From US$ 550 /person
Baku, Gobustan & Absheron Land of Fire Tour
Baku's medieval Old City and Zaha Hadid curves, then the ancient fires, rock carvings and mud volcanoes of the Absheron Peninsula.
View trip & itineraryAzerbaijan sits between the Caspian Sea and the Greater Caucasus, and the two halves of the country could hardly be more different. On the coast is Baku: a walled medieval Old City listed by UNESCO, an oil-boom skyline of glass towers, and around it the dry Absheron Peninsula, where natural gas burns out of a hillside at Yanar Dag, mud volcanoes bubble at Gobustan beside some of the oldest rock carvings in the region, and Indian traders built a fire temple at Surakhani three centuries ago.
A few hours inland the land rises into forested foothills around Gabala and then into the high Caucasus at Shahdag, the country's main mountain resort, and Khinaliq, a stone village at about 2,350 metres with a language of its own. Our two trips split the country along that line: five days based in Baku, or seven days that take in Baku and then the mountains.
