Lehic (pronouned Le-heech) is a small village (around 400 people) in the mountains north west of Baku. The only road into town is an extremely bumpy unpaved track carved into the side of a canyon hugging a river. Very beautiful and very remote, but thanks to the Soviets, the town has electricity and television. Thanks to capitalism there's Coca Cola and local pre-teen boys that act as unnecessary paid guides.




This guy made me take his picture, which I was planning to do anyway. He was sitting in the town center selling greens to I-don't-know-who. The center bustled with activity as two guys loaded up horses with sacks of rice. The standard benchful of on-lookers looked on.
The main town square.




On the way there, we made the driver stop so we could cross a scary footbridge to nowhere, just for the fun of it.





Seki (pronouned Sheckie) is a relatively large town (65,000 people) in northwest Azerbaijan, just beneath the southern edge of the Caucasus Mountains. It used to be a stronghold on the Silk Road. Now it's just another small provincial outpost where they make silk and halvah and throw their garbage in the river. The mountain setting and green grass and trees make the crumbling Soviet buildings look somewhat quaint. The slightly less crumbling pre-Soviet buildings are even more quaint.




We stayed in the Caravan Saray, a 400 year-old hotel that was originally built to house travellers and their camels. The interior courtyard was also the site of a temporary bazaar, kind of like a mobile mall taking goods back and forth between Europe and India.



Seki is home to a 400 year-old palace that once belonged to the
ruler of the region. We took a tour of the inside, which is largely
unrestored yet in pretty good shape.

 We had to put on special cloth booties over our shoes to protect the carpets, though the carpets didn't look original and I suspect the booties were just a subtle form of humiliation. As usual, we had to bargain with the obligatory tour guide over the amount of the entrance fee (the simple you-owe-this-much-to-go-in-here sign doesn't exist in Azerbaijan). At the end of the pretty lame tour, the guide told us we owed him more money. This is another annoying feature of the so-call tourist industry around here. He hadn't told us about any additional guide fee when we first bargained, so we didn't give him any more money. He sulked but didn't try to tell us that we were doing something wrong, because all we were doing was not being suckers.




In a small village near Seki (only about 25 minutes over cobblestone roads) is a 1500 year-old church.

It was built by a long-vanished people called Albanians, who have nothing to do with the present-day Albanians of Albania.
Our visit attracted a small group of onlookers. They're used to an old church, but gawking foreigners still bring out the crowd.


We had lunch in a nice open courtyard next to the hotel. The setting was wonderful but the service was brutally slow. We kept watching with open longing as the waiter brought food to a different table that had arrived well after we did.


Rena got so hungry she started to eat her own arm.
The driver ignored her desperate act of self-cannibalism.

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