After a lovely breakfast with our hosts we rolled down to the port. To our delight we were informed that a ship is scheduled to sail this evening!! Awesome! We purchased the tickets and then waited to be let on the boat. At about 4pm they started calling people over for passport control. We were so excited to soon be sailing across the Caspian sea.
The border guard kept scrutinizing our passports and eventually turned to us with an expressionless face and told us our Azeri visa had expired which means we were not allowed to leave the country until we pay the $400 per person fine and obtain an exit permit from the immigration office. WHAT!!!!
At first we thought it was a joke, then a misunderstanding and after a while we realized we were trapped in a real live nightmare. What a blow! The worst of it was that this was not our fault but the visa information we received at the embassy in Batumi had been incorrect.
We begged the officers to let us pay the fine on the spot but they just looked at us with their condescending, cold eyes, shook their heads, pointed out the door and repeated the word "Immigration".
Great! First of all, it was Saturday so the Immigration office would close in about an hour and the chances of us getting there in time were slim because we did not know where it was and the officer's directions were vague. With a taxi it may have been possible but there was no way we would leave our bikes with all our stuff at the port in the hands of these nasty officers. We gave it a try though and rode into town. There we asked for directions but ended up getting sent to the wrong office by a well meaning individual who just did not know any better. Then the clock struck 6, the Immigration office, where ever it is, closed and would not open again until Monday. We had been told that the exit permit is only valid for 48 hours so waiting for another boat was out of the question because they generally run every 7-10 days and a flight to Kazakhstan would cut too deep into our travel budget for us to continue going east. Our only way out would be a night train back to Georgia on Monday and then a cheap flight to Switzerland.
We slowly started to grasp the fact that the Kazakh and Uzbek visas we had picked up the day before would never have a stamp on them. In other words, our trip was over. This hurt. I have never felt such intense disappointment in my life.
Pictures: sad bikes outside the customs office; the ship we would never get to sail on :-(
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