A little tour on the outskirts of Baku

So this weekend I had arranged for  mini bus and tour guide to pick a few of us up and take us out of the city to see some of the sights...we had a great time. After a little issue with finding one of the hotels, we were on our way to the petroglyphs at Gobuston.

These are apparently some of the oldest petroglyphs in the world and our guide was fantastic at pointing them out on the rocks. If we were on our own we would definitely have walked straight past the majority of them.

After our fill of ancient rock carvings we headed to the mud volcanoes. They are in the middle of nowhere, up a dirt track {I had to close my eyes for some of the ride because I was convinced the minibus would give up and fall down the mountain. Thank God it didn't}.

There are no signs, no museum, no ticket booth. Just nothing around.

Everyone loved them. The mud bubbles up and forms little volcanoes, but it's cold, which I don't think any of us expected. Dan took the opportunity to have his Hollywood Walk of Fame moment and left his handprint in the mud.

Our little group had one final stop for the day at Yanar Dag - burning mountain in English. There was a dicey moment where it looked like the security guard wasn't going to let us in, but our guide managed to convince him to open the gate.

There's a natural gas source somewhere under the mountain which stops the fire ever going out, and it has been there for centuries - Marco Polo even wrote about it in his diaries.

And that's where we ended our day. We've now got the challenge of finding new activities to fill our weekends...I think the big market just outside of Baku will be next to fill our new apartment. Which, fingers crossed, we will be in by next weekend.

We did the bus tour!

Anyone who knows me, knows how much I enjoy a good hop on, hop off bus tour. To me, they are the BEST. THING. EVER.

{I've even planned on starting my own hop on hop off tour with my mum. I won't disclose the location here. But trust me, it'll be an amazing tour}

Wherever I go in the world, the first thing I do is google if they have a tour bus and plan my route and stops. Some people just wing it. Not me though, there's a technique to doing a hop on, hop off tour right to squeeze every last moment out of your 24 hour ticket!

And Baku was no different. The bus only started running a couple of months ago here, so it's still very new and testing the waters, but I think with a few small tweaks it could be up there with the best. Well Dan and I 'hopped on' a couple of weekends ago we took in all the major sights. From the Cultural Centre to the Flame Towers we saw it all.

My favourite part of the whole weekend was when we stopped at the Boulevard and jumped on the funicular that took us up the mountain side to the Flame Towers, Martyrs' Lane and the Eternal Flame. The view alone was impressive, but all of it together made for such a fun afternoon.

We briefly stepped into the Flame Towers {home to the most expensive hotel in the country} and walked along Martyrs' Lane {bet you've never been to a cemetery with an escalator!} and then spent ages just staring out at the port.

Our ticket lasted until lunchtime the next day, so we took advantage and headed up to the Heydar Aliyev Cultural Centre in the morning. The building is very impressive, even if the exhibition inside didn't blow us away. But they do have an incredible art installation at the moment, with around 100 giant glass sweets decorated in flags from around the world. It was pretty cool.

I think we've done most of our city sightseeing now {just a few museums to hit, but we're saving those for the winter months}, so this coming weekend we're going on a road trip to the mud volcanoes, petroglyphs and fire mountain, which I've been planning with a local tour guide. There's a whole mini bus relying on me, so it better be good!

Our visit to the zoo

We went to the zoo yesterday...and it was everything I feared.  These were not a bunch of happy animals. It was an old soviet zoo, and it didn't look like it had been updated since the Stalin years.

The crocodiles had no water, the birds were kept in small dark caves, there was rubbish in most of the cages and the poor bears were running round and round in circles because there was nowhere for them to go. You could even see the ribcage on the lion.

Apparently there is a new state-of-the-art zoo being built, and all I can hope it that out 3 Manats went to speeding the building process along so they can get the animals out of there.

In conclusion, if you want to see some animals, take a detour to Africa before you reach Azerbaijan.

A Wedding in Wales

We're back in Azerbaijan after a few days gallivanting around Wales for Matt and Katie's wedding.  It was a hectic weekend, flying straight after work on the Thursday, driving to Wales on the Friday, the wedding on the Saturday, driving back to Heathrow on the Sunday and then flying out first thing on Monday morning.

But it was an amazing weekend, and we had so much fun seeing everybody again...even if it had only been four weeks since we saw some of them last!

Matt and Katie {although, I think probably mostly Katie} had bought flags for everyone based on where they had travelled from to get to the wedding. God knows where they got them from, but we had two little Azerbaijan flags on our place settings.

 

I think Dan's highlight of the weekend was getting to drive into the castle when we went to set everything up in the morning.  It was pretty cool.

 

My highlight? Rich's dancing - the handstand turned backflip with an accidental backwards roll and stumble got the whole floor's attention if they hadn't already been watching his great moves. I have videos, but I'm saving them for his 50th birthday or something.
 

Going back did have it's other advantages - normal shops, with normal things. We cleared out the shelves in Asda of Cadbury's chocolate {the first three HUGE bars that I brought lasted me all of a week and a half}. Sales of chewing gum and tea bags also went up.
 

We exchanged some of our pounds for dollars: The referendum had made the pound crash really badly and currency exchanges were refusing our money {we lived cheaply for the last few days before we flew back to the UK}.
 

Getting back to the hotel from the airport was a bit of a nightmare - it took forever to get through immigration and we had to go and buy new temporary visas as our residency ones haven't come through yet. But we made it back in one piece, despite a dodgy taxi situation.
 

I thought that as we weren't going to be away long  re-adjusting to the time wouldn't be too bad. Turns out I was wrong. Getting up for work on Tuesday morning was tough and Dan was almost falling asleep at work.
 

So here we are, back to the crazy world of Baku.

Oh yeah, it's windy in Baku

Oh my goodness, it felt like a hurricane was getting ready to pass through Baku this past weekend. It really was windy out.

 

On Saturday I'd arranged for one of the work buses to pick up a group of us and take us on a day trip to the beach. And I was a bit worried when I peeked out the window in the morning and saw leaves blowing everywhere. But as soon as we got out of the city it wasn't quite as bad. Although it was still quite breezy.

If you want a nice beach around here you have to pay. A lot of the coast is polluted by the oil rigs, so you have to go up the coast a bit further where the beach club. You have to pay to get in but they have nicer water. We're not talking Barbados-nice. More Bournemouth. But still.

I wasn't expecting much, but it was loads fun to have a day out with everybody. There was crazy golf and water sports {not that we actually did either, next time} and a couple of restaurants to choose from.

The main reason we went though was because the Euro Beach Soccer Cup was being held at the Jumeirah Hotel just up the road.  There were only two matches on that day, but it was fun to watch. Dan had a great time with his GoPro recording all the action and some of the players were really good with their bicycle kicks.