AZERBAIJAN: TWO NATIONAL PARKS--SHIRVAN AND GOBUSTAN

We visited two national parks back-to-back in Azerbaijan: Shirvan and Gobustan.

1. Shirvan National Park is a small (about 200 square miles) park 60 miles southwest of Baku that was formed primarily to protect the goitered gazelle, seen atop the tower below:

There are other animals there, of course, but none so important--or visible--as the gazelle that gets is name from the way its neck puffs out during mating season. The park has had a very successful breeding program--they started with 131 gazelles in 1961 and now have over 8,000. We saw quite a few:

Here is a fairly good shot of the "goiter" in the male's neck:

Our other wildlife sightings included a very cute (and not very wild) kitty:

This picturesque dove cote could be almost anywhere in the world:

Look carefully. Do you see something hiding in the bushes out there?

It was some kind of a fox:

This land used to be at the bottom of the Caspian Sea, and it is still below sea level. Ten to fifteen percent of the park is water reservoirs:

The water attracts 220 species of birds:

We weren't as focused on the birds, but we did see some kind of an egret:

. . . and a black kite:

The grasses themselves were quite beautiful:

I love this little bridge that appears to made from bamboo. There are tire tracks leading to it. Did we drive over it? I can't remember, but it doesn't look sturdy enough to hold a car:

2. Gobustan (also spelled Qobustan) National Park is famous for its rock carvings, mud volcanoes, and stone pots.

We started at a funky museum near the parking lot:

It was full of unusual dioramas:

The museum also documents some of the early man archaeological finds:

The IMPORTANT stuff, however, is outside. (I can't resist throwing in this picture of what looks like hundreds of furry hats.)

The official name of this UNESCO World Heritage site is the Gobustan Rock Art Cultural Landscape Resesrve:

The variable, dramatic rock formations alone are worth a trip:

There is a particularly unique type of stone found at Gobustan called a "gaval dash," or musical stone. Some also call it a "tambourine stone." When tapped with another stone, it has a kind of hollow-sounding musical quality, much like the drums we enjoyed in the Stans. I wish I had recorded our guide demonstrating it here:

But the most important reason to come here is the ancient rock art. There are more than 6,000 rock engravings (aka petroglyphs) that date back as far as 40,000 years. The art and remains of ancient settlements, according to UNESCO, reflect "an intensive human use by the inhabitants of the area during the wet period that followed the last Ice Age, from Upper Paleolithic [40,000 years ago] to the Middle Ages."

Can you pick out some engravings in the rocks below?

Here is a close-up of the dancing figures. Incredible, isn't it?

The curved horizontal line with vertical pegs is a boat. Don't miss the figures beneath:

 One of the walls is quite densely covered with engravings. It looks like contemporary art, or maybe layers of graffiti on a wall in downtown Los Angeles

That cow figure in the center is an aurochs, a now extinct species of cattle that used to cover this area:

We saw lots of aurochses (aurochsen? aurochsi?):

 This is some kind of antelope--maybe an oryx?

The curly horns look like a kudu to me:

A somewhat primitive glyph of a man on a horse:

A more skilled rendition of a horse:

Somehow the human figures look as though they are moving:

"Don't smoke!" (No worries there.) "Don't touch!" (That was harder.)

After all, SHE gets to touch:

 More modern primitive art:

 It was a cool, clear day, and we had a wonderful view of the Caspian Sea, which I will forever associate with C. S. Lewis's Narnia books because of a character named Prince Caspian:

Signs like this get Bob excited. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending whom you ask), no venomous vipers appeared:

These deep holes were carved into the rock as a kind of a well to catch rain water. They date back to the Bronze Age (3300-1200 BC). The numbers are a recent, and in my view unfortunate, addition:

These blocks are also of more recent vintage, although still very, very old:

We only saw a very small part of the park. Other sections have mud pots (aka mud volcanoes), which I would love to have seen. Apparently Azerbaijan has 300 of the earth's 700 mud pots, and most of them are in Gobustan.

Gobustan is an aspiring rock artist's dream:

And just to add a little interest--here is the nearby Gobustan prison, Azerbaijan's most notorious lock-up facility for especially dangerous criminals.