Working at home

Working at home, with help from Narimanov

Candy Cane Mountains

Monday this week was a local holiday, so we travelled to the Candy Cane Mountains which are about 1 1/2 hours from Baku. Travelling north towards Quba. On the way you pass Sumqayit which is described as an ideal location for a beach resort until the Soviets planners made it home to Azerbaijan's heavy industry (chemical factories). It once held the world record for infant mortality.

The weather was warm & sunny. They are called candy cane due to the coloured banding of the rocks. We enjoyed a picnic - before we saw the wolf !

Weekend in Dubai

At the end of November, we took a week off work and spent 3 nights in Dubai. We stayed at The Atlantis which is at the end of the palm. The view from our balcony

Dubai was a nice change from Baku, it made us realise how challenging Baku can be ... when you are living there things just become the norm. We were especially surprised by the quantity & quality of the food - there were supermarkets with more than a few tins of vegetables !

The weather was also warm, the last few weeks in Baku the weather has turned much cooler and it will be like this until the end of March when the good weather starts again.

The hotel we stayed in had a huge aquarium in the centre of the hotel, you could stay in a room with a wall looking into the aquarium for 29,000 dirhams (£5,000) per night !

Still cheaper than the rooms in this hotel !

New Additions to the family

Four weeks ago we became the 'new slaves' to two rescued kittens, who we have named Narimanov (male) and Natavan (female). We believe that they were about eight weeks old.

They both have settled in very well and spend most of their day, eating & fighting & sleeping.

Narimanov is the ligher coloured, bigger kitten. He was quite cautious when he first arrived but not any longer. Natavan is darker in colour, she was the bravest of the two.

Vets (at least ones you would trust, we have heard lots of horror stories) aren't that easy to find, most people use either the state vet (which is a 40 min drive from the centre of Baku) or the vet at the zoo. We have found a vet close to our apartment, she is from the Ukraine and was very good with them earlier this week when they got their vaccinations for the first time. Medicine for pets isn't very advanced here and it tends to be human medication from the local pharmacy given in smaller doses.

The Mud Volcanoes

This was a view from the apartment one night this week.

Sunday we travelled out of Baku to Gobustan to see the Petroglyphs and mud volcanoes with The McCrae Family and Lina.

The petroglyphs are cave cavings of shamen, cattle, horses and deer. There is a small museum and just outside a miniature 'tamborine stone' which sounds like a drum when hit by stones.

The mud volcanoes is a desolute place which is known as Clangerland. Natural gas produces the volcano's flatulence. The expanding gas cools as it emerges making the mud surprising chilly. On rare occasions, extreme gas pressure blows out the whole crater throwing masses of mud & rock in the air. The methane can ignite a dramatic flare that may burn for weeks.

As you can see Nathan and Natasha enjoyed themselves !!

Arriving in Azerbaijan

We arrived in Baku late on the 3rd of October. As always the visa queue was very long with only one person issuing visas, at least we were near the front !!

Luckily our 14 bags arrived safely, the excess baggage charge was £1,200. The person at the check in desk asked if we wanted to pay by cash or credit card !!

Off to the Hyatt that was to be our home for a couple of weeks .. However we soon discovered from the 1st of October (which is officially winter) the air conditioning is switched off. It was 27 deg for the first few days after we arrived and even now 17th October it is averaging 22 deg. We decided that we would move into our apartment as soon as possible.

This is the view from our bedroom window ... the statue is of Nariman Narimanov who is a famous doctor.


So far things have gone well, everyone is very friendly & helpful. Food shopping is quite an experience, some of the labels are in Russian and some Azeri .. so you are never quite sure what you are buying. We are trying to stick to the local Azeri shops, we went to one of the expat shops today and a small bottle of Helmans mayonnaise was 5 AZN (£3.80) compared to a local brand 1.7 AZN. We also saw a packet of flour for 7 AZN !!!

Tried our first borsch this week, courtsey of Jamilya our maid. It was very good but we didn't realise that there was meat in borsch ...

Before the Move - South Africa Trip

We decided to take a well earned holiday in South Africa before the move to Baku.







We spent 4 days in Cape Town, visiting Table Top Mountain, the winelands, Robben Island (where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned) and The Cape of Good Hope.












Next stop was Hermanus (Walker Bay) for the whale watching. Every year in Sept - Nov, the Southern Right Whales visit these bays to calf & breed.



Unfortunately the weather did not allow us to take a trip on a whale watching boat so we took an air safari instead. The take off & landing were a little scary ... the runway was a dirt track in a vineyard ! We saw a number of whale pods, mostly mothers with a calf but we also saw one pod of 5 whales.

The final leg of the trip we flew to Johannesburg and then out to Kruger National Park to stay in one of the private game reserves for 3 days.

This was definately the highlight of the holiday, we took two jeep safaris each day and saw so many animals that it would take a whole page to list all the wonderful memories ... we saw lions, rhino, hippo, zebra, giraffe, warthogs, deer, eagle, crocodile, elephants - including a baby that was less than a day old



but the highlight of the trip was the leopards which we saw on three occasions, mother and two young males.






And to end our South Africa adventure .... this is probably the strangest photograph we took ........