Where Can I Park My Camel?

Caravanserais are the original motels. They were designed specifically for groups of travelers who needed a place to stay en route. Caravanserais began to pop up in great numbers along the Royal Road, a merchant trail that led into the Silk Road, all the way back around 600 BC. Open to the sky, the traditionally square courtyards were the "parking lots," as goods, people and animals were all settled into their appropriate places for the night. Some of these unique complexes still exist and a visit to one conjures up all sorts of images and scenes straight out of Arabian Nights.
Crafts and valuables were stored in cellar rooms, travelers stayed on the second floor and the courtyard level rooms were used for trading and selling. In Baku, a few caravanserai have been turned into restaurants. We dined at one called, simply, "Karavansara," which dates back to the 14th century. Ducking and squeezing into a slit of a doorway, we were shown our private dining room. A gas powered ring of fire was lit in the stone fireplace and we were left to imagine what kind of business deals went down centuries ago. Outside, a fez wearing quartet played traditional mugam music.
In Sheki, we were able to have an even more authentic caravanserai experience. The city, in Northwestern Azerbaijan, is famous for its silk factory. So, naturally, it was a major stop for merchants on the Silk Road. By the 17th century, four large caravanerais were built in the city - two of which remain. One of these historic travel lodges is restored and back to doing what it does best- giving weary travelers a place to rest their heads.
The 18th century Yukari Karavanerie Hotel is a huge square structure. Around the perimeter, facing out toward the sidewalk, small shops occupy the nooks and crannies. Simple tea spots, minimarkets, halva shops, copperworks, musical instruments restringing. The hotel's domed entry hall is incredible, spanning upwards in impressive narrow brickwork. Below the wooden balcony, a sign reads "WIFI."
Our room was not heated in the traditional way - carpets hung up on the walls - but, rather, with a radiator. It being wintertime, whose complaining? Even with the touches of modernity, it felt historic. A completely unique experience. We slept in one of at least a hundred identical rooms that wrapped around the moonlit arcade. The palm trees and courtyard benches were covered in snow.
The morning after our stay, we left before the sun rose. The front door was unlocked by a sleepy young man and we maneuvered our backpacks through and out of the door. The town was asleep, and popping out as we did, I felt like a cuckoo clock announcing the morning. Like the caravanserai's first visitors, we had a long route ahead of us. Onward west we went, over the border to Georgia and through to the capital of Armenia.

Hanging Meat and Sharpened Axes

How does a person cut up an animal? It’s a cultural thing. In America they do it in secret. In Azerbaijan they do it on the roadside, with axes.

This man, lovably, wanted to know if he should put on his white butcher’s coat. From the look of it, the coat was worn only for photos. We were standing on a muddy sidewalk next to a fetid gutter, looking in through the open front of this man’s shop. Granted, it was around forty degrees Fahrenheit, which is about the same as the inside of a refrigerator – but meat isn’t treated the same way here. Butchers practice their craft proudly, in the open. The cutting of meat isn’t treated like a vice to be ashamed of. Packaging doesn’t exist. To buy meat is to buy a piece of an animal, often still steaming with life.

The strange difference between this kind of display - overt savaging of tissue and bone - and the American version - secretive and sanitary - isn't what is produced but the attitude towards cleanliness. In the west, we're terrified of food and meat. It's perceived as automatically dirty, almost sinful by default, and the people who work with it are supposed to hide the worst of this filth from our consumer's eyes. In places like Azerbaijan, where refrigeration (viable electricity, in some places) is rare, to eat meat is to accept a level of dirt and risk. There's no clean water, the facilities have dirt floors, the flesh will be contaminated whether you can see it or not.
We came across this man on the road from Lankaran to Lerik. We pulled over and asked if we could take his picture – he nodded, but didn’t stop working. The sheep was still limber, its head and forelegs discarded casually in the dirt. The man worked like anyone accustomed to their job - comfortably and efficiently.
The first Azeri butchers we came across were in Baku, at the Təzə Bazar. Men grabbed bloody chunks of muscle and held them out to us – “beef,” they said, or “steak.” There were hearts and lungs, cleaned tripe, trotters and testicles, brains sitting on semi-cleaned tile counters. The butchers worked – as they do everywhere in Azerbaijan – on large chopping blocks fashioned from sections of tree trunk, the bark still on.

At first, I was struck by how casually these vendors handled their products. How is it that that’s surprising? Millions of pounds of meat are cut up every day. Is every slice committed squeamishly? Is every piece parted with closed eyes? Does an employee in a slaughterhouse shudder at the sight of intestine?

In Azerbaijan, meat hangs right over the sidewalk, like burly men having a conversation in front of the store. Unwanted scraps are tossed to the dogs. Customers can touch and smell the flesh, the butchers will make alterations.

Meat is expensive here, and selling it is a proud trade. This woman motioned for us to take her picture, cleaning up her workspace. Imagine an American supermarket butcher, hidden away in the back room, working in (what we assume is) glistening sterility, his hands in plastic, his product sealed up as quickly as possible. Imagine that butcher wanting his picture taken - it seems almost like taking a picture of a mortician or a doctor, not of someone preparing food.

In the markets and on the roadsides of Azerbaijan, the butchers see this red stuff for what it is: food. I remember one man holding up a cut of beef appreciatively, palpating it a little with his red hands - "beef" he said. "No problem. Very good." His eyes were proud. What he was showing me was something he saw as tasty, like a baker holding up a pie or a grocer displaying fruit.

The Living Skansen

There is a peculiar type of museum, which we call "skansen." It's a Swedish name, but we use it because it's easier than the bulky "ethnographic museum" and more elegant than "open-air history museum." We've been to skansens in Poland, in the Czech Republic and in Georgia. The effect is generally the same: in the collections of old, tiny buildings, one feels the simpleness and smallness of life in the peasant classes of the past.

But it's also the present. In Xinaliq, it's a way of life. We stayed with a family in their house and felt the closeness of a timeless home.

In this room, three generations - some nine people - cook, eat, sleep, pray and watch TV. There is a low table, we sat on the floor. There is a stove, covered in pots. A stack of mattresses gets put away in one corner, the dishes are kept on a small shelf. When the electricity is on, there's a light overhead and the television blares Turkish music videos. When the electricity doesn't work, the only light is from a small hole in the ceiling - once the chimney for an open fire. The family's sheep are kept underneath in a low, dark barrow.

It is, in so many ways, exactly like the skansens. But it isn't a museum, and the people whose lives are contained in this room weren't eager to play the part of living history.
All of us curious travelers are attracted to Xinaliq because of its "unspoiled" culture. It is a place not yet fully modern, somehow. The people speak their own language, full of clicks and hard vowels. They dress in traditional clothes, have their own customs, live almost completely off their sheep. There is a sense that one is making first contact with an undiscovered culture - a perverse anthropological excitement. Hasn't this sort of thing disappeared?

Before we went, in a guesthouse room in Quba, our Xinaliq contact - a man named Xeyrradin -apologetically explained the situation to us. "There's no water, no hot water. The family only heats one room and it's very cold there. They don't have wood, so they burn dung. They will only eat soup, maybe, or some kind of potato, it's very simple." He paused and spread his hands out to us. "Most people go in the summer," he said, shrugging.
There is one other "finished" room, mostly disused, as well as a small entryway, plus a storage space - but these aren't heated, and aren't used much. We slept in the guest room, which was only a degree or so above freezing. The winter closes in the life of this family. They spend as much time as possible inside, watching the television or using their cellphones. At night, the piles of mattresses are spread out over the carpets.

Falling asleep in our cold, separate space, the sound of sheep below the floor mixed with the sound of the television in the next room.
We spent hours sitting on cushions around the table. There was a lot of simple food, and many cups of tea in between.

Maybe the biggest cultural oddity about the home wasn't something we expected - this family seemed almost doggedly resistant to making a connection. There were no introductions. No-one said goodbye when we left. There were very few attempts at crossing the language divide. Food was served to us, one of the men would bark at his wife to refill our tea cups. Rebecca and I would have our own conversation and the family would have theirs, even as we all sat around the same table. We felt lucky that there were two toddlers - at least someone looked at us. We spent two nights with this family and have no name to attach to them.

There are no hotels in Xinaliq, and no restaurants, and that somehow explained our loneliness. The family was providing a service to us - a place to stay, with meals served. In other words, they were providing access to Xinaliq, the town. It probably never occurred to them that we were interested in them more than the buildings.

When we walked between the old stones, the people who approached us wanted to suggest hiking routes, or tell us to visit the caves. They were friendly people. But there are mountains everywhere, and shallow caves too. What makes Xinaliq stand out isn't its location - rocky, hilltop towns are special, but not extraordinary. They exist. Most of them, though, exist only as places - not as a theater for life.

There was a man named Misha in Tbilisi, Georgia, who we met at our hostel. He was Polish, but he'd lived in the Caucasus for years - he'd traveled all the back roads, been to all the remote spots. When we told him that we were heading down to Azerbaijan, he told us about Xinaliq. "It's my dream to go there," he said.

Xinaliq is the dream that there are still untouched places on earth. Perhaps with better Azeri (or Russian), or with more time, or with more persistence we could have found some spark of recognition between us and the family. Instead, we found ourselves more and more settling into the role of watcher, as though we really were visitors to a museum.

But what an amazing museum! Accept the divide, and the display is magical. We saw wolf tracks in the snow, a bloody sheep's stomach in the mud and herds of goats in the narrow lanes. We watched groups of kerchiefed women fetching water for their tea and washing clothes outside in the snow. There were boys playing dominos beside us and homemade cheese on the table - and fresh lamb, pickles, and bread rising wrapped in blankets. We sat in a tableau of the ancient present and saw things that could only be re-enacted elsewhere. Waking in the morning, the sun rose over a wall of rocky peaks around us, the hilltop was as silent and static as it has been for thousands of years.

Maybe not making a connection is the difference. Maybe that's why Xinaliq is still so untouched.

In a Land Far, Far Away...

Some places are hard to get to and, once there, even harder to really get at. Winter makes both attempts more difficult with snow obscuring roads as well as most signs of life. The world is full of places that remain set apart, that remain relatively unreachable even in this era of global connectivity. There are all sorts of words for these places: off-the-beaten-track, remote, exotic, fabled. Xinaliq has earned that final adjective - existing for at least 5,000 years on its unlikely mountain perch. Isolated, it's the stuff of legend.
Xinaliq an ancient village, one of the oldest continuously inhabited places on earth. Pressed into the mountains like a silk button in an overstuffed cushion, it has been able to retain its unique identity - even its own language. Who knows how many times in its long history the residents of Xinaliq have been aware of which empire or country they technically "belonged" to. It's the mountain equivalent of a distant island that has, for almost all of its existence, until very, very recently, been disconnected from the rest of the world.
This has changed, somewhat, with the new Quba-Xinaliq road. A difficult two hour ride in the summer, it was almost impassible on the wintry morning of our departure from Quba. Snow fell steadily and we were surprised, really, when our ride to Xinaliq showed up right on time in his Lada Niva. On the way out of town, he stopped to pick up another passenger. "I'm the man that plows the road," the man communicated proudly. "With my tractor." Well, great. The snow never let up and driving up into the village felt like entering a snow cloud. In the morning, at sunrise, the white curtain had been drawn and we could see where we'd wound up.
Winter makes it difficult to really get a good look or feel for things, physically and culturally. Xinaliq's landscape, which is lauded for its hiking options, though not without a guide, was covered in snow. The people were mostly hidden, smiling and waving to us when they emerged to use the outhouse or fetch more water. The sheep, the reason for the town's existence, weren't gallivanting around the fields being guarded by vicious dogs. They were led out once or twice a day to eat warm grains from troughs, ingeniously made from split tires.
Even with the bleats of sheep and occasional sledding child, there was a deep sense of hibernation. Fruit and vegetables were tucked away in jars, pickled and preserved. Wool socks and hot tea were applied in layers. Chickens were cooped up, along with families. Rubber clogs on doorsteps gave a sense of how many people lived in each house. This young girl stamped excess water out of her laundry. Her female relatives waited to hang the clothing up, adding to the banners of bright cloth with icicle fringe strung up all around town.
The town has retained a way of life that has become more and more rare and rarified. The smell of burning cow dung clings to everything. These pungent heating bricks are piled up outside of homes, an alternative fuel in a place that has no wood. Water is piped into wells spread throughout town from a single spring in the mountains. The stone houses are built one on top of another. Covers are placed over the chimney of one house so that the "upstairs" neighbor's child won't fall in stepping out their front door.
We managed a hike out into the surrounding mountains, a four hour loop guided by the oldest son of our homestay. He brought us first to this shepherd's refuge, a shallow cave filled with ice sculpture stalagmites and stalactites. Handkerchiefs and scarves were hung up and four or five tea saucers were placed upright against the wall. It was difficult to tell if there was a religious purpose for this or if it was simply a way to flag the spot and provide dishware for lunch. As we continued on, the rock faces kept changing, buzzards appeared and disappeared overhead, a gunshot rang out and the fox it was aimed at darted across a hill. Now and then, our guide would sit on his gloves and smoke a cigarette while we took pictures , cleaned our slip-prone boots and gathered our fraying nerves.
Many people mourn the Xinaliq-Quba road for the modernity it is bringing to such an ancient place. Cement walls, corrugated roofs, wood paneling are seen as defacement. Until recently, Xinaliq was frozen in time. Covered in snow, frozen in practically every other way, it still felt ancient to me. Winter gives everything a tinge of being colorless, lifeless, timeless. A sense of mystery.

The Great Mountain Paxlava

We were holed up in snowy Quba, a town without apparent features. Sure, there was frozen mud and a soviet park, bald taxi tires spinning on the icy road. There were people and a small bustle, a closed carpet factory, some quiet mosques, concrete-floored tea houses. There were even two restaurants, populated by a sparse collection of policemen and town officials. But it was still bleak, not much more than a base camp for our excursion up to Xinaliq. Quba seemed just like so many other mountainous, remote, once-Russian outposts, with nothing to set it apart.

But slowly, as we clomped around in boots and hoods, the snowy, low-roofed landscape revealed a surprise. Everywhere, tucked into inauspicious nooks, were little shops and stands – too small to notice, at first – advertising “paxlava.” But what is this thing?

If you say it out loud, with a hard, back-of-the-throat “x,” “paxlava” sounds an awful lot like its Turkish cousin - baklava. This was illustrated for us by an amused vendor after several attempts on our part – we were trying to say something like “patch-lawee.” He punctuated each syllable with a swing of his spatula, then shook his head. “English? Allmagne?” he asked. “American” seemed to give us a free pass (it usually does in Azerbaijan).
Paxlava is made not with pistachio and honey, but with walnuts and sugar. Walnuts are a local specialty, and honey is something of a delicacy. The treats are made in large, round, covered pans and baked in slim, stovetop ovens. The walnut is mixed with sugar and then layered between thin sliced of pastry. Once cooked, the hard cakes are cut and soaked in a sugar syrup which is usually dyed bright red.
There are literally dozens of paxlava vendors in Quba, which is remarkable because there are so few other businesses. The majority are tiny, single person operations, sometimes just a small window in a family's home. It seems a hopeless day, to sit shivering in hat and coat, hands in pockets, an untouched tray in the window, only the hardscrabble streets of Quba to look at. We didn't see a single local buying or eating the stuff, and we didn't see a single tourist. It's good that the sugary diamonds keep so well - the paxlava business is a waiting game.
The price for a piece fluctuated quite a bit - depending more on the geniality of the vendor than on the quality of the product. Our first pieces weren't very good, but were the most expensive: two manat (about €2) for three pieces. Other shops had friendlier bakers and lower prices - sometimes as low as 30 qəpik.

The town's other specialty is "bükma," which is similar to paxlava, but a different shape. Despite all the signs for it, this other pastry didn't seem to be widely available.
How to describe the taste of paxlava? It's sweet. The better the paxlava, we decided, the more one can taste the walnut. The piece on the right was probably our favorite of all the types we tried (it was snowing, there was nothing else to do) because it wasn't as sugar-saturated.

But as for taste? Imagine eating mushy, over sweetened, walnut cookie dough that's sat out until crusty and dry. Not bad if there's only one piece. Kind of sickening after three.

The Azeri Coast

There are places on a map that feel distant, no matter how close they may be. The Caspian Sea is one of them.
I remember the first time I ever really thought about this salty place. Some years ago, I awoke in the groggy middle of a fourteen hour flight from New York to Delhi - this was my first trip to a land more foreign than France or England - and looked at the flight map screen. Our small, digital plane was hovering over a strange disc of blue pixels. Somewhere below, a real body of water lay in the darkness, hemmed in by strange and terrifying names. Iran and Turkmenistan, vast Kazakhstan and mountainous middle Russia. The thought made the journey seem huge: "I'm flying over the Caspian Sea. This is so, so far away from home!"
Even right by its waters the Caspian seems distant and foreign, as though this grey, polluted surface was something other than the reality. A promenade, almost featureless, sweeps along Baku's seafront. At one end, the world's tallest flagpole stands. At the other end, a grid of new towers. Between, men and women walk in groups, taking pictures of the quiet water and the winter-wrapped trees. A "new dock," for strolling instead of boats, juts out over the ripples.
Oil dominates the Azeri stretch of coastline, and has for centuries. The wells here are the reason for Baku's boom - for as long as the city has existed, there has been oil. Before modern extraction, it literally seeped out of the ground. Much of the on-shore deposits have been drained, but rigs and derricks continue to be built far out into the water. If you believe reports, there's an entire offshore town, built by Socar Oil thirty miles from the coast. This watery metropolis is called Neft Dashlari; its population is over five thousand, it has a public park.
Just south of Baku, a rig-servicing station sits some distance from the highway, near vast cement plants. The long support legs jut hundreds of feet into the sky.
If this place feels exotic, it's because of the nightmare imagery of desecration and machinery. In the world, I've never been to a place that encapsulates the factory wasteland like Azerbaijan. Before we ventured up away, into the interior, I thought that the entire country must be like this. Luckily, it isn't. The waterside has brought out the worst.
The Caspian's water level fluctuates a great deal, rising and falling with drought and periods of rain. Once, it was much lower, and, before the mid twentieth century, Azerbaijan had some very nice beaches. Most of these have been lost as the sea rises.
What is left is a trash and rock strip, with occasional pebbly coves and a few, man-made sandy bays. In Lankarin, like most coastal towns, there is hardly any sense of the sea, the houses and people face inland.
Of course, this sea is known for its caviar - ninety percent of the world's real caviar comes from the Caspian; the sturgeon in her waters were once so plentiful that the eggs were considered peasant food. Today, the larger Beluga and Osetra sturgeon are endangered, though fishing still goes on. In Baku's Təzə Bazar, we saw big, gutted fish for sale and lots of tins of eggs.
These are less sought after, more common mackerel (we think), which are caught and sold for Azerbaijan's frying pans.
I still wish that I could really go to the Caspian Sea, or at least, to the idea of the place that I once had. Maybe on the other shore it's different, or in Iran or the north. Here, there is so little: sinking buildings and nodding oil wells, drooping power lines, trash, bulldozers, half-built "resorts," concrete, oil scum.

Lavangi, A Talysh Delicacy

This chicken has a secret. Like so many chickens and fish in the Talysh region of Azerbaijan, it has become lavangi. All around the country, chicken lavangi is touted as a national treasure - the best poultry dish in a land full of cooked birds. While we were in Baku, we attempted to find a Talysh restaurant to get our taste of the food, but we never found it. Driving through Southern Azerbaijan, the birthplace of the dish, we knew we would have our chance to find out what the heck lavangi actually is.
I'm still unsure if the word references the stuffing itself or the fact that it is stuffed, but here it is: chicken lavangi. The stuffing is made mostly from onion, chopped walnuts and herbs, but can range in actual recipe. This chicken's stuffing tasted like an earthier, saltier pesto. Its consistency was close to an olive tapenade. Though, it was definitely something all its own.
We have yet to see lavangi in a restaurant, but that's been a lot of the fun. Roadsides in the Talysh region are lined with smoking tandirs. These clay ovens cook up lavangi and fresh bread. Signs illustrate the process, showing a bird with a stick through it dangling vertically over a flaming tandir - the moment before the magic begins to happen.
Locals must be aware of lavangi's almost mythic status in the country, as they knew exactly what we wanted as we approached. We were welcomed into the "kitchen" of these outdoor stands as fires were fed and tandirs were heated up. Always hoping for a warm version of the dish, we hulked around. Our noses tried to sniff out freshly emerged chicken or fish.
This was the tell-tale sign of any lavangi stand. Out on the road would be a glass display case with a chicken, a fish and some bread hanging overhead. We never did get that warm one. But maybe no one ever does?
The river fish doubled in size all plumped up, their skin crisped perfectly in the clay oven. I was particularly excited about lavangi because it was a national dish I could actually eat. In my -totally unbiased pescatarian- opinion, fish lavangi works better. The stuffing is right in there up against the flesh of one side and separated from the other by just a simple bone fence. It's much easier to get a nice forkful or pinch of meat and filling together.
We picked at the fish on the side of the road, using its newspaper wrapping as a plate, our fingers as forks and a warm loaf of bread as a napkin. This filling was lumpier, with bigger pieces of onion and walnuts and a little rice mixed in. It was flavored with a good deal of cilantro, possibly some thyme and made sour by bits of dried plum. Plum and pomegranate are common features of lavangi and the tartness reminded me of cranberry Thanksgiving stuffing.

A Talysh Retreat

With only one day trip out of Baku under our belt, we were antsy to head out of the big city and start seeing the rest of Azerbaijan. We arrived in the country by overnight train. So, even though we've technically traveled the width of it, we didn't really get a good look at anything. I know Merlin just extolled the virtues of our new carless existence - but we never said we wouldn't rent a car now and then.
A highway stretches down along the coast of the Caspian Sea from Baku to Astara and into Iran. It was mostly flat, though the scenery did vary some. We were excited to get up into the Lesser Caucasus of the Talysh Region. There are basically two mountains roads in the region that are deemed "readily passable by car." So, obviously, we took them both to the towns they led to: Lerik and Yardmili. The drops down to the hillside below were sometimes staggering and always beautiful. Along the drive from Lankaran to Lerik, there were a number shuttered resorts and riverside rental huts. Signs promised shashlyk and fresh bread. Grills and tandirs sat on the roadside. I imagine that, in summertime, the route must feel like a long, fragrant cloud.
We may have seen more sheep than people for a good deal of our time driving through the Talysh region. Young boys, who were just tall enough to see into our windshield, herded groups of sheep with flimsy sticks. Now and then, a man would gallantly ride past us on a horse. Sometimes, a donkey would pass by with a heavy load on its back. But the sheep, those masters at hanging out diagonally, were definitely most abundant. They spotted the scenery and clogged the road.
Lerik itself felt unremarkable - but that's sometimes the point. It was simply a town that was reachable, so we reached it. Legend has it that, in 1990, a local shepherd donated his flock to refugees and President Heydar Aliyev wanted to honor the man with a visit. He was told that the road to Lerik was simply too bad for his car. So, he repaved it. I guess, in a way, every foreigner who makes a trip to Lerik simply because they can is really paying tribute to that nameless shepherd.
The town of Yardmili was more picturesque and slower paced. We should have stayed longer,. There were so many things to do: visit a carpet weaving factory, see the Shalala waterfall, gaze over Tangi Canyon from a recommended tea spot. Sometimes beautiful weather and a sleepy town have a way lulling you right into contentment.
That night, we slept on the road between Yardmili and Masalli at a bizarre hotel - the only we could find. The gold-toothed manager wore a full suit and there were at least ten people on staff - about five times as many workers as customers. There was an artificial pond, gazebos and talk of peacocks on the premises (though we never saw any). The epitome of life on the road.