The Otherworld of Azerbaijan

THE DRIVE: from Quba (pronounced~ goo-buh) (about 2 hours from Baku) to Xinaliq (pronounced "henna-look"--which is actually what it means because the mountains are henna-colored in the sun) a small town in the mountains of Azerbaijan, 25 kilometers from the Russian border, in the Caucasus Mountains.













ABOVE Left: Treehouse perched amongst a tree's autumn leaves. Unlike Baku, Quba was fully being hit with fall. Trees of Quba, few pines and furs, were orange red yellow, and some still green.

ABOVE: Hills of area surrounding Quba.

Our driver was a great tour-ish guide too. He knew all the great tourist photo-op places. As we drove to Xinaliq, he stopped the car a number of places, to show us waterfalls, rivers, and beautiful rolling hills.
Here, he stopped to lead us up some stairs, by the road. Some rocky steps of this hill, and some slices of wood nailed as steps up to this lookout. These steps led to a quite precarious climb, as some of them were broken and unstable. Heres our tour guide in a picture below.

















More beautiful scenery!!!!!!!
















Sorry about the dust on the lens in this pic. of mom, here, folks. Did I say it was windy? Cuz it was windy, not so much down in Quba, but very windy in Xinaliq. I think some dust got blown onto the camera lens, so the pictures a little funky monkey. Also below, you'll catch a glimpse of "yo", this photo taken by "mi madre". Hey, I'm learning a bit of Spanish, anyway. Again, pic is a little blurry.























Posing at a picnic party palace. Nice alliteration, eh?


















OH NOOOO! She's gunna fall over the edgeeee!!! (While I sit here and watch...)



















CANYONSS!!! Getting close to Xiniliq....












(Ok--so Marlys' first picture of the village was the next one, but I felt the narrative went better if you could see the town first. But it is more exciting in her version, I guess.--Alison)


OUR TIME IN XINILIQ: They cook and kill their own meat in this small village town built on a hill....look what we almost tripped over! :0


















Grazing in the hills of Xiniliq...



















Okay, here's mi madre now, she's gunna share a few memories with y'all.


Hi, Alison here now.
Here's Zaur, our guide, with his 15 cows in the background. He's a super skinny guy--but the wind is blowing up his clothes like balloons! You can't really see, but Zaur climbed with us in casual dress loafers. It was amazing--we were often going straight up and transversing shale hillsides. We hiked with him for several hours, past sacred waterfalls (wish I'd thought to take a picture of the discarded and rusty crutch that was left near the falls--a clear indication of its healing powers). Folks tie prayer flags on a bit of fencing near the entrance to the caves/falls, but as with any location in the country that sees many number of visitors, there was also trash...Not much trash up higher though, where mainly shepherds are the only human inhabitants.














Here's Marlys and Zaur with Russia off somewhere in the distance there. Just outside of the village we stayed in was a station/boarding house for border soldiers--I wasn't sure if it was for the Russian soldiers or the Azeri soldiers though.







Marlys and Zaur.















More scenery. The wind was whipping up the dust and the clouds were moving through at the same time. Hazy effects.







Below is Xinaliq from above on our hike. As you can see, it's quite defensively built on a spur of the mountainside. Since the inhabitants of this village speak a language no one else speaks (and which has not been definitively connected to any others), one local man speculates that maybe communication with nearby villages was only through hostilities. The other two small nearby villages (both lower altitude) speak a language no one else speaks also. These are still living languages, but because the villages have been subject to the familiar phenomenon of migration to larger towns for jobs, and the permanent resident population has been halved in the last quarter century, I do wonder how long the language will remain strong and dynamic. Children are beginning to be brought up elsewhere. The man who arranged our visit said his second son, who has lived for three years in larger Quba and plays with Azeri speaking kids, speaks the Xinaliq language with a strange accent.
Marlys chose all these pics and I have some others I want to talk about so I'll close out this post and start another. We got some really spectacular photos I want to share. More next post...Alison