partnership as much as we valued theirs, as resources were few. We met with community groups and workers, and families in tawdry apartment blocks. The men seemed to need a shave by midday, and the women wore headscarves and friendly smiles that glimmered gold teeth with every amusement. The ground around them was filled with rubble, syringes, rocks, trash and bottles, with fat-tailed sheep obliviously grazing in between. From apartments, Turkish-style rugs were hung out to dry with the rest of the washing. Part of our existing work was to help these IDPs of Nagorno-Karabakh begin to develop their circumstances economically, through access to credit or whatever was required to help them begin to begin to build their lives. They were living in squalor.

  But there was an underlying challenge that I slowly began to decipher. Although no-one spoke about it, the Azerbaijan government did not want these IDPs to assimilate into the rest of the country. They wanted them to remain here in these semi-ruined neighbourhoods as a community with a single identity: the people who were rightful owners of the land that Armenia had taken from them. If we successfully helped the families to establish themselves within Baku, the Azeri case would be weakened. If this was the government’s intention, then we would never be able to do significant development here. Our work would probably be little more than solidarity and support.

  I visited another school in a semi-ruined apartment complex. Entering the classrooms now had a sad taste to it. I looked at the earnest faces of the children in the c
old room, so cold they wore their coats and hats at their desks. Whatever their dreams, their future was possibly being restricted for political purposes. No matter what their potential, they needed to live here in these substandard buildings. They were Exhibit A in the court of appeal.

  In fairness I was seeing the worst side of Azerbaijan during a quick visit. It’s clear there was emerging wealth through oil and other industries. But the oil income was not reaching regional areas, and most changes were concentrated in the city of Baku. I was disturbed by the statistics we examined. Nearly forty per cent of the ‘employed’ workforce were farmers. Nearly half the children were from households living below the poverty line, and almost one in ten children were dying before their fifth birthday. More than two million people – mostly men – had migrated to countries like Russia seeking employment. This was not just a number – it was more than two million stories. It was causing family instability, and the absence of adequate parental care and affection to children.

  None of these facts fitted comfortably with the picture that the government wanted to project to the international community. At the time the country wanted to host the 2016 Olympics and to join the EU. On the one hand, the government recognised the gaps, and hence appreciated and welcomed the opportunity for us to work together. On the other hand, it wanted to project an image of a prosperous Azerbaijan.

  In the end we didn’t proceed with child sponsorship there; it wasn’t the right funding approach for this area. We continue to work there with grant funding. Yet the picture of the people that emerged was surprising and didn’t quite fit any of my preconceptions. It is a world somewhere between Asian and European, still under the influence of the strong bureaucracy and education of the Soviet era, and with an underlying sophistication and richness of European, Turkish, Russian and Iranian influences. The people were proudly Muslim, but hardly anyone attended the mosque. You could listen to an oud or attend the ballet. The brown eyes and olive skin of the population are sprinkled through with the green or blue eyes and fair skin of children of Russian or other European descent. It was the first Muslim nation to grant women equal political rights, as early as 1918, just before Lenin decided his nation needed Azeri oil to survive. The Soviets invaded. And then Azerbaijan was left with the seventy-year mess of its occupiers.

  And then I did something stupid.

  I was invited to a staff wedding the night before I left. I thought this would be an interesting experience but nothing prepared me for the scale of the undertaking. The reception was held in a massive ballroom, completely filled with guests. The family spared nothing. They spared nothing to the extent that I decided my children would never have my blessing to marry an Azeri, because I would need a second mortgage to pay for an event on even half such a grand scale. The other interesting thing about Azeri culture is that although they are Muslim, they are partial to alcohol, and very generous with it. The night took me back to childhood myths like Aladdin, because the glasses were magical. When you turned your head, your half-drunk glass of beer was full again. And you must then try the wine, they insist, but try as you might, you simply cannot empty the glass. They also love you to try their liquor, very special, in the magic shot glass.

  The Azeri semi-sweet red that night was really something; Georgia produces a similar drop. Azerbaijan has produced wine for thousands of years, but an Azeri colleague told me they had almost killed their industry. In 1985 Gorbachev introduced alcohol reforms because alarming numbers of Soviet citizens were drinking themselves to death. His reforms included orders for Georgia and Azerbaijan to rip up their vineyards. Georgia responded, ‘Yes, we’ll get right onto that,’ and did nothing. But the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic faithfully began to do it. As a result, they lost a lot of ground in wine production, which once made up nearly half the republic’s income.

  I was pulled up to dance. The dance of the women is hypnotic, beautiful, and I was completely entranced by the graceful hand movements and flourishes. But obviously I couldn’t follow her lead. What was I supposed to do? I looked around to try to interpret what the men were doing, but they danced in moves I couldn’t quite get, so I had to make it up. It helped me realise I had lost track of my drink with the magical glasses – not something I usually do. So the time seemed right to grab one of the many, many taxis waiting outside. On a slow night for a taxi driver, waiting outside a wedding of this scale would make sense. I noticed a good layer of snow on the roof of the taxi as I got in. The night had turned extremely cold.

  I arrived back at my hotel and discovered the room was spinning so much I didn’t feel I could lie on the bed without tipping off. I decided the liquor must have been a Soviet rocket fuel recipe, and a walk might be a good idea. I wandered the streets and entered a bar to escape the cold, but lots of women at the bar were hoping I would buy them a drink. I sought refuge by striking up a conversation with a couple instead, and they invited me to their place, which was ‘not far’. My sense of adventure came to the fore. See an Azeri home, have coffee and return to my hotel. This seemed like a brilliant idea. At the time.

  Only, as we drove, it seemed to be a lot further than they had suggested. It looked like we were heading out of town. I asked how far, and they again said ‘not far’, so I asked for a specific time: ‘Five minutes? Fifteen minutes?’ The answer was thirty minutes. I had a plane to catch the next morning, and didn’t like my chances of getting a lift back tonight. I asked them to stop. I stepped out into street and they drove away into the Baku night. There was snow around, and I was now beginning to realise how underdressed I was for the occasion.

  I now didn’t know where I was. I thought we had made two major turns right. I walked for a long time but began to wonder if we had made three major turns, not two. I didn’t know. I wasn’t recognising anything. I just needed to remember the name of the hotel I was staying at. But I could not. I mean, how could anyone be so stupid as to not remember the name of the hotel they are staying in? But in my work, I am often driven around, as I was in Baku, and at no point during this trip was I required to remember the name. So I was in the snow-laden streets, not dressed warmly enough, with no local language, and no idea how to describe where I needed to be. This was insane.

  In the night there was the occasional man or small group wandering around, so I stopped someone. He didn’t speak English. I tried a second person and a third. No-one spoke English. I kept wandering, wondering if I was heading towards my hotel or completely askew. After a long time I came to an internet cafe and thought I might have more luck with English. A young guy stepped out.

  ‘Excuse me, do you speak English?’

  ‘Yes, what’s the problem?’

  I had found someone at least to communicate with. But I couldn’t tell him the name of my hotel. I suggested if we could find a phone book, we could ring one of my colleagues – albeit in the middle of the night. We tried a fast food store that was closing, but they simply waved us away. I asked him if there was an Australian consulate, and he said no, but there was a US embassy. So we took a taxi there. Outside was an American soldier on guard. In the cold.

  ‘Excuse me, I’m an Australian citizen and I’m lost. I’m hoping I could talk to someone about making some phone calls – just access to a phone book.’

  He looked at me. He thought about it.

  ‘No, I don’t think so, sir.’

  ‘I only need a phone book. My mother’s an American citizen,’ I added enthusiastically.

  He thought about it. Somehow that didn’t connect with anything he knew, so he stuck to his position.

  ‘Ah … no, I don’t think so.’

  I remember thinking, That’s why you’re out here in the cold on guard and everyone else is inside. It wasn’t a big ask, really, I thought. But helping me apparently wasn’t in the interests of US security. The ANZUS Treaty wasn’t helping me at all.

  We spent three hours trying to find my hotel. I finally had success when I described some trees near it, and its rela
tive distance from the Caspian Sea. The young guy thought he knew the place, and so somewhere around four-thirty a.m. I found my room. I was frozen. My head was now completely clear.

  In Cambodia a couple of years later, I got lost with my colleague Melissa in Phnom Penh. We pulled over a tuk-tuk driver who didn’t speak English. So I pulled out of my pocket the hotel card with the name of the hotel in English and Khmer. I had learnt a lesson in Baku.

  Travel idiot warning #51: Remember where you’re staying. Grab a card from the hotel before you go out.

  CHAPTER 18

  Sudden Appearances in Peru

  If you are on the outskirts of Lima at the right time, a miracle occurs overnight, a little like mushrooms or Christmas mornings for children. Because when you wake up a completely new town has appeared on the nearby hill. Literally. An entire town with buildings that weren’t there the night before.

  It’s usually a bare hill on the edge of town. In Peru it’s common to put big statues or crosses on the peaks, a Catholic way of discouraging alternative religious practices on hilltops. So clearly the high places here are ripe for miracles from one god or another. By morning an entire suburb of homes has appeared, including the buildings – albeit a little makeshift – and each holds a family in their designated address on their designated street. OK, the new locale may be missing a few details like paving, electricity, water, sewerage and street signs. But this is substantially how it will be. There can be two or three thousand new homes in the morning– sometimes twice that number.

  It used to be illegal, this squatting, while a small oligarchy sat on most of the land in the country. By the 1960s, 0.1 per cent of the population controlled sixty-one per cent of Peru’s farmland. I assume the wealthy put in their thumbs and pulled out their plums, perhaps gave a little donation to charity and said, ‘My what a good boy am I.’ Most of the other farms were tiny, barely-scratch-a-living patches that poor families often had to pay rent to exist on – they didn’t even own the little plot of dust beneath them. Over decades, successive governments progressed or halted a slow-motion arm-wrestle for land reform. By the late 1990s, a breakthrough law was passed: if a property has not had improvements made within ten years, the title becomes open. The powerful elite held so much land they couldn’t even use it all.