When it came it was hardly luxurious. A smartly dressed ship's officer got into a fight with a passenger and punched him in the face. The food was poor, services primitive and the crossing rough.
But the journey was still a lucky one: the same ship, Mercury 2, an Azeri cargo ferry with some passenger accommodation, sank in stormy seas off Baku later in the year with the loss of over 40 lives.
The sight of Baku was welcome indeed after the crossing: all cypress trees and parks nestling among quiet squares on a dramatic hillside tumbling down towards the incomparable Baku bay.
From there the road on to Tbilisi, in Georgia, is another long, tortuous journey, and the Azeri-Georgia border crossing is no easier than that between Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.
But to arrive in Tbilisi, with its unique skyline of Christian churches quite unlike any found elsewhere in the world, and its balconies peering over narrow streets, is to move to a different world from Muslim Baku, dominated by an old town of mosques, fortresses and towers.
All across former Soviet Central Asia and the Caucasus, the travelling can be hell. But the cities and towns, the seas and deserts, the mountains and monuments, are like nowhere else on earth.
And if there's no way out of Bukhara, who really minds?
RSS