Gobustan Mud Volcanoes, Ateshgah & Yanardag: Private Day Tour from Baku

By midmorning the highway peels away from Baku’s glass-and-concrete edge and the land opens into the blunt, wind-scoured plateau of Absheron. The tour vehicle eases to a stop at the Gobustan museum and you step into a cooler hush—the gallery’s touch-screens and 3D panoramas shrink millennia into an hour. Outside, the rocks wait: flat, scarred slabs that have been used as canvases by people who hunted with spears and read the sky for signs. The petroglyphs stare back, not as pretty relics but as sharp, economical records of life—boats, ibex, ritual figures—etched between roughly 5,000 and 20,000 years ago.