Reilly Traveling Circus

Posting this from Aktau, more specifically from the Rixos Water World Resort south of the city and north of the port where our cars will debark on an 18 hour ferry ride to Baku, Azerbaijan.

I’ve never been on a cruise ship but feel like we are on the land version of it here. We sent our car off on a trailer from Almaty for the 3,000+km drive to the port here and then headed to the Almaty Airport for a flight to Aktau. We learned a couple of things. First, Google reviews of the Almaty airport were highly inaccurate. We arrived expecting long lines and filthy conditions and were pleasantly surprised to find a modern, clean airport. We also learned no check in before 2 hours before the flight and that Kazakhs do not believe in orderly queuing when boarding planes. No boarding by groups here! During our flight, which was full, we were serenaded by a screaming baby in the row behind us. A one hour car drive from the airport to here. The Ransco brothers were in the same situation and we traveled as a group of 4.

The resort here is very nice but after 4 days, it has grown stale. It is an all inclusive resort, so we’ve been wearing wrist bands that allow us food and drink, as well as entrance to the water park and amusement park. It is right on the shore of the Caspian Sea and has the largest swimming pool I’ve ever seen: a salt water pool that is about 200 meters long. As a sign of how boring it is, I have been able to lay claim to being (by far) the oldest person to go down three of the water slides in the park.

The older of the readers may recall that about 35 years ago, General Noriega hid in the Vatican Embassy in Panama to avoid arrest after the US invaded the country. To drive him out, US troops played very loud music (Gun n’ Roses, Doors) in an attempt to get him to surrender. We have a bit of that dynamic here. Promptly at 10 am every day, the loudspeakers at the poolside bar/buffet crank up with a variety of genres that share the common characteristics of being overly loud, very repetitive and frequently interspersed with unintelligible, at least to us, DJs yelling into the sound system. This lovely serenade continues to 11 pm. We are in a room overlooking the central courtyard and have a direct auditory ‘line of sound’ to this lovely feature of the resort. During the day, we flee to the far end of the pool where the sound is more muted.

Today is our last day here. We depart tonight for Baku on a chartered flight. The cars go by ferry. We are scheduled for a new engine supplied by Tuthill from England. I can’t say enough positive about how great they have been, especially given that we didn’t have a prior relationship.