Azerbaijan

Lttle visited and not particularly interesting, Azerbaijan is a byword for international obscurity. We didn't feel the need to stay long - a couple of days in Baku to recover from the ferry, and then a couple of days in Seki in the foothills of the Caucasus on the way over the border into Georgia. Both were pleasant enough. Azerbaijan is rapidly getting richer, due to oil and gas under the Caspian and as a result Baku is a bit of a boom town - lots of new cars on the roads, more luxury-brand shops than Mumbai and Delhi put together and building sites engulfing much of the sea front promenade. In 1910 Baku sopplied half the world's oil, and there are some nice buildings in the 'old town' from this earlier oil boom and a very few that are older, but most of the modern stuff is fairly ugly. Its hard to see how any amount of beautification is going to disguise the sprawling oil terminals that form the backdrop to any view of Baku.

Oil money also means that the country is not very good value. This is severely exacerbated by the size of the kebabs, which have shrunk from a decent meal in Central Asia to four withered dry chunks of meat. Prawn kebabs, in particular, are not recommended.

Seki is reputed to be one of the most attractive towns in the country and was passably pretty, but nothing really exciting. We spent the day walking up the valley to a village with an old church and then had a picnic dinner in our guesthouse overlooking the town. The landscape and architecture has definitely got more of a European feel now, and we had our first rain for a long long time.

Fun facts about Azerbaijan:

1. It pretends to have a distinct alphabet, but it differs from the roman alphabet only in having a back-to-front and upside-down 'e'.

2. There are no famous Azeri people.

I think Azerbaijan suffered a bit from being the second country in a row that we were only in because they are in the way between countries we actually wanted to visit and from my nasty ear infection, that finally seems to be clearing up after a week. We're now in Tbilisi, which has a lot more going for it, trying to decide whether to head up to the mountains or down to Armenia for my birthday on Thursday. I have decided to shave for the first time since we left Delhi to mark the occassion.

T.