Private Lankaran – Khanbulan Lake Tour from Baku | Southern Azerbaijan Experience

Your driver meets you at your hotel in Baku early in the morning. The change in landscape is the point of the drive: dry coastal steppe gives way gradually to rice paddies, tea fields and the wooded ridges of the Talysh Mountains. Comfort stops are made whenever you like.

Your first stop in town is the Khan's House, a red-brick residence built in the 19th century for the family that ruled the Lankaran khanate. Its arched façade and decorated interior reflect a period when this was a prosperous trading region between the Russian and Persian empires, and the building now serves as a museum covering the area's history. Nearby stand the town's other landmarks — the old circular brick tower and the 19th-century lighthouse near the seafront.

Khanbulan Lake lies about 12 km inland from the city, at the edge of Hirkan National Park. The reservoir is enclosed by steep forested slopes, and the water is unusually still — on a clear day the hills mirror across it almost perfectly. The forest around Khanbulan Lake is part of the ancient Hyrcanian woodland, home to ironwood, chestnut-leaved oak and species that grow nowhere else in the region. You have free time here to walk the shoreline, take photographs or simply sit with the view.

The south is where Azerbaijani tea is grown, and a stop at a traditional samovar tea house is one of the most memorable parts of the day — tea poured into pear-shaped armudu glasses, served with cherry or feijoa jam. If you prefer a full lunch, your driver can recommend a local restaurant serving lavangi, the regional speciality of chicken or fish stuffed with walnut, onion and sour plum paste and baked in the oven.

Depending on the season and what is open on the day, the last stop is either a local market or a citrus orchard. Autumn and winter are the best months for this — the Lankaran markets fill with lemons, feijoa, persimmon and pomegranates grown a few kilometres away, and prices are a fraction of what you would pay in Baku.

You set off back in the late afternoon and are dropped off directly at your hotel in Baku in the evening.