Cappadocia – the Land of Fairy Chimneys, Underground Cities, Hot Air Balloons, and Penis Jokes

We took our first night bus of this trip to Cappadocia from Fethiye.  We pulled into Goreme, the town we used as a base to explore the region, at 4:30 in the morning and made our way to our second cave hotel of this trip (the first was in Matmata, Tunisia).  The one here though, named Star Cave, was definitely far nicer.  Since we arrived so late at night we didn’t get an appreciation of the landscape that brings tourists to this part of Turkey.  That completely changed in the morning.

The terrain, as Di put it, is almost alien-like.  It was created by volcanoes and carved by rain, wind, and time to form extremely unique looking valleys and countless pillars named “fairy chimneys” here.  Some of these fairy chimneys look like they belong in an elf’s village in a fantasy novel, others are extremely phallic looking and if I was a teenage boy I would have found them really, really amusing.  Actually who am I kidding, if my highly educated and respected 30 something year old male friends came here with me I’m positive the penis jokes would still be never-ending. 

Back to the landscape, we woke up really early one day (like 4:30 am) to hop on a hot air balloon, a popular but expensive activity out in this region.  We considered not doing it due to the price but everyone we met who experienced it vehemently assured us that it was worth it.  They were right.  We were in the air for about an hour while our pilot deftly controlled something that was basically at the mercy of the winds.  At times she would let us hover one meter off the ground, gently grazing the tall grass, and at other times she would launch us 1000 meters up to give us a commanding view of Central Anatolia’s canvas.  We would drift through valleys and canyons gliding between fairy chimneys with the silence being occasionally interrupted by the sound of massive flames erupting from the burner.  We couldn’t stop taking pictures.  It was a surreal experience and definitely one of the highlights of our trip so far.

Another day we rented a POS (that stands for piece of crap, mom) 100 cc Peugeot scooter to check out the immediate region surrounding Goreme.  I say POS because the thing totally died on me on a steep downhill section, so we had to ride it out without a functioning engine for about 500 metres before I could finally stop on some level ground and restart it.  Also when I had the thing on full throttle at inclines of about 10 degrees, the fastest Di and I could go was about 40 km/h.  That day was still fun though, seeing up close what we were seeing from a far in the balloon.  The most impressive sight was the Goreme Open Air Museum, which is deservingly the star attraction in this area.  Here Christian Monks carved cave churches into this otherworldly landscape between 900 and 1200 AD.  Some of the frescoes inside these cave churches are still in remarkable condition.  Three theologians known as the Cappadocians (St. Basil, St. Gregory and another St. Gregory) contributed greatly to Christian doctrine and the development of monasticism here.  So apart from its natural beauty, there is interesting history in Cappadocia as well.

On the last day we booked a tour to visit the farther areas (where a scooter would not be able to make it) and we checked out the Ihlara valley and an extraordinary underground city named Derinkuyu.  The city was made for the purpose of hiding from enemies and was remarkable.  The tour was fun as we had a good group of people and an excellent, informative guide.  There were a couple younger girls from Hong Kong there, and when I asked them in Cantonese to help us take a picture, they started to freak out and scream and hug each other in excitement.  I thought this reaction was due to the fact that I’m ridiculously good looking, but really they were just excited because they hadn’t heard Cantonese in over 3 weeks.  I guess their reaction could have been worse (like the “get away from me creep!” response that I’m more accustomed to) so I won’t complain.

The hotel/pension we were staying at was completely filled with Canadians, Australians and a couple of American students studying Arabic in Jordan on an exchange program.  We had a great group which resulted in some pretty good conversations about travel and life-experiences.  I mostly ended up talking to the Americans, and I found myself envying how impressive they were at the age of 21.  They had an amazing grasp on politics and Middle Eastern issues, and a drive to foster their intellectual growth while making the world a better place.  Long discussions about health care, foreign policy and economics didn’t phase them at all.  And if you’re envisioning a couple geeks you’d be dead wrong; the guy looked and talked like a ski bum out of Whistler with scruffy hair and an 80’s “Idaho potatoes are best” sweatshirt on, the girl (who had the sweet girl-next-door look) was confident and her obvious intelligence commanded your attention as she talked, but she was in no way overbearing.  When I was in third year at UBC I’m pretty sure that most of my conversations were still about girls and cars.  And it’s not like I wasn’t well travelled as I was able to backpack a region of the world every summer.  I’m happy to have met them and curious to see where they’ll be in 10 years.

After Cappadocia, our options were to either keep heading east to Mt Nemrut or to head south into Syria.  We finally decided that after being in Turkey for over 3 weeks, we really should head to Syria as we only have about a month and a half left to cover 4 countries before meeting my sister on July 4 in Cairo.  So we took a bus to Gaziantep (very interesting ride, will post about it later) and spent the day here.  We’ll be heading to Syria tomorrow.  I heard the border crossing is not fun, so hopefully we’ll get through in less time than it took to get into Libya.  Time to re-enter the Arab world, insha allah.