Gobustan

Gobustan is an hour down the coast from Baku, where three flat-topped hills of limestone stand back from the Caspian in a semi-desert of wind and salt, and on their boulders people drew for forty thousand years: more than six thousand petroglyphs of reed boats with rows of oarsmen, of aurochs and wild goats, of pregnant women and lines of dancers holding hands in the yalli that Azerbaijanis still dance, cut into Boyukdash and Kichikdash and Jingirdagh from the Upper Palaeolithic to the Middle Ages, and read today from the boardwalks of a UNESCO reserve with a museum, opened in 2011, that is the best of its kind in the country. At the foot of Boyukdash a Roman legionary of the Twelfth, Fulminata, cut his unit's name into a rock in the reign of Domitian — the easternmost inscription Rome left anywhere. On Jingirdagh the Gaval Dash, a slab that rings like a tambourine when struck, was the region's first drum. And fifteen kilometres over the tracks to the south-west, the mud volcanoes of Dashgil — grey cones the height of a man that burp cold clay — belong to the four hundred that make Azerbaijan the world's capital of them.

The traveller comes from Baku by taxi or the Alat bus and starts at the museum, so that the boats and the bulls make sense when the boardwalk reaches them; walks Boyukdash in the early light, when the incisions show and the tour buses have not arrived, with a site guide who knows which shadow to stand in; finds the Roman stone at the foot of the hill and the Gaval Dash for someone to strike; hires, in the village, a Lada driver who knows the way to the mud volcanoes — a track a normal car cannot take — and stands among the cones while they bubble; and comes back along the coast past the Bibi-Heybat mosque and the oil terminals, in time for a late lunch in Baku, having seen, in one morning, the oldest art and the strangest geology in the country.

The Guide's honesty: Gobustan is a half-day from Baku that every tour does — go early and see the museum first; there is no shade on the mountain and the wind is Baku's wind, so water, a hat and a jacket, in that order; the mud volcanoes need a driver from the village in something old and high — negotiate the price before you get in, and skip them after rain, when the track becomes the same mud; the coast here is industrial and the sea is not for swimming; the petroglyphs are subtle and easy to walk past — the site guides earn their fee; the burning mountain of Yanar Dag is on the other side of Baku and is a different half-day, whatever the tour desk says; and the boats on the rocks, which Thor Heyerdahl came to see, are the same reed boats that were sailed on the Caspian into living memory — the traveller who looks at them long enough will see the sea move.