Day 6 October 21

Natural Environment
A quick breakfast was followed by us getting ready for the trip we were going on. the weather dropped a bit over night but is still around 60 degrees fahrenheit.

Today we ventured into the Gobustan National Park, unfortunately this means an hour long car ride to the southwest of Baku. Before that we got breakfast from the hotel. When we arrived we saw some amazing sights, that were well worth the drive! Among these sights were some carvings for ancient civilizations!

The carvings dated from 40,000 years ago until 5,000 years ago. There are nearly 6,000 of these carvings that depict flora and fauna and the life of the humans native to the region and ones that were not! The carvings that depict the life of the people show battles between tribes of these prehistoric humans, these battles were fought by armed roman, and warriors with lance-like objects. They also show a religious aspect, as they depict special dances done. These also show trade happening, which was achieved overland by caravans of camels. The flora and fauna are shown to be suited for a warm and wet climate not the harsh desert it is today.

This is a picture of a Latin inscription on a rock from the 80th year AD.  The stone is the farthest east any Roman artifacts have ever been found.



This is one of the most famous engravings from the park.  It is showing some of the people who inhabited the area in prehistoric times, carved by themselves.



This picture depicts a ritual from the prehistoric natives' lives.

We did get to see the mud volcanoes, they were not aggressively erupting but they were slowly oozing mud. This "mud" is not actually mud as we think of it, it was heated water mixing with some minerals and gas, mostly methane. There are nearly 400 mud volcanoes in Azerbaijan, the most in the world! The locals are very proud of their volcanoes.



This is a mud volcano from the park, they do not often erupt violently.  The volcanoes are normally just slowly releasing the methane from underneath them.

On the way back to the hotel we stopped at a German restaurant that had the best bratwursts ever! Were were particularly elated because we had not had lunch and were very hungry. I wish we had one of these back home in North Carolina.