Thursday, June 17, 2010

Hiking Through The Lesser Caucasus

As spring and now summer came to Qazax my new home turned into a BEAUTIFUL place! My site mates and some of our friends from Qazax went on a great hike recently to enjoy this wonderful place.

This is the beginning of the hike, the kick off place, Water just drips from the ceiling of this little cave into this old bowl, its some of the cleanest water here and we took some to drink on our hike!

Here we are, all the hikers! Minus one taking the pic. One of the Qazax villages is in our background.

As Connie is showing us, these holes were cut into the ground to catch rain water to us for drinking, working, whatever.

Grandma, this pictures for you, I told you we were just walking through Fields of dill! It smelled like pickles everywhere :)

I found out on his hike that Qazax is known for it's desert tortoises, and we ran into one little guy on the hike.

The mountain behind us, Gizil Qaya, is a famous land mark in Qazax. I have an AWESOME view of it from my living room window in my Apartment, but here we got up close-and-personal with it!



We hiked all the way up to this like church thing on the top on the mountain, through guard dogs and all.
This was first built in the 6th century as a place to worship the moon. It was then turned into a mosque, but somewhat destroyed in the war. It was still a very beautiful thing to experience.



I took soooo many pictures because the views were just fabulous!

To the pleasure of our adventurous sides, we got lost on the way back down the mountain. This lead us to the sides of cliffs, like we are sitting on here.
To a little cave exploring.

And fence climbing.

To tea with random guys when we finally made it down no where near where our other friends were waiting.
Through a forest of thistles taller than me.

And finally to the bottom, kebab and chay.




It was a grand adventure :)