On an unorthodox honeymoon to Nakhchivan, Azerbaijan, a mountain hiker searches for the purported final resting place of Noah’s Ark, a journey that requires full trust in a chain-smoking, denim-clad guide with limited English.
“Haroo, Haroo!”
A long-forgotten refrain from a school hall song, all plimsolled feet and easily crossed legs, escaped my lips. With legs now rather less limber, I took two or three steps uphill, one foot sliding back on the skittering scree, and sang it again.
“Haroo, Haroo!”
I continued, head down, bowed beneath the clear skies and desert heat, concentrating purely on ascending. This respiratory rosary, repeated over and over in my head, helping me keep a steady pace as I slowly trudged uphill. After several more minutes, I stopped, stretching to ease the kinks in my back. To my right, the east, were the snow-capped mountains that marked the Armenian border, and behind me, in the south, the wilds of northern Iran filled the horizon. I, though, peered up, picking out the route to the summit amongst the jumble of rocks and boulders, and looked for Noah’s Ark.
“The animals came in two by two, haroo, haroo!”
*
I was in Nakhchivan, the southernmost limit of Azerbaijan, climbing Ilandag Mountain. This peak, a monotheistic monolith that dominates the skyline from the autonomous Republic’s namesake capital, Nakhchivan City, is, according to local legend, the place where Noah’s Ark came to rest when the flood waters subsided. The discernible cleft in the mountain’s summit was gouged out by the ark’s hull.
Nakhchivan is, appropriately enough, an Azeri exclave left high and dry and isolated from the rest of the country. Separated by Armenia, and a short two-hour flight, on which we were the only ‘westerners’, it felt a world away from the steel, glass, and glitz of Baku, and its oil-based wealth, as the city prepared for its annual Formula One race.
As with many parts of the wider region, Nahkchivan has something of a melting pot history, its mountains and plains playing host to a succession of civilisations and cultures, from Persians and Armenians to Mongols and Turks. In the nineteenth century, it became part of Russia and, in turn, in 1924, the Soviet Union. Then in 1991, following independence, it became an Autonomous Republic within the newly formed Republic of Azerbaijan. Yet it has remained adrift, and far from the trodden tourist trail.
A strange choice, then, for a honeymoon. But my wife, Aimee, and I, looking for that Venn diagram destination which included good food, big mountains, and mid-haul flights, had settled on Azerbaijan. Or, perhaps, we’d gone through the alphabet and got bored quickly–an ominous sign for married life? Following a few days in Baku, and a further few in the clean air of the Caucasus Mountains in the country’s north, we headed south to Nakhchivan.
The eponymous city’s highlights didn’t take long to absorb. Crossing wide boulevards, all impeccably clean and oddly quiet, we saw the huge Juma mosque–still a construction site, the weathered ram statues in the open-air museum that date back to prehistoric times, and most impressive of all, Noah’s tomb, its eight-sided mausoleum patterned with blue tiles beneath a golden roof, with Turkey’s Mount Ararat behind it in the far distance–itself a mountain with no shortage of associations with Noah and his Ark.
It was, though, Ilandag that dominated both our thoughts and the horizon. In late spring and summer, while far from a technical climb, the peak’s remoteness and the challenges of travel in
Nakhchivan meant we were hoping for the arm-round assurance of a local guide, and we had booked a trip with Nakchivan Travel, a nascent tour operator based in the Province.
So, early that morning, a suitably Soviet Lada Niva rolled up outside our hotel with a driver and Emil, our translator. Emil was young and enthusiastic, a student working with the Nakchivan Travel to improve his English. In his jeans and trainers, he looked rather ill-suited for hiking, however, and his eager, earnest energy recalled a teenager off to his first party–but who was still reliant on their mum to pick them up.
Emil’s ‘greenness’ was all the more jarring compared with Karim, our guide, whom we picked up from a tiny village en route to Ilandag’s base. Dressed in faded jeans and a dusty denim jacket, he folded himself into the Lada’s front passenger seat with barely a backward glance, and immediately lit up a cigarette that hung deftly from his lips. It was the first of what must have been an entire packet that he chain-smoked for the rest of the hike.
Still, once we’d parked the Lada and were out on the trail, there was no doubting the Marlboro mountain goat’s lung capacity. With a few words, a munch on some citrusy sorrel, and a jab from his wooden walking stick, he indicated a path up Ilandag’s steep southern slope and set off, leaving us panting in his wake. As we climbed the grassy hillside, the desert views rose to greet us. The green slopes, though, soon gave way to shuddering scree, and while Karim skipped ahead, Aimee, Emil, and I found the going a little tougher. After an hour or so, we reached the col, and Karim pointed his stick towards a jumble of juniper bushes and something that resembled the frilly fronds of wild fennel, before bounding off once again.
We’d now reached the mountain’s cleft, supposedly gouged by the Ark’s hull, so had the choice of two summits. We headed towards the more westerly and smidge higher of the two, the path now all but disappeared and instead a full-on, hands-on scramble was the only way up, with all-fours being used. Ark or not, it felt suitably biblical, a penitent pilgrimage of sorts.
Topping out, we were greeted not by the Ark nor pairs of animals (in fact, one skittering lizard aside, we saw no wildlife all hike) but instead a rather curious poster for Azerbaijan’s former President Heydar Aliyev, himself a son of Nakhchivan. The views, though, were heaven-sent. North, we saw the neat grid-square layout of Nakhchivan City, east, Armenia’s snowy border, and south, and seemingly limitless, Iran–its arid landscape given life by the shadows of the clouds that had sidled into the sky.
Preparing, somewhat reluctantly, for what was sure to be a skiddery descent, Emil instead told us that Karim wanted to take us up the second of Ilandag’s summits, the other side of the cleft. With that typically British goal of ‘bagging’ the peak already achieved, I’ll admit I didn’t quite see the point. But with a rather mangled translation promising a wild ‘infinity’ pool that we would be able to swim in, we shouldered our packs and once again tried to keep pace with Karim, following the smell of cigarette smoke, if not quite his footsteps.
An hour or so later, sweaty and with the swimming spot being as hard to find as the Ark, we learnt instead the real reason for Kamil’s insistence on the second climb. He was out mushroom hunting, with Ilandag being one of his favourite foraging spots, and that’s why he’d wanted to scour the second summit. Though he too had had something of a fruitless search, with just one small specimen slipped into his denim jacket. In truth, it summed up the whole day and, perhaps, the whole of Nakchivan. Bizarre, unexpected, and a little frustrating, but memorable and utterly unique. Perhaps not such a bad place for a honeymoon after all.
