Mountain Beshbarmag & Candy Mountain Private Tour with Pink Lake

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.

Masazir

Masazir Lake is a salty lake located in Masazir, Azerbaijan on the Absheron Peninsula on the West coast of the Caspian Sea. The overall area of the lake is 10 km². Large volumes of chloride and sulphate are concentrated in ion composition of the water 12. The lake is also known as Masazirgol 3. The lake has a rich history of salt production, which began in 1813. A new salt making plant was built in 2010 for production of 2 Azeri brands of salt. The estimated amount of recoverable salt is 1,735 million tons. It is available in liquid (water) and clay forms 1.