After a fairly sleepless night and an early awakening from the hotel gloor lady with my clean clothes, I got into town on the Soviet style metro to meet Joe. He'd hired a car to take us to the one "must see" sight just 60km south of Baku. As we drove out of town we passed numerous deserted oil fields with rusting Soviet equipment. Occasionally an oil derrick was slowly pumping. For the most part the fields wer left as a wasteland reminder of earlier glory days of the hugely underfunded Soviet oil exploration.

We drove to the undistinguished and dusty town of Qobustan which lined either side of the main road and consited primarily of badly built Societ apartment blocks. It was a ghost town now, as most of the oil has run dry. Just a dew children played in the dust and one shope had opened it's doors selling light refreshments to passing traffic.

Our first stop was the petroglyph museum where a few simple animals and people had been primitively etched into the rock face. I can't say I found it that interesteing but it certainly drew a crowd of locals who seemed more interested in having their photos taken with us than looking at the drawings. 20 minutes later we were back in the car and on the to the more exotic mud volcanoes. With some difficulty we struggled along a no-descript dirt track until we arrived at the top of a hill surrounded by oil pipelines and electricity cables. There indeed we found the mud volcanoes - bubbling, thick, sludgy mud oozing from conical mounds. I couldn't resist the temptation to prod and poke these bizarre grey volcanoes. And like  a child I ignored all sensible precautions to avoid going to close. The lesson being that I actually managed to step onto a deceptively solid-looking piece of mud and fell in. Now some people pay hundreds of pounds to put mud all over their bodies anto make their skin better, I was immensley annoyed. I came out dripping with the grey mud - it had gotten everywhere. I then just burst out laughing knowing that there was nothing I coul ddo except to go nd wash myself down in a nearby lake.

We drove back to Baku in time for a late lunch and a few beers as afternoon turned into night.