Lonely Planet: The Forbidden Fruit

After bidding farewell to Tbilisi, we hopped an overnight train to Baku. After waiting for almost two hours on the Georgian side of the border to make it past customs and passport control, we were relieved when Azeri passport control breezed through the train. Little did we know we still had the formidable Azeri customs regime to deal with.

After entering our compartment, the Azeri customs official gave a very thorough look through all of the bags of the Uzbek family we were travelling with. When they realized we were Westerners, they sent over the special English-speaking customs official just for us. After he cursorily patted down our bags, we thought we had gotten lucky and were done with all the border formalities. And then we realized Azeri customs had bigger fish to fry then searching our bags for bootleg Georgian chacha - they were after our copy of Lonely Planet: Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan.

When the customs official first picked up the LP I'd left lying on the top bunk and launched into a diatribe about Nagorno-Karabakh, I didn't really realize what was going on and figured he just wanted to practice his English/spout some nationalist ideology for the foreigners. So I just kind of stood there and smiled and nodded as politely as I could. But Brian put together pretty quickly that he was going to confiscate our LP because it listed N-K as part of Armenia, rather than Azerbaijan (which, incidentally, it doesn't, but there wasn't really much point in arguing with him). After complaining that we wouldn't be able to find our hotel without it, he offered to let us rip out only the Baku pages. I wheeled and dealed and talked him into letting us keep the Around Baku pages, but he would not budge on Northern and Southern Azerbaijan.

So thanks, Azeri customs official. Now we will never know what wondrous sites lie beyond Around Baku. Maybe there is a magical city in the hills of Northern Azerbaijan where fairies and unicorns roam? Who knows. I guess we'll just have to stick to the baby cemeteries and burning oil wells.