From Neolithic drawings to mud volcanos -driving through Azerbaijan

Just when we thought we had the battle won, we had to concede to the nasty Soviet “nyet” woman. Foregoing breakfast, we headed for our hired driver ($50 for the day) and took off for Gobustan. Our driver was amazing- a touch of John Belushi with a “no problem” attitude. He was an unemployed chemical engineer- driving a taxi to make a living and had a wonderful attitude.

The landscape outside Baku was parched and harsh. We got to Gobustan and were fortunate enough to get the “warden” of the site, Gurban Alesberov, to take us on a personal tour of the site and the museum.

The site was home to Neolithic man and they left a wealth of cave paintings depicting buffaloes, deer, dancing women and even ancient ships. Thor Heyerdahl came here to examine these Viking like ship drawings. Still spooked by snakes, we watched Gurban carefully.

We then hired him to take us to the “mud volcanoes”. Azerbaijan has over 300 of these volcanoes that spit cold mud rather than molten rock. Our driver stepped too close to one of them and lost his shoe (temporarily) in the mud….”no problem”.

A few mud volcanoes and we were off to the Absheron peninsula to the town of Surakhany. Surakhany is home to a Zoroastrian fire temple, with a central stone shrine burning continuously, with flames shooting out from roof corner flues. The museum surrounding the temple had awful scenes of fire worship with tacky mannequins. The history of the site is unknown, but some say it was the site of a temple in the 6th –7th C. The current temple was renovated by the Parsis from India.

Our last stop on our absurd Azerbaijan tour was to Jamar Dag (Burning Mountain), the Chimera. Supposedly, it’s a hill that burns thanks to subterranean gases. It looked a lot like they were augmenting the burning with piped gas. Mamedov, our driver, was amused with our choice of sites.