A surprise on our way to the Caucasus

Planning a trip well is what I can recommend to anyone. The better the planning, the more you see! Yet the best travel stories usually come from the unexpected. Fortunately, experiencing unexpected things is also almost inevitable if you travel a bit adventurously even with good planning! Unexpected things can be a lot of things. The less pleasant things during the trip often lead to the best stories afterwards: that time you were stopped by the local police in the middle of the night, for example, or that moment when you drive backwards with the rental car and drive through a fence while the local neighborhood is watching. But luckily there are also unexpected things that you can actually enjoy while you are there!

I experienced such an unexpected moment while traveling through Azerbaijan. Towards the end of our stay in the country we drove from the south of Azerbaijan to the north to see some nice birds in the Caucasus. Our local guide had a place in mind where we could see some nice birds in the last hour before dark, after which we would drive the remaining hours to the Caucasus in the dark. So we took a side road. Pretty soon we saw some beautiful Cinereous Vultures soaring past us, but I was even more impressed by the landscape we drove through: beautifully colored rocks! Unfortunately I wasn’t in a position to stop every 5 minutes, so a lot of landscape shots were taken from a moving car! Not the way the real landscape photographer does it, but sometimes you have to deal with what you can! At one point we did stop at a place where we went birdwatching for a while. I left the birds to themselves this time (fortunately there was also nothing really special around) and I went to take some landscape pictures! In the last light we drove back to the highway. That was a nice unexpected stop! I had some nice pictures to show from it!