Azerbaijan: Leaving Room To Wander
Words by Matthew Fairbrother
The first sign that Azerbaijan wasn’t going to be a normal bikepacking trip came outside a roadside teahouse.
A group of older men were sitting together in the shade as I rode past. I heard them calling out behind me. I couldn’t understand a word, but the tone sounded close enough to heckling that curiosity got the better of me. I stopped, turned the bike around and rolled back towards them. The entire table went silent.
For a few seconds, they simply looked at me. Their eyes moved from my helmet to the bags strapped across the bike, then back to my face. I could almost see them trying to work out where I had come from and why I was there, then everyone stood up. Hands were extended, a chair appeared and I was guided inside. Within minutes I was sitting among them with a glass of chai in front of me. Each time I reached the bottom, someone refilled it. My attempt to find out what they had yelled became an extended session of drowning myself in tea while a table of strangers examined my bike, asked questions I barely understood and laughed whenever translation failed. That interaction became a useful introduction to the days ahead.
People weren’t only surprised to see a traveller. They were surprised to see someone travelling alone, at my age, on a bicycle loaded with everything needed to cross their country. The bike created immediate confusion, followed closely by curiosity. Azerbaijan’s land borders had remained largely closed to passenger travel for years, and international visitors outside Baku and the main tourist stops were uncommon. Cars slowed beside me. Children stopped playing to watch me pass. Shopkeepers came outside before I had even leaned the bike against a wall.
The conversations normally began the same way: Where are you from?
“New Zealand.”
That answer created a pause, followed by a second question:
Why are you here?
I never found a convincing response. I had spent weeks tracing a route through Shamakhi, Lahij, Goychay, Agdash and Sheki, wanting to experience the changes in landscape and culture gradually rather than jump between highlights by car. On the map, it looked like a physical challenge. On the ground, it became an exercise in observation.
Into the Heat
The first day was the hardest. Almost immediately, I rode into heat, desert and an unknown road. Ahead was an isolated stretch of roughly 130 kilometres. I didn’t know how rough it would become, how quickly I would move or how long it would take to reach the other side.
The corrugations removed any rhythm from the bike. Heat settled over the landscape and stayed there. There was little shelter and even less certainty. I had packed Nutella because it was calorie-dense and practical. In the heat it became a thick, oily punishment. I needed the energy but struggled to swallow it, forcing down mouthfuls while staring at a road that seemed to lead nowhere.
That first day exposed the mental adjustment required for living from the bike. At home, food, shelter, water and communication are normally only a few steps away. Out there, the basic questions regained their weight: Do I have enough water? How long will this surface continue? Will there be food on the other side? Where will I sleep?
Initially, I fought the slower rhythm, but after several days, my attention began to change. When life is reduced to a few essential decisions, there is less noise competing for your energy. I stopped thinking as much about everything waiting at home and began looking more closely at where I actually was.
A Country in Layers
Shamakhi was one of the first places that gave the journey historical context. For centuries it was an important centre of Shirvan. Earthquakes and invasions repeatedly damaged it, leaving less of an intact old city than its history might suggest, but the Juma Mosque and royal tombs still point to its former importance.
I rode through knowing that people had crossed this landscape for trade, politics and survival long before I had drawn a recreational route through it. That history appeared in layers. A mosque might sit near a Soviet-era apartment block, a broad road built for another political system would lead towards a community whose daily routines felt far older. The Soviet influence was obvious, but it hadn’t erased the differences between places.
In Goychay, the pomegranate was more than something sold at a market. The region is nationally associated with the fruit, and its harvest is celebrated through an annual festival. Agdash felt tied to the surrounding agricultural plain, less like a destination and more like a working town serving the people around it.
Many places did not appear to be presenting themselves to outsiders. Markets were not arranged as cultural experiences. Teahouses weren’t designed to give tourists a sample of local life. Workshops, farms and roadside businesses existed because the community needed them. I was the interruption, not the audience they had prepared for.
The Coffee Problem
One afternoon, I stopped at a small market looking for water. There was none, and I was ready to continue searching. But the people inside had another solution. Before I understood what was happening, I was ushered into the teahouse next door and placed in a chair.
Less than a minute later, a large glass of coffee appeared. I don’t drink coffee. Even if I did, this would have been a difficult introduction. It was the most bitter thing I had ever tasted. I took a cautious sip and immediately understood that drinking it slowly was not an option. There was no polite way to explain this, and the people around me were watching expectantly.
I decided the only solution was speed. I lifted the glass and tried to drink it in one go, doing everything possible to send the liquid directly down my throat without allowing it to touch my tongue. It was less like enjoying a drink and more like attempting a badly designed hydration challenge. I placed the empty glass down and tried to look grateful rather than traumatised. Everyone seemed satisfied.
These exchanges showed how travel worked away from the major centres. A request for water didn’t necessarily lead to a transaction. It led to whatever the people nearby believed I needed, sometimes chai and on this occasion, unfortunately, coffee.
What interested me most was the curiosity behind it. People wanted to inspect the bike, understand the bags, find my route on a phone and establish why a young person from New Zealand had appeared under his own power.
Lahij and Living Tradition
The approach to Lahij climbs into the foothills of the Greater Caucasus. Its stone streets and closely packed buildings immediately changed the atmosphere of the trip. Lahij is known for copper craftsmanship, a practice passed between masters and apprentices and recognised by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage.
What mattered to me was that the tradition did not feel frozen for display. The workshops still had a practical role. The sound of metalwork belonged to the village rather than being added for visitors.
It is easy to call a place preserved and imagine it has avoided change. Azerbaijan had clearly changed through empire, Soviet rule, independence, conflict and technology. Yet in Lahij, older skills and social habits had survived within that change. People weren’t living in the past; they were carrying parts of it forward.
A smartphone could translate a conversation in a centuries-old teahouse. A car might pass a cart. Young people lived modern lives while older trades continued nearby. The country felt neither untouched nor fully transformed. It felt specific to itself.
Fifteen Minutes at a Bus Stop
On one of the hottest afternoons, I stopped at a bus shelter to escape the sun and attempted to sleep. My bike was leaning beside me, and even closing my eyes for ten minutes felt useful. A man approached, sat beside me and began talking. I explained, as best I could, that I didn’t understand. It made no difference.
For the next fifteen minutes, he spoke almost continuously. He changed tone, pointed towards the road, gestured at the bike and occasionally waited just long enough for me to nod before continuing. I barely had a chance to say anything, which was probably helpful because I had nothing useful to contribute.
Eventually, I accepted my role as the audience for a story I would never understand. My social battery was already low from the heat and riding, and by the end it was completely empty. I stood, thanked him and tried to excuse myself. He immediately insisted on a selfie, then came the handshake.
It continued for so long that I began wondering whether it was another conversation, only conducted through grip strength. Eventually he released me, still talking as I pushed the bike back towards the road. I rode away laughing.
Sometimes I learned about the people I met, sometimes a man spoke at me for fifteen minutes and neither of us learned anything at all. Even then, it became part of the journey.
The Memorials
There was another part of Azerbaijan that was harder to understand and impossible to ignore. In town after town, I passed memorials carrying photographs, names and dates. Many commemorated people killed in the country’s past and recent conflicts.
At first, I registered them as monuments. After seeing them repeatedly, I began reading the dates. The distance created by history disappeared when I realised how many had died at my age. Some were younger.
That changed the way I looked at the towns around me. Conflict was not confined to a disputed region or reduced to something that had happened on the news. Its memory was present in public spaces and, clearly, within families.
Occasionally conversations moved towards war or loss, and the mood shifted quickly. I never pushed for details. The subject felt sensitive, and I was conscious that I was passing briefly through experiences other people had lived with for years.
Azerbaijan’s recent history is inseparable from the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh. Decades of fighting and displacement have caused deep loss for Azerbaijanis and Armenians. Travelling through Azerbaijan showed me only one side of that pain, but it showed me enough to understand that the wounds were current.
When a face looks close to your own age, it becomes difficult to treat death as a statistic. I thought about the difference between our lives, not because of decisions we had made, but because of where we were born and the circumstances we inherited.
I was there voluntarily, using physical discomfort as a way to explore. Many of the people in those photographs had faced consequences they never chose. That thought followed me long after I rode past the memorials.
Sheki
By the time I reached Sheki, the place I had been most excited to visit, I had stopped thinking of Azerbaijan as a collection of destinations.
Sheki felt like entering another period. It was disconnected from modern life, its older identity remained so visible. Set at the foot of the Greater Caucasus, the historic centre grew through trade and became a major silk-producing city. Its merchant houses, caravanserais, craftsmanship and Khan’s Palace reflect the wealth that once moved through it.
The streets and traditions didn’t feel like exhibits. People worked, shopped and drank tea in buildings shaped by earlier centuries. Of all the towns I visited, Sheki came closest to feeling like a time machine. One that was still moving, its history remained visible as life continued around it.
That was what I had been searching for without knowing how to describe it: not an untouched culture, because no living culture is untouched, but one that had not been completely rearranged for visitors.
I wasn’t being shown a performance of Azerbaijan. I was trying to keep up with Azerbaijan as it already existed.
Why the Bike Mattered
By the end of the journey, the bike had become less of a subject and more of a point of entry. It was the reason people noticed me before I noticed them. It made my movement understandable enough to follow but strange enough to question.
Every day created a problem: Where would I sleep? What would I eat? How far could I ride? Why would I choose to do this?
Moving slowly allowed the country to change gradually around me. Agricultural plains gave way to foothills, Soviet planning appeared beside older settlements, food, architecture and daily routines shifted one kilometre at a time, a flow easily lost when travel is reduced to arrivals.
Living from the bike also reduced my own life. My priorities rarely extended beyond food, water, shelter and the road ahead. At first, that simplicity felt monotonous, but slowly it became freeing. I had more energy to observe because I had fewer things demanding my attention.
I noticed where people gathered during the hottest hours, the industries around which towns had formed, traditions families maintained and memorials that would have blurred past a car window. Most of all, I noticed the surprise on people’s faces when I arrived. That surprise became the defining image of Azerbaijan for me.
I had travelled there because I knew very little about the country. Many of the people I met seemed equally unsure what to make of me. We met in that shared confusion, usually beside a loaded bike, and tried to fill the gap. Sometimes Google Translate helped, other times chai helped. Once, an extremely bitter coffee did not help at all.
I expected the route to be the story: the heat, isolation, corrugations and transition into the Caucasus. Those things shaped the journey, but they were not what made it memorable.
What stayed with me was travelling through a country that did not appear to expect me and had not reorganised itself for my arrival. Its culture was not waiting to be consumed, its towns continued at their own pace, its history remained visible in workshops, buildings, roads and memorials. Its people looked at me with the same curiosity I had brought with me.
My bike allowed me to enter that world without moving through it too quickly. I came to ride across Azerbaijan, but instead, for a short time, I was able to observe it.