This two-week plan is for travelers who want the full spread of Azerbaijan: the capital’s museums, the forested foothills of the Greater Caucasus, the old silk-road towns, the second city of Ganja and a night in the country’s highest village. The pace is steady. Most stops get two or three nights, so you unpack properly for most of the trip, with a run of one-night stops only near the end. You will use intercity buses and marshrutkas (minibuses), shared taxis for the mountain legs, one train between Ganja and Baku, and the occasional local taxi for sites without a bus.
Days 1-3: Baku and Gobustan
Give the capital three full nights, because the best parts sit at opposite ends of town. Start at the
Azerbaijan Carpet Museum on the seafront, the building shaped like a half-unrolled carpet, where the regional weaving styles you will meet later in Quba and Shaki are laid out side by side. Then slip through the gates of the
Walled City of Baku early in the morning, before the tour groups, when …
read more 👉This two-week plan is for travelers who want the full spread of Azerbaijan: the capital’s museums, the forested foothills of the Greater Caucasus, the old silk-road towns, the second city of Ganja and a night in the country’s highest village. The pace is steady. Most stops get two or three nights, so you unpack properly for most of the trip, with a run of one-night stops only near the end. You will use intercity buses and marshrutkas (minibuses), shared taxis for the mountain legs, one train between Ganja and Baku, and the occasional local taxi for sites without a bus.
Days 1-3: Baku and Gobustan
Give the capital three full nights, because the best parts sit at opposite ends of town. Start at the Azerbaijan Carpet Museum on the seafront, the building shaped like a half-unrolled carpet, where the regional weaving styles you will meet later in Quba and Shaki are laid out side by side. Then slip through the gates of the Walled City of Baku early in the morning, before the tour groups, when the lanes around the Maiden Tower are quiet enough to hear the swifts. Tucked inside the walls, the Miniature Book Museum is a single room of thumb-sized volumes and costs nothing to enter.
Day 3 belongs to Gobustan National Park, about 60 km south. The rock engravings of boats, dancers and wild cattle cover a hillside of tumbled boulders, and the bubbling mud volcanoes a short drive further are the strangest sight in the country. Old Lada taxis wait in Gobustan village to make the bumpy run up to the mud cones.Days 4-5: Shamakhi and Gabala
Head west into the hills on a bus that climbs out of the dry Absheron plain. Stop in Shamakhi to see the Juma Mosque, one of the oldest mosque sites in the Caucasus, and to eat lunch somewhere with vine leaves on the menu, since this is the country’s main wine district. Carry on to Gabala for two nights. The town itself is quiet, but the Tufandag Mountain Trail area above it is the draw: a cable car lifts you over beech forest to open ridges, and from the top stations you can walk well-marked paths with views across the Alazani valley.Days 6-7: Shaki and Ilisu
Shaki is roughly 2 hours further on, and it rewards two nights with its steep lanes of brick houses and walnut trees. The Palace of the Shaki Khans is small, maybe a 20-minute visit, but every wall is painted and its windows are made of thousands of colored glass pieces fitted without glue or nails. Stay at the old Caravanserai if your budget stretches, and order piti, a mutton and chickpea stew baked in a clay pot. On day 7, take a marshrutka toward Qakh and a taxi to the Ilisu Waterfall Trail, a forest walk ending at a cold, misty plunge pool.Days 8-10: Ganja, Goygol and Naftalan
From Shaki, a 3-hour ride south lands you in Ganja, a wide, leafy city that sees a fraction of Baku’s visitors. Walk to the Nizami Mausoleum and the Bottle House, a home whose walls are studded with thousands of glass bottles. Spend one day at Goygol National Park, about an hour away, where the lake sits in thick forest under the Murovdag range and the air is noticeably cooler. On the other day, go to Naftalan for the oddest spa session of your life: short, timed soaks in warm crude oil that locals swear by for joints and skin.Days 11-12: Back East and Up the Coast
Take the train from Ganja to Baku (around 4 to 5 hours), and use the evening for the Heydar Aliyev Center, Zaha Hadid’s white wave of a building, which looks best when the floodlights come on. The next morning, head north on the Quba highway and stop at Beshbarmag, the five-fingered rock above the Caspian, where pilgrims climb the stone stairs to tie ribbons and make wishes. Continue to Quba for the night and visit a carpet workshop, where the patterns from the Baku museum come alive on the looms.Days 13-15: Khinalug and Home
A shared taxi or jeep takes you up the gorge to Khinalug, where you sleep in a family homestay, eat dinner with your hosts and wake to a village of stacked stone houses with snow peaks on every side. Day 14 drops you back to Quba for an easy evening, and on day 15 the bus returns you to Baku in time for a late flight.
For one final detour, the Molokan village of Ivanovka in Ismayilli district keeps a Russian-speaking farming community, honey stalls and a collective farm that still runs much as it did generations ago.v2.webp){kind=logo}
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