The Furthest We've Gone...

Yesterday we reached the geographic zenith of the trip.  This bridge - crossed in the far reaches of Lappish Norway, on our way from one part of Finland to another - sits at 70°198947 N. The name of this place is Tana Bru.  There were a few low buildings, a store, leafless trees, grey skies, the swift Tana river and a small, wet pull off where we could park.  From there, our road turned back down towards the equator.
The experience had us thinking about the other extreme points of the trip, where we'd been the furthest east, west and south.  Here's our little cartography project.

It seems that we always reach these geographic extremes during cloudy, dismal weather.  It was a cold, windy day on the southern coast of Cyprus when we walked the Limassol shoreline, at 34°664911 N.  There were stacks of unused beach chairs and faded signs for "ombrellas," a few fishermen, rocky sand, strip clubs and blank holiday apartments.  Cyprus certain can feel like the sunny south, but in those earliest days of March we had no desire to swim.  From the beach, it's about two hundred and forty miles south to Port Fuad, Egypt.

Looking for lighthouses and glaciers, we rounded the western tip of Iceland's Snæfellsnes Peninsula, which is the furthest west we reached in our westernmost country (-23°973541 E).  The Azores are more westerly, but we don't intend to go.
The land out on the Snæfellsnes was dominated by volcanic rock and bright-green grass.  The waterside cliffs were full of bird nests, the air was full of mist.  It's a land of myth, and the local volcano was chosen by Jules Verne as the entry point into the center of the earth.

More than three thousand miles east, on the polluted shores of the Caspian sea, Baku was our other longitudinal extreme.  Oil derricks and harbor cranes hung in the sky, the city was gnawing itself to pieces.  Azerbaijan isn't a pretty place, and the Caspian was tar black in the January light.
The culture there is as much Asian as European, a mixture of Islam, Russia and its own independent fire.  Taking a night train overland through the dessert from Georgia, we awoke to grey scrub and brown earth.  The sea and the city, when we got there, seemed like the last place on earth.
As nearly as we can figure it, we reached 49°887371 E.

So, if these were our poles, where was the middle?  After some quick calculations, it seems that the east-west, north-south midpoint of our trip lands at 52°431929 N, 12°956915 E, which is about ten miles west of Berlin.
We've actually been to one (dubiously accurate) geographic center of Europe, in the Belarusian town of Polotsk.  It didn't feel like the middle, though.  Berlin seems much more accurate, even if our methods are a little unscientific.

Azeri Food

Azerbaijan is a strange and unique country. We could call it anything we wanted, really - Islamic, ex-soviet, Asian, Middle Eastern, European... this is a people and a land that doesn't fit easily into any category. It's a country that's over 95 percent muslim, with a language that's very close to Turkish and a regional identity that hinges on the silk routes and the desert - but it still feels extremely Russian. Vodka is the drink of choice. Borsht is on every menu. Old Ladas clunk down the highways. Women wear short skirts, policemen have fur hats.

Their food is a great representation of this mixture of cultures. Much was introduced during soviet rule, much influence has been taken from Turkey and Georgia, the desert and mountains play their part.

This is how every Azeri meals begins - with a cluster of dishes meant to accentuate and compliment the meal. Usually there's salty sheep's cheese, some kind of yogurt, goy (greens, typically parsley and scallions) and pickles. Sometimes there's plum sauce or choban (peasant) salad, in the mountains they serve a kind of tomato paste.
At a road stop along the southern highway, on our way from Baku down to the Talysh region, I had this bowl of stewed meat and qreçki, or split bulgar wheat. The landscape at that point was just beginning to green as we left the brown desert and the land began rising toward the Lesser Caucasus and foothill farmland. It was a dry dish, but delicious - the nutty grains didn't need anything but a pinch of salt.
The heart and soul of Azeri food is Shashlyk, in all its myriad forms. Lamb is the most popular meat, but there was also lots of baliq (sturgeon) near the coast and whole chickens - toyuq kebab - on the high plains. This was the best grilled meat I had: in the little mountain hub of Lerik, we stopped at a bright, airy cafeteria where the air was heavy with the scent of grilling meat. Outside the windows, the jagged border with Iran loomed, a series of snowy peaks. The waiter "suggested" I have these bits of fatty, well-seasoned lamb's haunch. Really, he gave me no choice - this was the dish he brought to the table.
Qutab was something we discovered pretty late in the country - we needed a quick bite to take on a long bus ride with us; this was the closest thing to the parking lot. In a dark, one room shack, I bought a small stack of these crepe-like things. They can be stuffed with meat, cheese or - a later discovery - pumpkin, but these were more basic and probably the most common. A thin layer of spinach and parsley is folded between two halves of extra-thin lavash, then heated up over a flame.
In poorer places, often the only available thing would be a kind of egg scramble. Sometimes the egg was mixed with oily potatoes and sausage, sometimes with spinach. The dish above was just tomato and egg, with a few bits of parsley.
If the bulk of many Azeri meals is kebab, the backbone is soup. Alongside borscht and chicken soups, there is dovga, made with yoghurt, piti, a lamb broth soup and düşbərə, shown above. The tiny, ravioli like dumplings in düşbərə are hand-stuffed with lamb and herbs, the broth is light, the waiters especially proud.

Also, I should re-mention paxlava and lavangi.

Things Azeri People Like

Tea. "Like," is an understatement. "Love," would be an understatement. "Subsist on," gets a little closer to the heart of it, but focuses too much on the consumption. Having tea in Azerbaijan is a social activity, a integral part of life. Mothers "decanting" tea to cool it off, pouring it into the saucer and holding it up for their children to sip, is the equivalent of a bed time story. Or a hug. It's all very ritualistic. Sugar cubes go in the mouth, not the cup. Candies are plopped in the cup, never the mouth. Jam can be added to tea or eaten with a spoon alongside it. As soon as one kettle is done, another is brought to a boil. We have never consumed so much tea in our entire lives. Azeris seemed to consume no liquid aside from it.
Bread. Sure, everyone likes bread. (Sorry, celiacs). But does everybody place it out in the yard for birds and animals to peck away at because it's too holy to put in the garbage with everything else? I didn't think so. Here, a man prepared long, flat loaves to replace the ones he'd just taken out of the oven at a restaurant. As soon as those were in, he would go about making more. And more. And more. Diners kept a piece of bread in their left hand as they ate with their right, using it to nudge food onto their forks or, topped with a small mound of something, making it into a separate utensil. Soups and stews were doubled in size with the addition of bread. Pieces would be ripped and dropped into the bowl until all liquid was soaked up. Then, the bready mash would be eaten. Of course, along with some more bread.
Outdoor Sinks. The omnipresence of this outdoor sinks were the result of another thing Azeri People like- washing their hands. A sink was placed outside the front door of every restaurant or tucked away behind a curtain right when you walked in. No one sat down without cleaning their hands first and we were beseeched by every host to make use of the sink upon arrival. In fact, we always made sure someone actually saw us wash our hands. That way, we wouldn't have to do it over again.
Statues. Sure, everyone likes statues. But Azeri people had a knack for them and really liked sprinkling them around public spaces. In almost every instance, the statues would depict regular people. In Baku, midriff baring women hailed a cab and baseball cap wearing men talked on cell phones. In Lankaran, two men laughed on a bench while another, stooped over with his hands clasped behind his back, consulted an information board. Behind this statue in Sheki you can see Heydar Aliyev waving from a billboard. Which brings me to my next point...
Pictures of Heydar Aliyev/Heydar Aliyev Museums/Heydar Aliyev. Former President Heydar Aliyev's picture is everywhere in Azerbaijan. Billboards show him in front of the flag or candidly laughing. Businesses hung enormous portraits of him shaking their CEO's hand. One cell phone company simply put up a banner with Heydar Aliyev, you guessed it, talking on a cell phone. Every town had a Heydar Aliyev Museum and at least one bust of the man. Anything that can be named after him is. You can tell his son, the current president, doesn't feel too competitive with his deceased old man.

Honorable Mentions

Cayxanas (Tea Rooms). I know I already said "tea," but this deserves its own honorable mention. Behind almost every door in any Azeri town is a cayxana. Most have no sign at all, just a rumble emanating from inside and the shadow of a dozen black caps in the foggy window. Men sitting in tea houses, sharing kettles of tea and nary a drop of alcohol, become rowdy and congenial. Tea houses are their bars, diners, elks lodges, pool halls all rolled into one. They seemed to spend their entire day here and grew silent and wary any time I entered their realm. Tea houses are like secret clubs and they are fervently male only.

Private Dining Rooms. Speaking of rooms, if an establishment served more than tea, they always had at least one private room in addition to the main dining space. This is where, most often, the police would go - some of the only people who eat out regularly. Sometimes, we were hidden away in one if there was a big party going on. In one restaurant, our private room was a mini picnic table in an faux beer barrel. Very cozy.

Having Their Pictures Taken. Exhibit A. Exhibit B. Exhibit C.

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.