Azerbaijan

For those of you planning on going on holiday to Azerbaijan, I’m here to save you trouble 😜.

Okay, that’s not really fair; I mean it’s not that it’s terrible; actually it’s very pleasant, and I had a lovely weekend and met some really nice people! But it just feels like there are better places in the world to see the same kinds of things.

So top marks for trying, but unless you’re trying to visit as many countries in the world as you can, or tick off all the former soviet republics, then here’s my Top Ten, so you don’t have to go yourself.

Number 1: Yanardag – The Mountain of Fire, where natural gas has been burning for thousands of years. If you’ve ever seen the Gates of Hell – i.e. the Darvaza gas crater – in Turkmenistan, then this is less like a Mountain of Fire than a Couple of Small Fires on the Ground.

Number 2: View of the Flame Towers from Number 3: Icheri Sheher, the old part of the city.

Traditional local food; perfectly average.

A lot of the taxis are London cabs. But not all, as you’ll see later…

Number 4: A pretty cool sculpture of Aliagha Vahid, a famous Azerbaijani poet.

Number 5: The Fire Temple in Surakhany – we saw Zoroastrians visiting to worship here, but they didn’t want to have a photo taken with me. The cat was happy to pose though.

Number 6: Petroglyphs in Gobustan National Park – actually, this was really interesting; there are loads of them, and there’s a great museum (which was actually open!). Some of these petroglyphs date back to 10,000 BCE.

Number 7: Baku has a museum with the largest collection of miniature books in the world. Indeed.

Number 8: The Heydar Aliyev Centre in Baku – famously designed by Zaha Hadid.

This is the other sort of taxi. I’m still not quite sure why I had to get out of a perfectly serviceable Hyundai 4×4 ix35 and into a Soviet-era Lada to go off-roading over a muddy mountain….

…to see Number 9: The Mud Volcanoes in Gobustan Reserve. Gobustan is home to almost half of the world’s mud volcanos. They are really just the ejection of a slurry of fine solids caused by the release of gases. We’ve all been there.