Getting around
Getting Around Azerbaijan: The Fan Out of Baku
Azerbaijan's transport map has a shape, and recognising it early saves a lot of wasted driving. Routes radiate from Baku like the ribs of a fan — north-west to the Silk Road towns, north into the Greater Caucasus, south along the Caspian to the subtropics — and the links between the outer ends of those ribs are far weaker than the ribs themselves. Arriving, moving out, and coming back are therefore three separate planning problems.
Updated 2026-09-19
Arriving, and the bus that meets the plane
Heydar Aliyev International Airport is the country's main international gateway, working across two terminals on the northern edge of the capital. Buses run between the airport and the city centre around the clock, and they are paid for with a prepaid transport card rather than cash — the card can be bought at the airport itself or at a bus stop, and it is the same card used on city buses and on the metro, so buying one on arrival is the single most useful thing a new arrival can do. Licensed taxi firms work the airport as well, and international ride-hailing apps operate in Baku alongside them.
The metro is worth knowing about at national level for one reason: Baku has the only one in the country. Card and QR-ticket payment work at every station, contactless payment is accepted throughout, and the network is actively being extended, which means individual services and interchanges do change — worth checking the current state of the lines rather than an older map.
Out of the capital: rails, buses and one flight
Rail is the underrated option here. Direct trains run from Baku to Sheki, Ganja, Gabala, Lankaran and Shamkir among other cities, with tickets sold online, which covers a surprising share of the places most itineraries want — the Silk Road north-west, the second city, the resort belt and the subtropical south. Long-distance buses cover the same ground and more from the Baku International Bus Station, also bookable in advance.
The one part of the country that is not a road or rail question is Nakhchivan, the autonomous republic in the south-west: it has daily direct flights from Baku, and for practical purposes that is how visitors get there. Everything else is reached overland, and the fan shape means a route like the north-west to the northern mountains is usually planned as two separate trips out of the capital rather than one arc between them.
The arithmetic: drive times, tolls and the clock
Distances in Azerbaijan are a poor guide to journey times, and the discrepancy is almost always in the last stretch. Gobustan sits about 60 kilometres south of Baku and behaves like the short hop it looks like. Lahij is roughly three hours away, with a canyon road at the end that accounts for much of that. Khinalig is only 57 kilometres past Guba, but those kilometres climb to more than two thousand metres and take their time. The rule of thumb that works: budget generously for the final ascent to any mountain village, and lightly for the motorway that gets you to its valley.
Two practical details catch people out. The highway north from Baku towards Guba includes a tolled section, and the toll is paid with a chipped card obtained at the entry or exit points of the road rather than at a booth, so it is worth sorting out before setting off. And the clock: Azerbaijan runs four hours ahead of GMT and has not changed its clocks for summer since 2016, which means the gap to western Europe shrinks by an hour from April to October — a detail that matters more for booking an early flight home than it sounds.