After driving through Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, we were confronted with a choice: try and drive through Turkmenistan and catch a ferry across the Caspian Sea to Baku, Azerbaijan or drive across the desert, back into Kazakhstan and catch a ferry across the Caspian Sea. After talking with some fellow travelers, overlanders and the guys from Trabant Trek, we decided that it was going to be a major pain to try and get through Turkmenistan. However, the problem with driving back through Kazakhstan and catching the ferry at Aktau is that not too many people have taken that route, so we had no information on road conditions and the ferry from Aktau, according to several sources, was far less reliable than its counterpart from Turkmenistan. Luckily for us, the day we arrived in Aktau was the day before the ferry left… the next one sailed in a week. After five hours of scrambling to get all kinds of different stamps for paperwork that we could not even read, we boarded the ferry but not before spending another six hours waiting to clear immigration. A couple of “security” bribes later and a few shots of confiscated Georgian hootch with the Kazakh border guards and we were on our way to Baku. It turned out to be an interesting yet extremely trying experience, and even when everything that could have gone right did, was still the longest three days of the expedition.
