Azerbaijan is where fire worship began — a hillside at Yanar Dag that has burned for centuries, a Zoroastrian fire temple at Ateshgah, and 6,000-year-old petroglyphs at Gobustan carved above the Caspian. Baku itself is a walled medieval old city with three glass flames rising behind it. It is the easiest, most surprising door into the Caucasus.
Azerbaijan & Georgia Caucasus Combo » 10-Day Twin Country Tour is a 10-day private tour of Azerbaijan, run on your own dates with a private guide and driver. You stay in 4-star Baku hotels with daily breakfast, a private vehicle and a licensed guide, with all site entrances included.
Prices are per person and drop as your group grows — from $1860 per person for two travellers down to $1200 for a group of seven. Every departure is private: you never share the vehicle or the guide.
10-day Azerbaijan itinerary
Met at Baku airport and driven into a city on the Caspian that runs on oil and knows it. The world's first industrially drilled oil well went down here in 1846, and by 1900 half the planet's oil came out of this peninsula — which is why Baku has boulevards of Parisian mansions built by 19th-century oil barons, and why it now has three flame-shaped skyscrapers. Tonight, a walk in Icherisheher, the walled old city, which is UNESCO-listed and still lived in.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
The Maiden Tower is 29 metres of solid stone and nobody agrees what it was for — a fortress, a Zoroastrian fire temple, an observatory; its dating ranges over a thousand years. The Palace of the Shirvanshahs was the seat of the local dynasty and is the finest medieval building in Azerbaijan. Then the modern half: the Flame Towers, lit at night with rippling fire, and Zaha Hadid's Heydar Aliyev Centre, a building with no straight lines anywhere in it — arguably the best thing she ever built.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
Gobustan first — six thousand rock carvings spanning twelve thousand years, and the cold mud volcanoes bubbling beside them. Then up into the mountains to Lahic, a cobbled village where coppersmiths still hammer in open workshops and the people speak Tat, a Persian language. On to Gabala, capital of the vanished Christian kingdom of Caucasian Albania, under the wall of the Greater Caucasus.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
Sheki is the loveliest town in Azerbaijan: red-tiled roofs on a green mountainside, and the Khan's Palace at the top of it. The palace was built in 1797 without a single nail, and its windows are shebeke — stained glass held in a wooden lattice assembled from thousands of pieces, again with no nails and no glue. Sheki halva is a different thing from the halva you know, and the caravanserai you sleep in has been taking travellers for centuries.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
Across into Georgia and into Kakheti, where wine was invented. Georgians have been making it in buried clay qvevri for eight thousand years — the oldest winemaking tradition on Earth, and now UNESCO-protected. Sighnaghi is a walled hill town looking out over the Alazani valley to the Caucasus. Bodbe holds the tomb of St Nino, the woman who converted Georgia to Christianity in the 4th century. You taste the wine from the qvevri, and it is not like any wine you know.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
Mtskheta was the capital for eight hundred years and is where Georgia became Christian; Svetitskhoveli Cathedral is said to hold Christ's robe beneath it, and it is the holiest place in the country. Then into Tbilisi, and up to the Narikala fortress above the old town for the view: sulphur baths, wooden balconies, churches, a mosque and a synagogue, all packed into one bend of the river.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
Tbilisi means 'warm place' — the city exists because of the sulphur springs, and the domed brick bathhouses of Abanotubani are still working; go in, it is the local thing to do. Rustaveli Avenue is the grand 19th-century spine. The Dry Bridge flea market is where the Soviet Union was sold off piece by piece and still is: medals, cameras, cutlery, chandeliers. Finish on the funicular up Mtatsminda.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
North on the Georgian Military Highway, the road the Russians cut through the Caucasus in the 19th century and which Pushkin and Lermontov both wrote about. At the end of it, Gergeti Trinity Church stands alone at 2,170 metres on a spur, with Mount Kazbek — 5,033 metres — directly behind it. It is the picture of Georgia, and it is better in person.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
The Dariali Gorge, where the mountains close to a slot and the Russian border sits at the end of it — this is the pass every invader from the north has had to force. Back to Tbilisi for a supra, the Georgian feast: a tamada presiding, toasts that are small speeches, and more food than is reasonable.
Overnight: 4-star hotel.
A transfer to Tbilisi airport for your onward flight. End of our services.
