Just over an hour’s drive north-west of Baku along the Guba highway is a 382-metre high mountain whose bizarre shape long ago led to it being called Mt. Beshbarmag, which is Azerbaijani for ‘Five-finger Mountain’. Legend has it that sometime in the ancient past a prophet called Khidr ventured here in search of a ‘potion of life’ and having drunk from a spring at the summit achieved immortality. Today the mountain is shrouded in mystery with locals coming here to pray for strength and good fortune. As a tourist attraction, it’s well worth climbing to witness a number of age-old spiritual rituals as well as for the fantastic views of the Caspian Sea from the summit. What's more, the general area is also one of Azerbaijan’s best birdwatching sites, with the corridor between the mountains and the sea acting as a bottleneck for hundreds of migrating bird species.

Khizi

One of Azerbaijan’s most beautiful stretches of road leads for about 40 kilometres from the Guba-Baku highway west towards the mountain village of Altiaghaj. Roughly mid-way between the two one passes through a dramatic valley flanked by rolling shale mountains whose astonishing red, orange, pink and chalk-coloured swirls led British travel writer Mark Elliott (author of the very popular 'Azerbaijan' guidebook) to dub them the Candy Cane Mountains, a name that’s stuck with travellers ever since. The astonishing colours are said to be due to groundwater that’s altered the oxidation state of iron compounds within the rock. Also you may discover tiny fossils and perhaps even a squid-like belemnite from the cretaceous period.