Cappadocia

[Back in blogging action after some whirlwind travel.  Apologies for the wordiness: written late night & half asleep in Kayseri bus station.]

After arriving in Goreme, Cappadocia at 4:00am to a darkened hotel and locked reception, it was getting a bit chilly outside at 12 C.  We prowled around the outside stairs and discovered that the rooftop terrace - 1/2 of which is enclosed - was unlocked.  So we escaped some of the cold and snoozed a bit on some cushions until after 8:00am when a hotel employee finally showed up to make breakfast.  In the meantime, we got to see the lingering sunrise, and the departure of Cappadocia's famous hot air balloons.

Cappadocia (Kapadokya to the Turks) is one of the most famous attractions in Turkey, for its odd mushroom-shaped rock formations.  Sandstone underneath + harder lava from a volcano on top + erosion = rock columns with caps on top.

The overnight bus tired us out, so we didn't do much except nap and wander about town taking photos of rocks.  Many of these strange formations and cliffs were hollowed out and made into houses and churches, etc. over the centuries.  The sandstone is easy to chisel away, and there's not a ton of shade in this hot & dry region, so the houses would have been cool.  (Though they do get a bit of snow in the winter.)

We bumped into the Aussies (Shaun and Ali) from our cruise, who were planning to go hot air ballooning, which was out of our budget.  They were staying at the Kelebek Hotel, and had gone for a massage which they thought was quite nice.  I still hadn't had a Turkish hammam scrub/massage, so we dropped in to check it out.  One look and I was sold - this was pretty high-end stuff for rural Turkey, like someone decided to install a Turkish spa in Yaletown (heated stone floors, mosaics).  (Sarah declined - she claims she doesn't like massages - more for me!)  The price was pretty steep for Turkey, but a wicked deal by Canadian standards. For 60 Euro, I got a 2 hour program featuring:

• 5 minute sauna
• full body exfoliating scrub
• full body soap massage & scrub (they put a layer of foam 1 foot thick on you, which is like a warm blanket)
• 15 minute post-scrub rest in a quiet room
• full body oil massage
• rejuvenating face mask (though due to my unshaven state, it was only cheeks-up)

We got in touch with the Quebeckers (Pierre-Antoine and Angie) from the cruise & arranged to meet up with them the next day to tour an underground city about 35 km away.

I got up early to go for a run, and once again I felt like a tractor had run over me.  It was hot & I was tired; I got chased by the same dog twice; and I had the town poison-spraying truck drive within 2 feet of me as I ran wheezing down the road, trying in vain to hold my breath.  I need more exercise, but so far it is NOT going well.

Then it was on to the underground cities.  They were built in ancient times - often occupied by Christians hiding from non-Christian armies - so that people could hole up and wait out armies that came through the area.  The one we visited (at Derinkuyu) housed up to 12,000 people for several months at a time, and had churches with baptismal pools, stables for livestock, elaborate ventilation shafts and rolling stone doors to keep out invaders - spread out over 8 levels.

Looking down part of a ventilation shaft

This is in the ceiling - umm, I think I'll stand over there...

We bussed back to the stone "citadel" that overlooks the village of Goreme - the view from the top is pretty amazing, so we took many more photos of pretty rocks.

The Canadians from opposite coasts

The cubbyholes are for pigeon nests, whose guano was collected for fertilizer

The village of Goreme, with pink Rose Valley cliffs in background

Valleys

The flash flood valley

While we were at the underground city, it had briefly rained (with a bit of hail) in Goreme.  We bumped in to a couple from San Francisco who had been walking up one of the small valleys when it started to rain.  They sheltered under an overhang, but the gorge rapidly filled with water.  Luckily they found some handholds and (because they are rock climbers) were able to climb up the wall of the canyon in a low area (about 15-20 feet high) before the water became a raging torrent!  We were thinking of walking back to town through a canyon, but since it looked like more rain we thought we'd take the minibus back instead.

That night was our last night in town, and the Quebeckers' last night as well, so we thought all of the cruise people in Cappadocia should meet up for "one last meal."  Unfortunately we couldn't reach Shaun and Ali in time, but Pierre and Angie were available.  They dropped by our place for appies first and our bottle of Bozcaada wine I had been schlepping around in my backpack - which had an over-compressed cork with little black dots on the bottom, and had turned into pure vinegar.  Drat!  Oh well, Pierre and Angie brought tomatoes, cucumbers, chips, and canned stuffed grape leaves.

We went to a restaurant called Seten (operated by the Kelebek Hotel people), and wow, what a great choice.  For only a little more money than the ubiquitous kebap cafes that we had been eating at, we had a lovely, proper dining experience - including a bottle of Turkish wine that hadn't turned to vinegar!  The setting was beautiful, the food was truly excellent, and the host had even gone to university in New Brunswick.

Next day, while waiting for our next overnight bus, we went to the Goreme open-air museum.  It was cool, but a bit of a letdown after having seen nearby sites - more fairy chimney houses like one sees everywhere in the region, but with tiny churches built into them.  Oh, and several of the houses are closed.  And if you want to see the best one, they tell you after you've entered that it costs extra.  Meh.

The UFO museum - note aliens out front

On the way back we took a detour into one of the valleys near town, and it was a much better experience.  Almost no one around, lots of cool fairy chimneys among garden plots - really quite nice.

You don't have a dirty mind - the suggestiveness of these pillars is well-known

Chad is at the bottom-left of the column

We ran into Cassandra, the New Zealander we had met on the bus earlier and toured Ephesus with, so we had lunch.  Rather than rush around, we played cribbage and drank cay until it was time to hop on the bus at 7pm.  And Sarah tried to avoid the many walnut trees providing shade in town.

We might not have seen all the sights in Cappadocia, but once you've seen the fairy chimneys and an underground city, well, the landscape all seems to be different flavours of the same theme, and we had seen what we wanted.  (We even think many of our photos look better than the real thing.  Unlike Pammukale, where photos don't do it justice.)

We took a minibus to Kayseri, a fairly well-off city of about 1 million people, where we were suitably impressed by this huge volcano-looking mountain which dominated the landscape.

At Kayseri's fancy new bus station, they put us on an earlier bus, which we promptly missed, and then  they put us on an even later bus - which worked for us, since getting to a small mountain town at the original arrival time of 3:30am or earlier (not the same town as our hotel) was NOT something we wanted to do.

Three pastrami shops in a row, IN the station?  My kind of place!

Cappadocia had amazing geology, and we warmed to the tourist village of Goreme.  But 2 days was plenty for us (as we weren't partaking in all the bus tours, ballooning and organized activities).  Especially when we had massive mountaintop pre-Roman stone heads to look at further east!