January 16, 17, 18, 19: Azerbaijan
Looking at the central, clean, tidy, efficient part of Baku from the top of the maiden tower, which is an inexplicable pile of masonry from long ago. This is the original oil-boom town: in the nineteenth century, half the world's production of oil came from Baku. Scores of Europeans flocked to this barren peninsula and became rich from the oil. The Nobel family, for example.
The Ateshga (or Zoroastrian Fire Temple) outside Baku, on the hellishly polluted Absheron peninsula, has a sacred fire burning in the altar in the center which used to be fueled from a natural crack in the earth, but which is fueled from the gas mains now, which are in turn supplied from the oil and gas fields worshiped by so many oil company executives.
Inside the Ateshga monastery cells are grotesque dioramas of the Zoroastrian pilgrims who used to come here from India to worship the sacred fire. I like to imagine some future display, hundreds of years hence, in the center of Baku, with dioramas of the absurd worship practices of the oil company executives: their expensive mistresses, cars, Texas-style restaurants, and apartments.
Wilson bought a soviet camera and took many pictures of the source of the sacred Nyeft, or heavenly balm of the earth.
A bit further out on the Absheron peninsula is Yoner Dag, a bare hillside in a moorland, where a gas seep was accidentally ignited in the 1950s. There is a chaikhana next to it, and you can enjoy a jolly cup of tea while contemplating the burning gas.
The next day we grabbed a set of cabs and headed seventy kilometers south to see Gobustan, an amazing collection of old petroglyphs.
The site itself is a huge, tumbled-down pile of boulders that used to be on the seashore.
But hidden up in and around the boulders are thousands and thousands of wonderful stone drawings, some 30,000 years old, but most about 12,000 to 5,000 years old. It is a world treasure, on a par with Lascaux or Altamira, but hardly known outside the former Soviet Union.
A bit further south is a region of mud volcanoes: pressurized natural gas forces gobs of mud up out of the earth, making amazing sounds in the process. It was a delightful place, full of surprises.
It is absolutely inhuman, disconnected from life, an alien place.
The Azeri people are friendly and welcoming, their food is great feast food, delicious and complex (plov is more than comfort food in my opinion), the traditional music of the Azeris (mugham) is interesting even without understanding the poetry of it, but Baku and the Absheron peninsula look like the results of a Faustian bargain: central Baku is an international city with great stores and clean, repaired roads--and there are loads of expat oil guys with lots of money--but just outside the cordon sanitaire is great poverty, some of the highest infant mortality in the world, and the most polluted place on earth. The current government is little more than a police state, with enormous corruption. None of the Azeris I spoke to would talk about their government. I wonder what they thought of the Rose revolution.
During the funeral ceremonies on television in Baku, I saw a clip of former President Aliyev, his face skull-like, smearing oil on his face from the first new oil well. The film went into slow motion as he wiped the brown goo onto his cheeks and the image is stuck in my mind.
Later, I accidentally ignited a 1000-manat note, or perhaps it burst into flames.