Seventeen days from Baku to Yerevan: the long way round, because there is no short one

Heydar Aliyev airport is twenty five kilometres north of the city, with an airport bus to the centre around the clock and taxis for a fixed fare from the desk inside. Sleep in or beside the walled old city: everything for the next two days is inside it or a short walk away.

Start with the Maiden's Tower, which stands where the old city meets the sea and is the thing every argument about Baku's history is about. Nobody agrees what it was for, and the climb to the roof gives you the whole layout: walls, then mansions, then towers, then the Caspian.

Then walk the corniche as the lights come on and eat late, which is when Baku eats.

The old city is small enough to cross in fifteen minutes and dense enough to spend a day in. The Shirvanshahs' palace at the top of it is a 15th century complex rather than a single building: audience hall, mosque, bathhouse, and a set of burial vaults, all in the same honey coloured stone as the walls.

Work downhill from there through the lanes. Most of the small mosques are locked and all of them are worth the outside; the Muhammad Mosque near the bottom carries an inscription dated to 1078 and has a minaret snapped off at the top, which the locals will tell you a story about.

In the afternoon, the History Museum. It is in the mansion an oil millionaire built for himself between 1893 and 1902, and the house is at least as interesting as the collection: an entire city block of Italianate rooms done in a decade of the first oil boom.

Go up to the ridge above the old town first, while the light is still on the bay. The three Flame Towers stand at the top at a hundred and ninety metres, finished in 2012, with screens across their entire facades that turn them into flames after dark.

The park beside them is a memorial cemetery, quiet and formal, with an eternal flame at the end of a long avenue and the best view over the bay from the terrace behind it. Dress as you would for a cemetery anywhere and keep the phone in your pocket until the far end.

In the afternoon drive south along the peninsula past the working oilfields to Bibi-Heybat. The mosque you see was built in the 1990s as a full reconstruction of the 13th century one destroyed in 1936, and it sits above the sea with pumpjacks nodding on the hillside behind it, which is Azerbaijan in one photograph.

Three hours north on a good road with the Caspian on your right and the Greater Caucasus rising on your left. Quba is an apple town, low and green, and it will feel ten degrees cooler than Baku did.

Its Friday mosque of 1802 is an octagon under a dome as tall as the walls beneath it, which is not a shape you see elsewhere, and it sits on a square with two old balconied houses opposite.

Then cross the footbridge over the river to Krasnaya Sloboda. Mountain Jews have lived on that bank for centuries, there are around three thousand of them, and the synagogues, the enormous new houses and the hillside cemetery are unlike anything else in the country. Walk it quietly; people live there.

Sixty kilometres and two hours each way, on a road that was a track within living memory and is now paved most of the way up. It climbs the Qudyalçay valley with the mountains closing in on both sides, and there are three or four places where you will want to stop that are not marked as anything.

Khinalig sits at about two thousand three hundred metres on a spur, a stack of flat roofed stone houses where each roof is the yard of the house above. Its people speak a language related to nothing else spoken in the valleys either side of them, and the shepherds still walk their flocks down to the lowlands and back on a route that UNESCO listed in 2023.

Take a driver from Quba rather than attempting it in a hire car, eat what the guesthouse offers, and give the village three or four hours. The drive back down in late afternoon light is the other half of the day.

Four hours back down out of the foothills and west along the range. Shamakhi is at eight hundred metres in a bowl of vineyards, and it has been flattened by earthquakes so many times that the town is essentially modern with two old things left in it.

The Friday mosque is the older: founded in 743, which makes it one of the earliest in the whole Caucasus, and rebuilt after each collapse, most recently in this century. What you see is new stone on an ancient plan, and the plan is the point.

Above the town, the Yeddi Gumbaz is a walled cemetery of domed brick tombs holding the khans of Shirvan from the 18th and 19th centuries. Three of the four standing mausoleums can be entered and the carved stones inside them are better than the ones outside.

The longest day of the trip: about three hundred and forty kilometres of it, west along the mountains, out of Azerbaijan at Balakan, into Georgia at Lagodekhi, and then south into Kakheti. Leave at first light. Expect an hour or two at the crossing and a change of vehicle: Azerbaijani drivers will take you to the barrier and Georgian ones will be waiting on the far side.

Sighnaghi appears on a hill above the plain in the late afternoon, and the first thing to do is walk out to the wall. Four and a half kilometres of 18th century rampart with twenty three towers on it wrap the whole town, each tower named after a village that was supposed to shelter behind it.

From the wall on a clear evening the whole Greater Caucasus stands up along the northern horizon, which is a fair reward for eleven hours in a car.

Bodbe is two kilometres downhill from town among cypresses, and it is one of the most visited places in Georgia because St Nino, who converted the country in the 4th century, is buried in the church. Go at nine, before the coaches, and walk down the steps behind the convent to the spring if you have the legs for the climb back.

In town, the small museum is worth an hour for one reason: sixteen original paintings by Niko Pirosmani, the self taught sign painter from a village down the road who died penniless in Tbilisi and is now on the money.

Then the wine. Kakheti has been making it in buried clay qvevri for eight thousand years, which is not a slogan but an archaeological finding, and the small cellars around Tsinandali and Kvareli will show you the pits, pull the covers off and pour from them. Have a driver or make it a very short list.

Two hours west from Sighnaghi, mostly downhill, with marshrutkas leaving through the morning. Drop the bags and walk.

Sioni was the cathedral of Tbilisi for centuries, low and dark under a brick dome, and it holds the cross of St Nino, made according to tradition from two vine branches bound with the saint's own hair. It is a fitting first thing to see after two days in the vineyards she is said to have travelled through.

The synagogue two streets away was built in 1910 by families from Akhaltsikhe and is still in use, and the whole point of this quarter is how close together everything is, all of it inside a few hundred metres of hillside.

The Museum of Georgia on Rustaveli needs two hours and the reason is in the basement: Colchian goldwork from the second and first millennia BC, worked at a level of fineness that makes the Golden Fleece story look like reportage.

The Museum of Fine Arts a few minutes away is quieter and holds the national collection from antiquity onwards, including the Pirosmanis you did not see in Sighnaghi.

In the late afternoon take the funicular up Mtatsminda. The pantheon at the middle station is a terrace of graves cut into the hillside beside a small church, where Georgia's writers are buried along with the mother of Joseph Stalin, and from the top there is a park and the whole city below.

Start on the northern edge of the city at the Chronicle of Georgia, which almost nobody visits: sixteen columns of thirty odd metres, carved top to bottom with kings on the upper half and the life of Christ on the lower, standing on a bare hill above the reservoir. It is enormous, bleak and about forty minutes out by taxi.

Come back in through the western hills and go up to Turtle Lake on the cable car for an hour of doing nothing, which is what the lake is for. There are pedalos, a swimming area, and a view down over the whole city.

Finish at Metekhi, on the cliff above the river, where the church and the equestrian statue of the city's founder look straight across at the fortress. It is the best hour of the Tbilisi day and it costs nothing.

Three hours to Alaverdi including the Sadakhlo crossing, which is straightforward and usually quick. The road follows the Debed river into a gorge that gets steeper and greener for the last hour, and the monasteries start appearing on the tops as you go.

Sanahin is above the town on the western rim, reached by a road of hairpins or on foot up from the old bridge. It was founded in the 10th century, has barely changed since, and it is a warren rather than a church: a scriptorium, an academy, covered galleries, and rooms full of carved cross stones that were the medieval world's most distinctive art form.

Walk down to the 12th century bridge over the Debed afterwards if the light holds. It still carries traffic, which for a bridge that old is a fair claim.

Haghpat is on the opposite rim from Sanahin, half an hour round by road, and it is the one most people prefer: a tighter, taller group of buildings on a shelf with the gorge dropping away below and a free standing bell tower beside it. Same century, same UNESCO listing, better view.

Akhtala, twelve kilometres north, is a different thing again: a fortified monastery above a mining town, with a walled gate, and an interior painted almost floor to ceiling in the 13th century by Georgian and Armenian patrons who were related to each other. The frescoes are the best in the country.

On the way back, turn up to Odzun. The basilica there has stood for about thirteen hundred years, in a working village, with a pair of carved memorial steles in the yard telling a story that nobody has fully read.

Three and a half hours south, over the Pambak pass and down onto the Ararat plain. Yerevan arrives suddenly and pink: the city was rebuilt to a single plan in the 1920s and 30s in local volcanic tuff, which is why almost everything in the centre is the same warm colour.

Republic Square is where that plan is most visible, a ring of neoclassical government buildings around an oval, with fountains that run to music in the evening. Walk through it, then keep going north.

The Cascade is a stairway of five flights climbing the hillside at the top of the city, with escalators inside it, a sculpture garden at the bottom and a modern art collection on the landings. Climb it at sunset. Ararat is straight ahead across the plain and it is very large.

The best half day in Armenia, and it is two stops on the same road east of the city. Take a taxi for the whole thing rather than piecing it together on marshrutkas: it is not expensive and the two sites are twenty minutes apart.

Garni is a Hellenistic style temple standing on the lip of a basalt gorge, built in the 1st century AD when Armenia was between Rome and Persia and borrowing from both. An earthquake threw it down in 1679 and it was reassembled from its own fallen stones in the 1970s, which is why the joints are visible and why it stands at all. Walk down into the gorge afterwards for the wall of hexagonal basalt columns known as the symphony of stones.

Geghard, further up the same valley, is half built and half quarried: the front church is masonry, and the chambers behind it are cut whole out of the cliff, including one with acoustics that will make anybody sing. If a choir happens to be there, stay until they stop.

Echmiadzin is twenty kilometres west and is to the Armenian church what the Vatican is to the Catholic one: the seat of the Catholicos, and a cathedral founded in 301 on the spot where St Gregory the Illuminator is said to have been shown where to build. Excavation under the altar found a Zoroastrian fire pit, which tells you what was there first.

Two more churches in the same town are as important architecturally: Hripsime, finished in the 7th century, is a compact domed cross that generations of Armenian and Georgian architects copied for the next thousand years.

Come back into the city in the afternoon for the Matenadaran, at the top of the main avenue, which holds the largest collection of Armenian manuscripts in the world. Only a fraction is displayed and the fraction is enough.

Zvartnots airport is twelve kilometres west of the centre, twenty minutes by taxi, and most long haul connections leave in the small hours, which means the last day is usually a whole one.

Spend the morning at the Covered Market on Mashtots for dried fruit and walnut sujuk to take home, then walk back through the centre for a last coffee. Then look up the avenue at Ararat, which you have not been able to reach from any point on this trip, and note that this is the second closed border you have looked across in seventeen days.