Saturday 15th June

After a fairly ordinary buffet breakfast we asked for a local map only to be told they didn't have one. To our surprise the hotel doesn't have any brochures for tourists & all we could get was a staff member pointing out to us how to get to the old walled town.

We walked across to the old town, had a coffee & then explored the lanes & byways of the place before retreating to the hotel for a rest.

In the afternoon we received a call from another person on the tour & we met up & walked with them down to the fountain square & as he had a Lonely Planet, we went to one of its recommended restaurants & had a great local meal.

Sunday 16th June

After breakfast we all went for about 10 minutes' walk down to the sea front to see the Caspian Sea, the world's biggest lake. The water looked Ok although there was a fine oil film in places & we spotted quite a few fish about 70-80 cm in length. Between the main road & the sea is a park area about 50m in width with various cafes & other buildings between grassed, treed areas.

We had local tea in an open air café & walked along admiring the buildings, before returning via the old town & the fountains park in the early afternoon.

At 6pm we met up with most of the other members of our party & Ramin, our guide in Azerbaijan for the next few days. This was followed up with a very poor dinner at our hotel. Our group of 12 includes a couple of men & 2 women travelling alone, another couple from NZ, a Canadian guy & an Australian couple with the husband's sister. All have traveled extensively & some are virtual travel 'twitchers', intent on maximizing the number of countries visited.

Monday 17th June

Today we set out southwards from Baku hugging the coast, whilst Ramin gave us a rapid fire description of what we were seeing as we rode along in a 30 seater bus.

To our amazement we passed myriads of oil donkeys within 10k of the city in a flat desolate landscape. Apparently, they can only pump oil up from about 100-150m below the ground so the fields are incredibly close to the surface. On the seaward side there were several offshore rigs a few km out & the coast has been developed with new housing, a port & a shipyard to build & repair ships & oil rigs. A huge jack up rig, with its pylon legs in the air, is now used as a training ground for fire control as this is an ever-present problem.

At about 50 k we left the main road in a minivan to climb into the desolate hills behind to see an active 'mud volcano', something we had never heard of. This bizarre phenomenon is a series of small hills only a couple of metres in height which bubble out mud making a trail of drying mud around them. The bubbling puddles are only about 20-30cm in diameter & the mud is quite cool. It is driven by gas pressure up to 9km below the surface & is slightly eerie. The general countryside is extremely arid with some salt bush & it was a long way to go to see WA Goldfields countryside.

After our visit there we moved on to see prehistoric rock carvings at Oobustan, which are similar in many ways to those of the aborigines in Australia. It had warmed up & was in the mid 30s so clambering around was thirsty work. Returning we visited a fine recent, museum on the rock art of the area before driving back to Baku for a late, very welcome, lunch break.

In the afternoon we visited the fire temple of the Zoroastrians at Ateshgah. This is a rebuilt complex where continuous fires burned as fire was worshipped by them. Zoroastrianism started in Iran in the 6th century BC & is now mainly continued by the Parsees in India. The fires were kept burning from natural gas emissions but now are from processed gas. It was a strange place to us in a walled complex with small rooms inside the walls.

From there we visited a 14th century castle at Mardakan, which comprised a square wall of about 30m enclosing a keep of 15 m by 15m. What interested us here was the large holes in the limestone floor about 3m in diameter & 2 m depth. These were granaries to store food in the event of a siege.

Then on our way back to Baku we visited the Yarnadagh fire mountain. This again is quite extraordinary in that a section of the hillside about 10m long burns continuously & the sight is quite bizarre. It is apparently burning methane which exudes from the ground & is certainly very hot.

Finally, we returned to Baku through another oil field with hundreds of derricks & donkeys on a rocky muddy area spaced at about 20m. Another somewhat confronting sight to us.

Our entry back to Baku on the airport drive was impressive as it is lined with a mixture of massive buildings for commerce, government & housing all of recent vintage.

We stopped to photograph the new Cultural Centre & Convention Centre, both of which are almost beyond belief.

After another hard days touring, we returned at 7.30.