Day Trips from Baku: Where You Can Actually Get and Back

The closest trip and the most distinctly Azerbaijani. Ateshgah, the fire temple at Surakhani, is about half an hour from the centre, and Yanardag, the burning hillside, is a similar distance north.

Ateshgah is a pentagonal caravanserai built around a natural gas vent, with Sanskrit and Punjabi inscriptions around the cells left by Hindu and Sikh worshippers who travelled the trade routes to pray here. An hour covers it.

Yanardag is the one that needs timing rather than time. In daylight it is a modest row of flames on a scrubby slope. After dark it is a wall of fire with heat reaching the viewing area. Build the day so you arrive in the evening, which is exactly the kind of thing a fixed group schedule cannot accommodate.

Often combined with the Qala ethnographic complex nearby, an open air museum of Absheron rural life, which fills the gap between the two fire sites neatly.

About an hour south. The UNESCO listed petroglyphs cover roughly twelve thousand years of carving, hunting scenes and dancing figures and the long reed boats that prompted Thor Heyerdahl's argument for a Caspian to Scandinavia connection. The museum below the hill is genuinely good and the carvings are reached on a trail above it.

The mud volcanoes are the second half and the reason to allow proper time. Azerbaijan holds a large share of the world's total, and these are small grey cones burping cold mud at irregular intervals, which is more entertaining than it sounds. The track out is rough and the last stretch usually wants a higher vehicle. Ordinary saloon cars do sometimes get stuck out there.

This is consistently the trip visitors name as their favourite, and combining it with the fire sites makes a full and very varied day.

Roughly two hours west. Shamakhi was the capital of the Shirvan state and holds the Juma Mosque, one of the oldest in the Caucasus, rebuilt repeatedly after earthquakes that have flattened the town more than once.

The surrounding hills are Azerbaijan's main wine region, and several wineries receive visitors. The country's wine industry is older than most people expect and considerably better than its profile suggests, and tasting here costs a fraction of the equivalent anywhere in Europe.

The Yeddi Gumbez mausoleum complex, the seven domes, sits just outside the town and is worth the short detour. Combined with the Diri Baba mausoleum built into a cliff face on the way, this makes a full day without feeling rushed.

Two to three hours north, and the landscape changes completely on the way. Quba is an apple and carpet town at the foot of the Greater Caucasus, and the reason to make the drive is what sits around it.

The Candy Cane Mountains are the draw: hills striped in bands of red and white iron rich rock, in a valley off the main road. They photograph unlike anywhere else in the country and they are the image most people have seen of Azerbaijan without knowing where it was taken.

Khinalug, one of the highest continuously inhabited villages in Europe at around two thousand three hundred metres, lies further up a mountain road from Quba. It is spectacular and it adds several hours on a difficult road, which makes Quba plus Khinalug an ambitious single day and a comfortable overnight.

Combine with the Tengaalti canyon and the Afurja waterfall for a full day that stays within reasonable driving.

About three hours west, and the country's main mountain resort area. Forested, noticeably cooler than Baku in summer, and the centre of Azerbaijan's own domestic tourism.

The cable cars at Tufandag climb well above the town for views across the range, and the Nohur Lake sits in the forest nearby with the still green water that appears on every Azerbaijani tourism poster. The Yeddi Gozel waterfall, the seven beauties, is the other standard stop.

Three hours each way makes this a long day but a workable one. If you have the night, taking it here is the better version, because the area rewards an early start more than most and the summer evenings in the forest are the point.

Around three hours north, past Quba and up into the mountains. In winter this is the country's ski resort, modern, with real lifts and hotels, and markedly cheaper than comparable European resorts. In summer it is a hiking and cable car destination with alpine air and temperatures ten degrees below Baku.

It is technically a day trip and we run it as one. It is a better trip with a night at the resort, because the drive is significant in both directions and the mountain light in the early morning is the thing you came for.

In winter, conditions govern. Snow can close the higher road and a four wheel drive becomes necessary rather than preferable. We say so honestly rather than selling an itinerary the weather will not support.

Sheki. It is five to six hours each way, and any listing that offers it as a day trip is offering you eleven hours in a vehicle for two hours in the town. Sheki is the place most visitors name as the highlight of the whole country, with the Khan's Palace and its stained glass shebeke windows assembled without nails or glue, the caravanserai, and the halva that exists nowhere else. It deserves an overnight and it is why our five day itinerary exists.

Lahij. The coppersmithing village in the mountains is three hours plus a slow final approach on a difficult road, and it is far better combined with Shamakhi or Ismayilli across two days than attempted and rushed in one.

Naftalan, Ganja and Nakhchivan are all too far. Nakhchivan is an exclave and requires a flight.

The honest summary: Baku supports two or three excellent day trips, and after that the country asks you to stay out overnight. That is not an upsell, it is the geography.

Public transport reaches most of these places eventually. Buses and shared minibuses run to Quba, Gabala, Shamakhi and Sheki, and they are cheap.

What they do not do is get you to the sites. The bus reaches the town; the petroglyphs, the mud volcano field, the Candy Cane valley, the waterfalls and the mountain villages are all some distance beyond wherever the bus stops, frequently on roads with no service at all. Several of these trips also depend on being somewhere at a particular hour, which a bus timetable will not respect.

That is the practical case for a vehicle, either as a fixed package or as a car with a driver where you set the route day by day. It is also why every one of these trips appears in one of our itineraries: they are the routes we drive most weeks, and the drivers know which roads are open in March and which valley is worth the extra forty minutes.