Exploring Baku-The Azerbaijani Capital Day-1

If you haven't read my blog on how to get Azerbaijan Visa & how to reach Baku, then I recommend you visit this link to the article.

So now that you have landed in Baku completed your immigration and hopefully collected all your checked in baggage, the first thing I recommend doing is getting a local Baku SIM card. If you  are from India, Airtel & Jio networks work here in Baku but there is a huge lag in getting text messages. This lag plays a spoil sport as any many services (like Taxi Apps) will send you a time limited One Time Password (OTP) which will be expired by the time it arrives on your India SIM card if it even does.

A local SIM card helps so much in registering for local services that you cant fathom until you use yourself. In the arrival area of Heydar Aliyev Baku Airport, there are very shops. Some of them thankfully sell sim cards. I recommend Bakcell and you can get it for 35 AZN (1AZN is around 43-45 INR) which is expensive by Indian standards but I recommend you one for each traveler in your group, trust me you wont regret it. The vendor makes you fill a form & takes a photocopy of your passport and then you have to take that form to the payment counter on the other side of arrival hall. Once you pay the 35AZN fee, they give you a receipt that you have to take back to the shop selling the SIM cards and they will activate the sim card and get it set up in your phone. For 35AZN you get around 1.5GB of data, few weeks of validity and unlimited social network usage which is good deal considering that Baku is in general an expensive city.

The next thing you must do after getting the local SIM card and before leaving the airport arrival hall is to download a Cab Aggregator app like Uber. But sadly Azerbaijan is another country that Uber had to back out of due to intense competition from local operators. I recommend using Bolt taxi app which can be downloaded for Android phone by clicking here. Then call a cab to your desired location hotel or apartment. It would cost you around 8-12 AZN to get to the city center by a Bolt cab.

Once you come out of the arrival hall in the parking and cab pickup area, you will be hounded by local taxi drivers. They will say anything to get you to ditch your bolt cab and board their badly maintained taxis. If you fall prey to such taxi driver, be prepared to lose up to 50AZN for a trip that cost just 8-12AZN.

Regarding your stay, I would recommend that you book an apartment hotel via Airbnb or Booking.com. I personally booked a one bedroom apartment on Abdul Karem Alizade street which is smack in the middle of the city center & just a 2 mins walk from the Fountain Square & Icherisheher (Old City). The building was from the Soviet era and more than 100 years old and to add to that, the owner had just renovated the apartment with all amenities that you would find in modern home and place for 8 people to sleep. The balcony had view to kill for.

View From my Apartment on Abdul Karem Alizade Street

We were received at the gate of our apartment by  our host Vukar who was awesome. I just really loved what he had done with the place.

 Exploring Baku:

Before even coming to Azarebaijan from your home country, I would recommend that you download offline google maps for the whole of Azerbaijan which will help a lot in finding your way in a country where very few people or hardly anyone speaks English. So, for the rest of the day that we landed in Baku, we just wandered around the city center guided by google maps, and reached Fountain Square (Fəvvarələr meydanı in Azerbaijani) which is a large public square decorated with fountains, shops, food court & even the Nargiz shopping mall. 

The fountains square starts from the walls of the Baku old city also called Icherisheher and runs parallel along the Baku Boulevard through the Nizami street. The square has been renovated by the local authorities in 2010 and is used for many public gatherings and functions by the local people and authorities alike. If you keep walking from the Fountains Square you would reach the Baku Boulevard which is a promenade built during the Oil boom of Azarebaijan when big barons had their homes on the seafront. 

Baku Boulevard(Top Left), Little Venice(Top Right), Carpet Museum (Bottom Left), Promednade (Bottom Right)

The Boulevard along the shore line of the Caspian sea was originally built to connect the oil fields but now its a public place and tourist attraction after the then President Heydar Aliyev declared it as a national park. The boulevard has an amusement park if you are in the mood, a mini Venice with Canals & Gondolas, Azerbaijan Carpet Museum & the Puppet Theater.  

The sunset is very late in Azerbaijan so you can walk along the very long boulevard and sit on the promenade by the seaside enjoying the very windy weather with great views of the Caspian sea. You can spend a few hours here every day after your day tours & excursions like we did.

For the next day we had already asked our apartment owner to provide us a good taxi operator and he had obliged by providing one with a rate that beat the rates of many reputed tour operator websites like Viator. The taxi operator had charged us just 90USD or 132AZN for the whole day tour of sites outside of Baku which was exclusive of tickets of course. Our taxi driver was fluent in English which was a welcome change. I would like to emphasize the fact the Azerbaijani public has great respect for Indians in general and our taxi driver cum tour guide made us smile with stories of his travels in India and stories of old Amitabh Bacchan movies he had seen.

You have to start early in the morning probably at 8.30-9AM to cover all the spots  properly and get back in time to enjoy your evening by the promenade like we did. The first place we visited was the farthest from Baku was the famous Gobustan National Park & Museum which is 67km from the center of Baku and takes around 1 hour to get there. It is the National Historical Landmark of Azerbaijan with very ancient rock carving which are 5000-20000 years old and the very famous Mud-Volcanoes and Gas stones. The place has more than 6000 ancient stone carvings and is UNESCO World Social Legacy site.

 

View From the Viewing Deck at Gobustan

Although a bit expensive at 40AZN per person, the entrance ticket does include a personal tour guide who will guide you through the large area which cannot be fully appreciated without an informed guide. Our guide Mujdgan tried her best to show us around and explain the rock carvings in a thick accent. The whole experience is absolutely worth it. After the tour the guide will lead you to a viewing deck which over looks the Caspian sea and is worth spending a bit of time there and enjoy the windy weather of Azerbaijan while it last as it gets quite hot & humid when the wind stops.

One more stop in the Gobustan area is for the famous Mud Volcanoes. They are small volcano like structures about a few feet high which keep spewing out mud at intervals. This happens due to the natural gas trying to escape from beneath the muddy ground. It is quite a spectacle but a photo does not do justice to its memory, it requires a video. It is said that the mud from these small volcanoes is medicinal and beneficial for your skin. The only bad part is getting to the mud volcanoes. No tour operator will take their own car to the rough terrain deep inside the Gobustan area. What the tour operators do is book old soviet era cars which filthy beyond repair and you have to reach the site in these. Their logic is that these old cars are more sturdy and can handle the rough terrain.

The next must see place outside of Baku is Yanar Dag which literally means the Burning Mountain in the local language. It is continuously burning Natural gas fire on a maintain side overlooking the Absheron Peninsula by the Caspian Sea. It takes about 45 minutes from Gobustan to get here.

They have developed a reserve area around the Yanar dag mountainside to which you can visit and there is kids play area too. The entrance ticket to the Yanar Dag Reserve is 9AZN for foreign nationals. There is also an arena to sit around and the fire of Yanar Dag burning slowly. If you can visit in the night it would look even more awesome. There also many spots where you can take selfies and photos with different props. The place also has views of the absheron region from the top of the mountain which are quite serene & picturesque. You can spend an hour here but not more than that as the next stop on the tour shall take a lot of time.Next you head one to the Ateshgah Fire Temple or Baku Ateshgah which just 15mins from the Yanar Dag. This is a Castle like temple built in the Surakani town which  is a  suburb of Baku. This built during the 17th century by Zorastrian, Hindu & & Sikh travelers along the Great Grand Trunk Road for fire worship. This temple has central altar for worship surrounded by dwelling areas or small rooms for the monks to live in. It was nice to hear Sanskrit incantations in country so away from India.

Ateshgah Entrance (Top Left), Outer Courtyard (Top Right), Ateshgah Museum (Bottom Left), The Eternal Fire(Bottom Right)

 

There is used to be an eternal fire that burned in the central altar of the temple and on top of its minarets. During the late 1800s, due to the petroleum plants that sprung up in the town of Surakhani, the supply of natural gas to the eternal flame waned out. Now the flame is lit by piped natural as from the town nearby. The entrance tickets are 5AZN per person and you get a personal guide for 5AZN more which is a good deal. You can spend about an hour here and in the courtyard outside. There are many souvenir shops lining the outer courtyard but mind you that the prices are exorbitant.

The last stop of our long day was the Heydar Aliyev Center which on the way back to the city center, It is a building complex designed by famous architect Zaha Hadid. It is named of after the Soviet Era leader of Azerbaijan, Heydar Aliyev. 

 

This is a place to chill. Although it has an exibition center and a museum inside, it is the outer ground that provide the actual view to marvel at the architectural genius of Zaha Hadid. The ground hos the most Instagram worthy spot in all of Baku, the I <3 Baku sign. You can spend at lot time just enjoying the grounds and clicking awesome photos for your social media or if are in a artsy mood you can buy the 30AZN ticket to the cultural center in the building and marel at some local art and sculptures. We did not do this as we were too tired for any more exploring and we asked our driver to just drop us at our apartment afterwards.

That concluded a long day of exploring Baku but we still had one more day to go in Baku before we took for Russia. Stay tune for the Day-2 of Exploring Baku which shall be posted shortly.