After a day of exploring Azerbaijan’s capital, we decided to investigate a couple of day trips to see more of the country.
One thing that keep coming up in our research were the weird and wonderful mud volcanoes at Gobustan.
We enquired at our hotel and $90 later we’d hired a private car, and driver, to take us adventuring. Gobustan National Park sits about an hour south of Baku, and just outside that are the curious farty mud volcanos. I’d read online that it’s pretty difficult to find them without a guide, and judging by the route we took on the day, I had no reason to doubt this. I’m not even sure there was a road to the site – I remember veering off the highway and up a dusty path.
Anyway while the volcanos are pretty interesting and definitely worth a look, there’s not a great deal to do or see there, so after about 20 minutes we hopped back in the car and continued on to the Museum and the famous rock petroglyphs.
The museum was very well done (and strangely empty) and the rock paintings were amazing. It’s was particularly interesting to me having seen similar drawings, 15,000 kilometres away in Australia during my trip through the Northern Territory.
We took a stack of pictures and spent a good couple of hours exploring before continuing on to the Ateshgah or Fire Temple.
Again there, wasn’t much to see here, but it was pretty interesting all the same. The temple was in the middle of an oil field (I suppose) with hundreds of oil pumps sucking the black gold from the ground. The air was thick with the smell of petrol and it was pretty concerning to see local kids, playing on the streets among the pumps.
After a busy morning of site-seeing we asked to be dropped off at the Amburan Beach Club to relax, chill out, enjoy a few cocktails and rub shoulders with the well-to-do expats and rich Azeri locals.