Into Baku

A COP29 (mis)Adventure

I’m not sure how to determine which day of my trip this is. I’m still in the same clothes and haven’t been to bed yet, so it still feels like day 1. It has been a little over 24 hours in real time since I flew out of South Bend, so maybe it’s day 2. But the date on my phone that automatically updates with the time zones is now on the third different day. This trip has been pretty rough on the body clock: flying through the night over the Atlantic from Atlanta, Georgia, then a long layover in Germany, and flying through the night again — though not all the way through, as we’ll be landing at 3am local time. As I write this, according to the dot on my Google maps, we’ve just entered the airspace of Azerbaijan from Georgia (the country, not the state I was in yesterday… or was that 2 days ago?).

Long-time loyal readers of this newsletter will know that I’m always keen for an adventure and that my adventures turn into misadventures with alarming regularity. Such was the case again today. My traveling companion since Georgia (the state, not the country we’ve just flown over) has been Colin, the producer of the podcast he and I have been putting out for five years or so. We’ve been commissioned on this trip (and funded by a grant) to make some episodes about COP29. But there are several other episodes and series we have brewing, and when we take a trip we like to double up objectives where we can, squeezing more out of the carbon we’re responsible for emitting by traveling like this. 

One of those ideas in the works is to do an episode about ancient humans, through the lens of archeological sites we’ve visited. We’ve seen some remarkable old petroglyphs in Arizona, some funny graffiti in runes on the walls of a four thousand year old tomb in Scotland, and I’ve ducked into caves every chance I’ve had where there is art preserved. When we saw that we’d have an 8 hour layover in Frankfurt for this trip, we looked to see if there might be anything interesting in the area that would complement these other experiences. I saw the Neanderthal Museum, on the site of the first Neanderthal fossils that were judged to be a different species from us. It looked pretty interesting and worthwhile, so we started planning. Well, kind of.

Both of us had looked at Google maps and saw you could take a couple trains to get there in about two hours. And this is Germany, so we expected it would be fairly easy to navigate — I had German in high school afterall! We weren’t seated together on the plane, but when we got off, we said, “should we try it?” and we answered ourselves in the affirmative. So we started following signs for the train station. Right when we got to the track, the train we needed was just getting ready to leave — literally: as we were coming down the escalator, the doors started dinging and we kind of glanced at each other and bolted for it. I actually had to stick my arm into the narrowing slit of the closing doors, trusting that German engineering wouldn’t lead to the doors collapsing on my arm and dragging me down the track. Thankfully they opened again and we hopped on and found a couple of seats, figuring that we’d be able to sort out things like tickets onboard.

There was WiFi on the train, and we both set about trying to make a plan. Pretty quickly we realized we were on a really fast train. We made it to the app and it gave real time data: 300km/hr. And then we found the ticket prices. Uh oh… It appeared that for people who just walk onto the train like we did, it was going to be about $450 for the two of us to go see the Neanderthal Museum and get back to the airport. That wasn’t going to fit into our budget. So I started working up in my mind some sort of plea deal for when the conductor came around. But he never came. And 45 minutes later we were approaching the train station in Bonn. We decided again without much preplanning to bolt for the doors.

In the train station, we found a cheery man at the information desk and tried to explain our situation. He typed some things into his computer and printed out a sheet that had instructions for how to get to the Museum. “Yes”, I said, “but wie viel kostet es?” (I remembered how to ask how much something costs from high school German.) He punched a few more keys and then wrote down the numbers 370. That’s Euros, which are about the same as dollars these days. Still not going to work for us. So we asked about getting back to the airport. More keys punched… 160. Hmm… so this high speed train is pretty expensive. But now we’re feeling stuck. We needed to get back to the airport and we were more than 100 miles away. Too far to walk.

The return train wasn’t for a couple hours, so we walked around Bonn (or the subsidiary town of Siegburg where the train station is). We sat in a coffee shop that was part of the public library and researched all the other options. Didn’t see any. We walked through a little farmers market. And poked our heads into a Catholic church that had organ music going. I said a little prayer and kept working on my plea deal speech. 

We boarded the return train with a bunch of other people looking like they were headed to the airport and found some seats. There weren’t any turnstiles or anything to go through or other barriers to just walking onto the train. Maybe in “socialist” European countries this is all on the honor system? Maybe there would be no conductor this time either? We felt a little like hobos jumping onto a boxcar, looking for a free ride, but since we didn’t really use the train to accomplish any goals, maybe it wasn’t too unethical?

Well, the conductor did come looking for ticket confirmations. I started the plea deal with, “Untschuldigung mir bitte, meine Deutsch ist nicht so gut.” He nodded, and of course he spoke English, so I continued, “I’m very sorry, we made a mistake this morning at the airport. We jumped on the train just as it was leaving and didn’t know what we were getting into.” I had several more sentences of groveling prepared before I was going to ask if there was any way we could get out of this unfortunate situation without having to pay the whole fare, and about how I would be eternally grateful and pray for blessings on his children and descendants to the seventh generation, but he interrupted me: “Airport, 2nd stop.” And he walked away. “Danke schön!” I said after him, and to God.

Back at the airport we had several hours to kill. Colin’s credit card got us into a lounge for a bit, but it wasn’t that great and we really wanted to lie down somewhere. So we eventually made it to our gate several hours ahead of time and could stretch out over three seats in a quiet area. I think I nodded off for about 20 minutes.

We met three others from the CCOP group who are on the same flight to Baku. I normally fly out of South Bend on Delta and have done so enough that I routinely get bumped up to nicer tiers of travel. It was a bit of a shock to be on this non-Delta flight and be stuck in a middle seat on a very crowded plane for 4 hrs and 50 minutes. On my right was a large German man who overflowed his allotted space by quite some margin. Our only communication was when he asked in a thick German accent (though in English), “Can you organize your air so it is not on me?” In my sleep deprived state, it took me a minute to catch on: “organize my air?” I asked, wondering how offensive I must smell by this many hours of traveling. “Yes” he said, this time pointing to the air vent above us, “please organize your air so it is not blowing on me.” Ah… gotcha. Entschuldigung. I organized my air, then put in my earbuds and put Volcano Choir on repeat and tried to nod off again while sitting stiffly in that confined space. I only ever got to the stage where my head bobs and then snaps back awake. But we made it.

We arrived at 3am and got on a courtesy bus for COP29 participants. It got us to the Old City in Baku. From there we five and our luggage got into car that comfortably seats four people without luggage to go toward our hotel. I say “toward” because it dropped us off at this construction site with a guard standing outside, and then the car took off. We said “Cityview Comfort Hotel?” and he looked at us like we were speaking another language… which we were. So it’s 4:45am in Baku and the 5 of us are standing on the side of the road with our luggage talking to a guard at a construction site who doesn’t speak our language. Nothing sketchy about that?

We discovered that we were about 3/4 of mile from the hotel, and so walked the fifteen minutes to get there. Fortunately, there was someone at reception to receive us; less fortunately, they didn’t have their records in order. After 30 minutes of haggling (in as good of a nature as our journey allowed), we were going to be escorted to two different apartments. The problem was that they didn’t have any more keys to give us, so we were going to have bang on the door so the people already there (from our team) would let us in. It’s now about 5:30am. The banging on the door didn’t rouse anyone. We later found out it was just a single woman in our apartment in one of the rooms, and she heard the banging but didn’t think it was prudent to go investigate. It took a series of messages through WhatsApp to finally sort things out and bring her to the door. Then we discovered there were three beds in the apartment and four of us. We asked the other group, and they had three beds for five people. But we sorted things out well enough for one night (that was now going to last about 2 hours).

We did more busses today to get to COP29 grounds and get our badges that will let us into the proceedings beginning Monday (don’t ask me how many days that is from now). So I’ll report primarily on non-COP business for the next couple of posts. See you then.

Samuel, Jim, Colin, and Katie getting our badges