Baku is an oil city. The black gold has turned what was once a small sleepy port into a modern city vying with Dubai for excess in modern architecture. The hotel prices are crazy, and accompanied with an archaic visa system (now slowly changing), there is little encouragement for tourists to visit. Yet Baku is well worth the effort, and expense, to visit and explore.

A mountain that is continually on fire near Baku, Azerbaijan? That sounds a bit like the 'Gate to Hell' at Darvaza in Turkmenistan, one of the most amazing sites I have experienced. I set off to see how one of the major attractions in the country compared with that of its near neighbour.

Hidden away in the hills, less than an hour from Baku, is Gobustan (pronounced Qobustan by the locals) an astounding site of ancient human art. Whereas other prehistoric sites such as Lascaux in France are closed to the public, with museums built nearby with reproduced copies of the art for tourists to see, Gobustan is an open air museum with few visitors and easy to walk around.

It is a sad fact that some of the most beautiful spots on earth have some of the most sought after commodities underground, such as the uranium under Kakadu national park in Australia. The island of Bougainville, east of Papua New Guinea is another such place. There are great coral reefs for diving, long sandy beaches, and a lush green interior dominated by smoking volcanoes. It is the very picture of a tropical paradise. Except that in the middle of the island there is a huge open cast mine polluting all around it.