The whole thing will end with a decidedly closed-casket affair. One hundred and eighteen degrees, plus a zillion percent humidity. That's amateur hour compared to Baku. But if there is a fouler, more disgusting body of water on the planet, I can't imagine how or where. A ruddy sludge of brackish raw sewage swirls slowly around balls of spilled crude oil, all of it supporting a flotilla of litter, medical waste bags and dead quadrupeds that may or may not be mammals.
Noxious gases pop into the atmosphere with each lethargic wave.
When my companions got back from their trashy swim, a miasma of moist toxins rose off their stained clothing in clouds. The Caspian, known during the Soviet era as the world's leading source of caviar from a fish called the Caspian sturgeon, suffers the horrific misfortune of covering the world's largest untapped oil reserves. If nothing else, Baku provides a textbook argument against putting all one's economic eggs in a single foreign-owned basket. But efforts to lure tourists to this ancient place fell apart after independence in 1991, and the Tower district now consists of some decrepit Russian restaurants, sad joints hawking ratty Soviet-era postcards and the Tower itself, which frankly isn't any big deal. Oil wells are pumping out the last of what are, compared to the Kazakh strike, tiny reserves.