Day Trips from Baku

Baku sits in one corner of a small country, which is the useful fact behind every trip on this page: almost everything worth seeing can be reached and returned from in a single day. The drives are real, though, and knowing which direction you are heading in matters more than picking a name off a list.

Four directions out of the city

South is the closest and the strangest — Gobustan's rock carvings and the mud volcanoes beyond them, about an hour down the coastal highway. East is the Absheron peninsula: the Ateshgah fire temple and the burning hillside at Yanardag, thirty to forty-five minutes out, usually combined with Gobustan into one day.

West is the green half of the country. Shamakhi is roughly two hours, Gabala around three; that is where the waterfalls, the forests and the mountain lakes are. North climbs into the Caucasus — Guba in about three hours, and above it Khinalig, one of the highest permanently inhabited villages in Europe, on a mountain road that takes another hour and is worth every minute of it.

What does not work as a day trip

Sheki is the honest example. It is a beautiful town with a khan's palace and a silk-road old quarter, and it is four and a half to five hours each way — so a day trip means roughly ten hours in a vehicle for a couple of hours on the ground. It works far better with a night there, and the same is true of Lankaran in the far south. If a place is more than about three hours out, look at the multi-day itineraries instead.

Group or private

Most trips here run both ways. A group departure is per person and leaves on a set date; a private trip is priced for the whole party and leaves when you want, which usually works out better from about four people up. Hotel pickup in central Baku is standard, and departures are early because the driving is front-loaded — you want the road done before the heat.