8-Day Azerbaijan Cultural Tour with Khinalug, Sheki and Gobustan

Arrive at Heydar Aliyev International Airport and transfer into the city. Baku is a surprise at first sight: a Caspian corniche, a belle-époque oil-boom centre built by the Nobels and Rothschilds, and three flame-shaped towers rising above it all. The afternoon is a gentle orientation along the Boulevard and up to the Highland Park terrace for the view down over the bay, followed by dinner in the old city.

Spend a full day in the capital, starting inside İçərişəhər: the Maiden Tower, the Shirvanshahs' Palace and its tombs, the caravanserais, and the hammam. Afterwards, move into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with the Carpet Museum, which is far better than it sounds and explains an entire visual culture, and Zaha Hadid's Heydar Aliyev Center, a building with no straight lines in it. The evening is free on Nizami Street.

Travel south along the Caspian to Gobustan, where the rock art covers the boulders of a limestone terrace: hunting scenes, dancers, reed boats, and the Roman centurion's graffito. The museum on site is well worth the stop. Then continue by 4WD onto the mud volcano field, a grey plain of small cones burping cold mud, entirely absurd and entirely real. Return to Baku via the Bibi-Heybat Mosque and the oil derricks that made this coast.

The Absheron morning is all fire: the Ateshgah temple at Surakhani, built around a natural gas vent and inscribed by Hindu and Sikh pilgrims, and Yanar Dag, the hillside that has never gone out. Then head north along the Caspian shore and up into the Quba district, with apple orchards, carpet-weaving villages, and the Caucasus filling the windscreen. Overnight in Quba, with time for the old Jewish quarter at Qırmızı Qəsəbə across the river.

Dedicate the whole day to one village. The road climbs sixty kilometres up the Qudyal gorge past shepherds' camps and hairpins above a very long drop, arriving at Khinalug on its ridge, with flat stone roofs, cattle in the lanes, and a language spoken nowhere else. There is time to walk the village with a local guide, look into the old mosque, take tea in a family house, and understand what a UNESCO-listed transhumance route actually means. Return to Quba for the night.

Travel west along the mountain front and up a side gorge to Lahij, a cobbled town of coppersmiths where the workshops still hammer trays and jugs to order and the drainage system dates to the Middle Ages. The road in is single-track and dramatic. Continue through İsmayıllı and Qəbələ to Sheki, arriving in the late afternoon at a town of tiled roofs and plane trees under the mountains.

The Khans' Palace at its opening hour, before the light gets high.

Drive back east across the Shirvan plain to Baku, stopping in Shamakhi for the Juma Mosque, first built in the eighth century and rebuilt after every earthquake since, and the Yeddi Gümbəz, the seven domed tombs of the Shirvan khans standing in a field above the town. Onward international departures leave Baku through the evening and night. Georgia can be added to either end of the journey, as Tbilisi is a comfortable day's drive to the north-west.