Baku, Quba & Shahdag Mountains, 5 Nights

Down the airport highway along the Caspian and into the city; rooms are usually ready from mid-afternoon. The rest of the day belongs to the Old City, which is small enough to cover on foot. Walk from the Maiden Tower up to the Palace of the Shirvanshahs, whose mausoleum, mosque and divan-khana are fifteenth-century Shirvan work, then through the carpet shops and caravanserais. The Heydar Aliyev Center, Zaha Hadid's white building, is a short drive away for a photograph from its plaza before dinner.

Out to Surakhani for Ateshgah, the pentagonal fire temple where Hindu and Zoroastrian worshippers kept a flame burning; the cells around its courtyard carry inscriptions left by Indian traders. Then Yanardag, a bank of sandstone along which natural gas burns in a low wall of flame, at its best towards dusk. In between there is time for the Carpet Museum on the seafront, built in the shape of a half-rolled carpet, and a late lunch on the boulevard.

North up the Caspian highway. Near Khizi a short detour reaches the Candy Cane Mountains, low hills banded in red and white by iron and clay, strange enough to be worth the half hour. Quba is an old market town on the Kudial river, and across the bridge lies Krasnaya Sloboda, the Red Settlement, one of the few historically all-Jewish towns outside Israel. From there the road climbs west past Laza's waterfalls into the Shahdag massif and the resort.

Shahdag Mountain Resort opened in 2012 below the peaks of Shahdag National Park, and it is the most developed ski area in the country. One cable car ride is included. The ski season usually runs from the second half of December until early April, depending on snow, and lessons and equipment are easy to arrange at the base. Outside those months some lifts run for sightseeing and the slopes become walking country, though the lift schedule is reduced; we confirm what will be running for your dates.

Back down the valley and south along the Caspian, past Baku and on about 60 km to Gobustan. The rock carvings on its escarpment show hunters, reed boats, dancers and wild cattle, and were inscribed by UNESCO in 2007. The mud volcanoes nearby are reached by local off-road car over a rough track. The final stop on the coast road back into the city is the Bibi-Heybat mosque, rebuilt in the 1990s on the site of a medieval original destroyed in 1936.

Breakfast and, if the flight is later in the day, an hour on Nizami Street or the boulevard close to the hotel. Pakhlava from the Old City bakeries and pear-shaped armudu tea glasses are the easy souvenirs to carry home, and both pack flat in a suitcase. Checkout is generally at noon, and the airport is around half an hour away, longer in the evening traffic.