Hi there !
We haven’t told you our little adventures in the land of fire for a good while but we kept discovering Azerbaijan and its treasures!
We have heard of Qobustan the first week we came in Azerbaijan and yet it took us 5 months to go. It is only 45 minutes south of Baku, I guess it sounded too easy for us , we are more into crazy night in smelly trains and little roads in the local Marchroutka !
Qobustan is a very interesting place for two main reasons: the mud volcanoes and the rock painting. Let’s start with the mud volcanoes, because it is quite unique and even if it sounds weird it is quite impressive.
Mud volcanoes
So we had some troubles to find the road, maybe because our taxi driver was almost deaf. Really he was talking so loud that we all left an eardrum in this taxi. Anyway after passing by the oil fields, which by the way you can see in “the world is not enough”, a James Bond with Pierce Brosnan where the bad guy dies at the end. (Spoil alert)
So we went at the top of little mountain in the middle of a landscape of oil derricks, steppes and desertic hills. And here they stand. The mud volcanoes seem quite small at the first sight but the fact that they are constantly in activity, spitting a cold and thick mud is quite curious. They are about fifteen on the same spot. Azerbaijan has almost 400 hundred mud volcanoes along the caspian coast. In 2001 a 15 meters flame went out of one of this volcano, which is still in the local memory.
But I hear you asking : a volcano which spit mud, how is that possible? So I will give you an answer of my sientist friend Wikipedia. “A mud volcano may be the result (yeah he is not quite sure about that) of a piercement structure created by a pressurized mud diapir which breaches the Earth’s surface or ocean bottom. Their temperatures may be as low as the freezing point of the ejected materials, particularly when venting is associated with the creation of hydrocarbon clathrate hydrate deposits.”. All clear? Ok so let’s go to the next stop, the rock painting. But first, let’s lose another eardrum in the taxi! YEAAAH !
The rock painting of Qobustan
Qobustan is quite a unique place in the world, and the first civilizations in the world settled down in this region, in front of the sea with a nature which was more luxurious than the today’s steppe. The Paintings, called petrogliph, date back from different ages. The most ancient petroglyphs are estimated from 12000 BC. The amazing thing is that the spot, which is a big rock field down a high “mesa” (a hill with a wide flat top), different period of history are represented.
The pictures represent antilops, hunting scenes, arrows etc…and there is also a roman dude who engraved something, and it is the most eastern sign of roman civilization found. It says “ Hi I am Julius Maximum, centurion of the 12th legion (It’s his real name) I am running short of paper and I have some time to waste, so I am carving some stuff on a rock, in a place where there is prehistorical painting in order to confuse the future historian. LOL. LMAO.”
Ok I might have changed some words but you get the idea.
Anyway Well I’ll just finish by thanking you to follow us and like Julius Maximus would say “see ya guys”!if you go one day to this place there is a very interesting museum which will present you very well the different information about this site. The trace of ancient civilization makes qobustan quite unique in the world.
FrenchiesinBaku 