Overnight Bus to Cappadocia

It's a 13 hour bus ride from Fethiye to Cappadocia, but Turkish buses are nice so we figured it had to be a lot more comfortable than the floor of Heathrow airport overnight.  We departed at 4:00pm, with an Aussie couple from our boat cruise on our bus, and a Quebec couple from the cruise on a parallel bus.

Before it got dark, the scenery was pretty great.  Lots of nice mountains, some achieving Alpine heights with snow on top.

In addition to the usual insanely-abundant agriculture, there were numerous rock quarries all along our route.  Some appeared to be gathering marble-like rock (but I'm no geologist - it was white rock coming off in huge square blocks), while a few might have been limestone or something to feed the ubiquitous concrete factories.  (All houses, fence posts and telephone poles are made of concrete in Turkey.)

We stopped at the bus station in Isparta.  It was a lot different than most Turkish cities we've seen - it feels 100% planned, wealthy and spotless.  Big new university on the edge of town, a wide lawn boulevard on the drive in, grid-like streets with no litter, big new buildings everywhere.  This is the capital of the rose region, so there are rose emblems everywhere.  And you can buy rose-scented stuff.

After a couple of hours of forced Turkish soap opera TV exposure on the bus, and what appeared to be the bus driver getting lost in some gigantic and partially-complete subdivisions at 3:30am (shades of my late night emergency taxi ride in Amsterdam years ago...), we arrived in the town of Goreme, in the heart of Cappadocia - 1.5 hours early.  Unfortunately, that meant it was 4:00am.  An old guy in sweats wandering the closed bus station told us how to get to our hotel (who knows, maybe he was the on-duty travel information officer) - where we found that the "24-hour reception" was closed and locked.  Handily, a phone number was posted on the door - and we didn't have a working phone.  So we hung out in the chilly 12 C pre-morning air on the hotel terrace & waited for reception to open and hoping to catch a glimpse of some hot air balloons that take off at dawn every day.

It's 4:30am, it's pitch dark and 12 degrees C