Gobustan and Absheron Tour

Overview

A full day of eight to nine hours from Baku covering the Gobustan rock art landscape and its mud volcanoes, then the Absheron peninsula for the fire temple at Ateshgah and the burning hillside at Yanardag, with hotel pickup and a scheduled lunch stop.

What to expect

• Breakfast at your own hotel, then collection.
• Bibiheybat Mosque on the way south out of the city.
• Gobustan: the carved rocks and the museum, then the mud volcano field.
• A lunch break at a local restaurant, around two in the afternoon.
• Ateshgah, the fire temple at Surakhani.
• Yanardag, the hillside that burns, before the return.

Everything on this itinerary is the same fact

The whole day is one geological story: the ground here leaks.

Natural gas and oil seep to the surface across this peninsula and always have. That single fact explains every stop. It is why people were here in the first place, why they carved the rocks, why fire became something to worship rather than merely to use, and why the world's first industrial oil wells were sunk a few kilometres from your hotel.

The mud volcanoes are the same phenomenon in a different form: gas pushing up through waterlogged clay, throwing out cold grey mud instead of lava. This country has several hundred of them, something close to half the world total, and they are one of the strangest landscapes you can stand in.

Six thousand carvings, and a Roman who left his name

Gobustan is a hillside of boulders covered in petroglyphs — around six thousand of them, cut over an extraordinary span of time. There are hunters, dancers, cattle and, repeatedly, long reed boats with rowers, which is what first made archaeologists argue about connections between this coast and the ancient Mediterranean.

There is also, on one rock, an inscription left by a Roman soldier — a centurion of the Twelfth Legion, recording his passage in the first century. It is the easternmost Roman inscription known, and it is oddly moving to find a man carving his unit's name onto a stone that already carried pictures ten thousand years older than he was.

The eternal flame is on a gas pipe now, and that is worth knowing

The temple at Ateshgah was built around a natural vent. Pilgrims came overland from India to worship at a fire nobody had lit and nobody could put out, and the pentagonal courtyard you will walk into was raised by Indian merchants in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The vent stopped in 1969. Extraction from the surrounding field had drawn the pressure down, and the flame that had burned for centuries simply went out. What burns there today is piped in from the city.

We would rather tell you that before you arrive than let you assume otherwise. It does not diminish the place; it is the most honest illustration on the whole tour of what the second oil boom did to the ground beneath it.

Yanardag still burns on its own

The hillside at Yanardag is the real thing, still fed by its own seep, still alight, and best seen at dusk when the flames actually read against the slope. Travellers have been writing about the burning ground of this region since the middle ages.

Practicalities

Breakfast is taken at your own hotel before the pickup, so plan around your hotel's serving time.

The lunch stop is scheduled at around two, and what you eat there is your own arrangement unless your booking says otherwise.

Admissions are not listed as part of this, so check your own documentation if entry to the Gobustan museum matters to you.

The track out to the mud volcanoes is unpaved and rough, the site itself is open and exposed, and the mud will get on your shoes.