For our sightseeing itinerary in Azerbaijan, we picked out five tourist attractions that the Around Baku pages leftover from our confiscated Lonely Planet made sound interesting. Sometimes travel writers try too hard. The sights didn’t live up to their thrilling descriptions.
First was the Zoroastrian fire-worshipping temple at Atesgah. “You won’t find anything like it outside of India,” the LP promised. I envisioned elaborately carved fire gods, imposing towers, ornamental arches. My bad, I guess, for confusing Zoroastrianism and Hinduism. Atesgah's temple was a plain pile of beige bricks. You could climb to the top of the gate. And there were life-sized dioramas inside the walls. Woo.
Next we tried Qobustan, a region 40 minutes south of Baku with a whopping two destinations: prehistoric petroglyphs and the mud volcanoes. Here we'll give the LP some credit. These were both awesome. Although our driver preferred the volcanoes. "To me the mud is more amazing," he said. "It is living, it jumps, but the stones just sit there."
Three down, two to go. On the morning of our final day in Azerbaijan we made for the baby cemetery of Sumqayit, a memorial to the little victims of the world's most ecologically devastating petrochemicals complex. Sumqayit is a Chernobyl that lasted thirty years. The LP tipped us off about this fun excursion and explained where the buses leave for Sumqayit from Baku, but had zero information about where the dead babies were located. Once in town we found a taxi driver to take us to the cemetery (a tad awkward), but in 45 minutes of roaming the headstones all we saw were adult graves, which of course are not as cute as baby graves.
That left Yanar Dag, a source of natural gas that caught fire decades ago and no one has been able to extinguish since. The LP gasped at the "10 meter wall of flame," and recommended a night-time visit for greater visibility. We decided to stop by on the way to the airport, and were glad we had a late flight so we could catch the Dag after subdown, in all its natural-resource-wasting glory. But it was not as breath-taking as we were led to believe. Saying these flames reached 2 meters would be stretch. 10? No.
The score - LP: 2 for 5. Or, AZ, 2; LP, 0.
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Azerbaijan formally the Republic of Azerbaijan (Azerbaijani: Azərbaycan Respublikası), is a country in the Caucasus region of Eurasia. Located at the crossroads of Eastern Europe and Western Asia,[6] it is bounded by the Caspian Sea to the east, Russia to the north, Georgia to the northwest, Armenia to the west, and Iran to the south. The exclave of Nakhichevan is bounded by Armenia to the north and east, Iran to the south and west, while having a short borderline with Turkey to the northwest. The Nagorno-Karabakh region in the southwest of Azerbaijan proper declared itself independent from Azerbaijan in 1991, but it is not recognized by any nation and considered a legal part of Azerbaijan.
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I think Azerbaijan is like North Korea..not an ideal destination but the places that you can discover inside the country..truly amazing. I think that what matter most as a traveler.
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