How To Travel To The Autonomous Republic Of Nakhchivan: Tips + Itinerary

Written By Joan Torres From Against The Compass

Before traveling to Nakhchivan, I had heard rumors that the Nakhchivani people were kind of hostile to foreigners.

My obvious conclusion was that the Autonomous Republic of Nakhchivan has been in complete isolation for many years, so this hostility was merely a product of their misery and little exposure to the outside world, as they wouldn’t understand why a wealthy foreigner would even bother to come to their land.

Still, the idea of visiting such an isolated, off the beaten track region, which belonged to an already off the beaten track country, sounded quite appealing to me, so I didn’t need to think twice before booking a round-trip flight ticket from Baku.

While in the plane, I imagined that I would be landing in an extremely undeveloped part of Azerbaijan, in one of those dusty, chaotic capitals, a Karachi-like-city, and the fact that we were flying over a desert just a couple of minutes…