Episode 18

After a couple of days spent in Tbilisi and with the car keys working again, both sets, I was bundled back into the car into my usual possie propped up by pillows, and we took our leave of this rather charming place. Mind you the traffic chaos we encountered on our way out was enough to give any one gray hairs, perhaps that's why D’s hair is so silver.

As we headed east towards Azerbaijan we again passed through a wine producing area but that petered out after a while and all we saw were sheep, goats, geese, and a few cows and pigs as the vegetation became more sparse.

It took some finding but we did so eventually, the Bodba convent that is: It is in the small church here that St Nino is buried in a tomb edged with silver and with a turquoise cloisonné halo, L sneaked an illicit photo while no-one was about. The setting is rather pretty in amongst tall cypress and other pines. There is a holy well 800m down a steep hillside but after battling Tbilisi traffic D didn’t have the energy to visit the well. Going down would have been fine, coming back up, well, we won’t contemplate that:

My lot stood at the 'passport window’ on the Azerbaijan border post fairly early on bleak overcast morning and shivered in the wind. It took a bit of time for the paperwork to be processed as it did for everyone who was there but then we were on our way again, still in the car. There had been much speculation about whether the car would be allowed into Azerbaijan as it is right hand drive and technically speaking, not allowed into Azerbaijan. L and done quite a bit of research into this matter and found that most tourists with right hand drive cars were allowed in, however some had been asked for a bribe, so they said. We had to pay €40 car tax and insurance, but every foreign vehicle has to pay that.

The road improved dramatically as we headed off in the general direction of Baku, the Capital and largest city of this oil rich nation. Mind you many of the back roads are just the same as in Georgia.

We took a detour to Shaki to see the palace there. Well it isn’t really a palace but the only remaining building that was just one of about 40 originally that were built inside a fortress wall by Khan Haci Calabi in the mid 18th century. It has only 4 big rooms, 2 on each storey and was used mainly for business but with a ladies room and a guest room upstairs.

It is beautifully, if somewhat over poweringly decorated in the Islamic style. Some has been restored but much is original. The stained glass doors are very well crafted, each piece of glass is separated by a small piece of wood, there are no nails or any metal pieces holding it together. The floors would have had carpets that mirrored the pattern on the ceiling. Much of the damage and loss of furnishings happed during the early soviet period. Local craftsmen still make these windows and also carpets here but no-one seemed to be around when we went looking for them in the tipping rain. Ah, yes, it was raining yet again:

A very touristy little town is Lahic, famed for its copper beaters and carpet weavers, again we had no luck in seeing them work although we did get to see many of their wares when finally some of the little shops opened about 11am. A couple of the men told D that they had made the things for sale but the only one we saw working was a smithy making horse shoes. There were a lot of horses in this pretty hilly area. We had passed stockmen driving both cattle and sheep through the gorge that we passed through to get here.

Then we arrived in Baku: The traffic seemed quite chaotic to L though D insisted that it really wasn’t too bad. Usually one sees many small hotels on the way into a big city, however we didn’t see any coming into Baku, and not knowing what the city centre would be like it was decided that we would stay at one of the better, and very expensive hotels just a few k’s from the centre.

It seems that my lot had to get their visas registered within 3 days of entering the country. The easiest way to have this done is by staying at a hotel that will register it. Not all tourists are aware of this law, not all hotels will register the visas, with the result that many tourists are fined very large sums for not registering their visas. My lot chose this hotel because the people there said they would register the visas as they are well aware of this regulation. Let’s just hope that they did do the registration:

This city has ancient roots. There is a tower known as the ‘maidens tower’ and although some archaeologists believe it to be as late as 12th century, others argue that it could be as old as the 2nd millennia BC. Old coins found here date from the 5th century BC leading Archaeologists to think that it was a trading centre at that time.

Baku is known as a windy city and it didn’t disappoint: Sometimes it nearly blew us away then we would turn a corner and be out of it for a while. Plenty of pedestrian malls and small parks to stroll around in this incredibly clean city centre. Apparently the soil for the gardens has been imported and the water for this desert city comes via canals and pipeline from the Russian Caucasus mountains. Later, on the trip north we travelled near this canal for quite a way.

L remembers her Dad saying that he had been here during in WW2, how come, we have no idea, didn’t ask those sorts of questions, but he hated the place and said that it was filthy just as Cairo was. L also remembers reading something in more recent times about it being a very dirty and quite rough place. Perhaps its because they had the Eurovision Song Contest here in 2012 and next year will hold the European Games that they have cleaned the place up. Not only are the streets almost totally free of litter, the building look as if they have all been sandblasted they are so clean. Many of them are built of a yellow sandstone and some are a cream limestone and both almost glow in the sunshine. Not that we got much of that during this visit.

We visited the Shirvanshah Palace and took a guided tour. It has had extensive renovations of the exterior to bring it to this standard but the interior hasn’t been re-done so the guide could only tell us how it might have looked. It was built in the 15th century but fell into disuse when the shahs one surviving son was killed in battle and the winner moved the capital elsewhere and just left the place. The Shah died at the age of 100 years in 1501 and is buried in the mausoleum here along with his wife and 4 of his children, sons. We also climbed that Maidens Tower, mentioned earlier, and got a good view over the city and the bay in a brief spell of sunny weather.

With the outlook still very bleak we headed north to the Quba region. The outer suburbs of Baku are full of new housing estates with large and small block houses all set behind a high concrete or stone wall. Between wall and road is a 4 or 5m wide strip of bright green grass sometimes with a small area of brightly coloured flowers in a garden. It must take one heck of a lot of that water that comes all the way from Russia to keep that grass so green in this very arid place.

Along the way we called into a National Park but found nothing of any interest, some scrub covered hills and plenty of gravel trucks going back and forth. In this area too, we saw what the locals refer to as Candy Cane Mountain because of its pink and white strata. Apparently it’s full of cone shaped fossils but my lot didn’t want to sink up to their eyeballs in the gooey mud to have a closer look.

There isn’t much in autumn colour yet. It seems that big swathes of the hillsides have just turned brown as if a bush fire has been through, it hasn’t: Now and again there are a few trees that have turned a lovely yellow but no rich tapestry of autumn colours that L loves so much.

At Quba we even found a small tourist info office. The girl spoke some English and gave us directions to some sites but she didn’t have a local map. From her directions we found the old bathhouse with its beehive domes sprouting grass. Didn’t venture into the dark interior, thought it best not to.

In 2007 a mass grave was discovered when some earth works were being done. In 1918 there were several large massacres around the country perpetrated by Armenian Bolsheviks. Evidence of these events were taken to the Paris peace talks in late 1918, however a war weary Europe apparently ignored it, and because of its annexation by the Russian soviets in 1920 the whole episode got forgotten. The discovery of this mass grave under a kids play ground in 2007 sparked a lot of research and unearthing of some of the events. The victims are mostly Muslims, but also a few Jews and other minorities. It’s claimed now that all the different ethnic groups got on well together until this happened but perhaps there was some catalyst that sparked such reprisals. Being a predominately Muslin country now we are only getting one side of the story. It was at the end of the Ottoman Empire so who knows what had been happening during that period.

The tourist info girl had mentioned a couple of good villages to visit and gave us some directions, however one road was closed and the other didn’t lead anywhere so we gave up on that. With light misty drizzle and very low cloud we can’t see very much anyway. Instead we drove on up to Qusar and up into the mountains passing a new ski resort that is still under construction with two of the hotels and a ski run open during the ski season. We went over a pass at 1727m and down into the mountain village of Laza. It used to be the end of the road but more road is under construction beyond the village.

D then tried by a different route to get to the village of Khinaliq that the tourist office girl had recommended but with the rain the steep mountain road looked a little too daunting for David beyond Susay so we gave it a miss and returned to Quba and then headed back towards Baku. Called at Five Finger mountain and both my lot climbed up as high as the ladders and steps went. Their excuse for not taking me was that they had to climb up steel ladders but as it turned out most of the way was much easier concrete steps with only two short bits of steel ladders for them to climb. They came to a small one room house at the top where a family lives apparently. Got a great view of the coastal plain and the Caspian below:

Then we went onto the Abseron Peninsula. This is really the area that gives the country its name as a ‘land of fire’. Most of the peninsula is now full of housing estates that makes it just one big suburb of Baku. There are a great many oil derricks to be seen all around and even a couple of old castle ruins, not that we could find them. But it’s the fire that is legendary. Gas seeps from the ground and at some point in time has been lit so that a flame burns continuously. Some have burnt for only a few years but over the millennia there have been fires in different places where gas has been escaping. It is here too, that oil was once collected from pools. The drilling for oil has released much of the pressure so that there are not many fires now. We had seen one near Candy Cane Mountain, now we saw the ‘wall of fire’. This one is about 10m long where the gas escapes at the bottom of a small hill. It’s nothing spectacular to see, but there aren’t a lot of places where one can see something like this.

The peninsula is very dry and mostly flat. Along its northern coast are some beach enclosures with unbrellas, little cabanas, cafes and restaurants, all of which you have to pay to enter and most are now closed for the season. What we did see of the beach didn’t temp L to grab her swimmers and head for the water. In another area we saw massive apartment developments then in another we drove over a rough sandy track for about 10ks through a rubbish dump. Just imagine your worse nightmare of what a rubbish dump can be like and imagine it spread over 10k’s and that’s what this is like. Then we came to a suburb of new houses and a large area of plastic covered green houses. This was fairly near the SE end of the peninsula, the pointy bit. The climate here would be fairly mild in winter but all the water for those green houses has to come all the way from Russia. Gee, if this lot upset the Russian they could get mighty thirsty.

We had seen one solar farm, not yet complete, on a bit of waste ground near a highway interchange, and a big wind farm in the same vicinity. Now as we drove back towards Baku we saw more solar farms being constructed on waste ground near highway interchanges. Not as pretty perhaps, but far more practical than those bright green water thirsty lawns.

Driving across Baku while D was battling the traffic chaos L saw a few interesting buildings but she was a bit too slow with the camera so didn’t get any photos. When we got out onto the SW side of the city we looked for the oil field used in one of the James Bond films but perhaps because of the new 6 lane highway we couldn’t see it. But we couldn’t fail to see the massive offshore oil derrick, though L did fail to get a photo thanks to large trucks passing at the time.

Near the town of Qobustan we visited the reserve where there are some ancient petroglyphs believed to be from the Bronze age or earlier. Some of them are quite easy to make out, others have been made then later ones done over them so they are quite hard to distinguish. A boat was very clear, along with many human figures, horses, bulls, and a deer. Not so easy to discern are things such as Shaman and pregnant women without heads or hands. We had visited the new museum first so had a good idea of what to look for, however, many of the better drawings are in an area not open to the public, now isn’t that often the case! That really peeves L who loves these things.

The petroglyphs were well up on the hillside, at the bottom of the same hill is a rock with a Roman inscription from the 1st cent AD. It was done by a centurian, and it is the most eastern Roman inscription so far discovered. This is the only proof that they ever passed this way, perhaps this fellow lost his way when chasing a bit of local skirt.

Not far away on another hill top we found the mud volcanoes. These are quite quirky little things. Several large mounds of mud that have built up over time have small craters of bubbling mud on the top and/or out the sides. Some were glurping away quite nicely with others didn’t appear to be doing very much today. Some days they are more active than others, aren’t we all! I kept having to dodge mud splatters while L took a short bit of video.

Then we headed a bit further south to the Sirvan National Park where we saw the Caucasian antelope. These are the only remaining animals of this species. The fellow in charge told us that 30 years ago there were only 77 of these animals left, now there are 10,000 in this park and a few have been given to Georgia so that they can breed them up. Although we saw quite a few they were too far off for photos. They are something similar to a Thompsons gazelle that my lot were familiar with in Africa all those years ago. On the lake in the park there are a wide variety of birds too including a large flock of flamingos.

We had planned to stay much longer in the park but the rain set in and the already muddy roads became extremely slippery so after a couple more hours we gave up and made our way out of the park and continued on southward. We are heading into the Talysh mountains near the Iranian border.

© Lynette Regan 7th October 2014