Cappadocia: December 14th - December 20th, 2023
After almost 7 weeks (and minus one week in Istanbul), Susan and I finally bid farewell to the southwest corner of Türkiye and the Mediterranean Sea. We looked forward to starting a new stage of our trip after making a trove of good memories (fun climbing and international travel time with friends) and a few less-good memories (Susan in the hospital); but it was almost time to put our new, giant, heavy bags to use and find some Winter! One stop first, though - Cappadocia.
Cappadocia, the Land of Beautiful Horses, comprises a wide area across the inland hills of central Türkiye; over thousands of years, the volcanoes along the periphery flooded and buried the landscape under layers of ash and lahar, creating pastel strata of grey, tan, and reddish sediment only slightly closer to rock than compressed dirt. If you've been to the Badlands of South Dakota, imagine that but just a little bit more cohesive and sturdy. Not good for rock climbing, but really good material for the forces of erosion to craft strange, alien-looking sculptures and for the forces of humans to excavate dwellings and cities and churches (especially if you're an early Christian or other human who wants to hide from the powers that be).
Huge numbers of tourists stream through Cappadocia every year, so for the most part there's plenty of tourism infrastructure to help people make the trip and then stay there comfortably. Susan and I lucked out in terms of timing - we were past the high seasons of late spring, summer, and fall, but most places were still open to catch vacationers traveling during the upcoming winter and year-end holidays. Still plenty of services, but minus the "Yellowstone-in-summer" level chaos and crowds, and theoretically not too cold yet (although the days were getting noticeably short; you can't escape all of winter's effects).
So it wasn't too tough to find a bus traveling from Antalya to the Cappadocia region, and we showed up at the Antalya Otogar one last time, at 8 in the morning to start a 10 hour bus ride. I was still pretty nervous about Susan's condition, and whether this long trip on a Turkish bus would push her back over the edge, but our little practice rides to & from Çıralı had gone well enough, and the ride ended up being non-eventful. I enjoyed traveling up through the Taurus mountains in the daylight this time around, catching glimpses of craggy peaks dusted with bits of snow out the window. A couple times a taller volcano with a white summit reared on the horizon and I'd daydream of the skiing to come. Susan and I took every opportunity to get off the bus to stretch and move around, and chatted a bit with a Scottish tourist on her way to Cappadocia as well (it's easy to pick the westerners out on the bus). She gave us a really helpful tip to not try to transfer at Nevşehir onto a smaller, local, perhaps non-existent bus, and just take our big coach bus straight to Göreme, the town with our hotel and rental car; we hadn't even looked for a single bus ticket all the way to Göreme, so it was a relief when the driver confirmed we'd stop there and that they'd have enough space for me and Susan to stay on.
The bus ride felt longer than it was, since we rolled into Göreme well after night fell. But as we came over the last hill and got our first proper look at the town, the yellow street lights twisting and curving and spiraling around, above, and under each other, disappearing momentarily behind earthen towers illuminated by white floodlights before emerging at different angles on the other side, only served to enhance our wonder and curiosity about what might be waiting in this intriguing place. Göreme is an interesting blend of restaurants, tour offices, kitschy shops, and old and questionably stable stone/cave dwellings carved out from the landscape, many of which have been renovated and had guesthouses and hotels built on top of them (presumably after some structural reinforcement); situated pretty squarely in the middle of the Cappadocia area, it also serves as a great place to base from to tour the surrounding landscapes and cultural sites.
But before we could move into our own little hotel cave-space for the next week, we had one thing to do - pick up a rental car! While I was admittedly terrified of driving among the Turks, we were also both pretty excited to have a means of transport that would let us do things on our own terms and schedule (and not pay a whole bunch of exorbitant tour guide fees). So I left Susan at the bus station with our 150 lbs. of luggage and walked down the main strip to a small rental office where our white Renault sedan waited patiently. It took a long time to go through the paperwork, and while they did make sure we got an automatic transmission (thank God), the gas light was on, so getting some fuel would be the first item of business. Göreme doesn't have any gas stations, which meant a 20 km round trip for the nearest petrol - sorry Susan!
The lightless road to the town with petrol seemed endless in the dark, the company of the gas light keeping a persistent fear in my head as to what would happen if the tank ran totally dry. Finally at the station, I blanked when the attendant asked how much fuel I wanted and blurted out "Full!"; on the way back, unburdened by fantasies of being stranded, I felt the elation of a newly independent 16-year-old wash over my mind and remarked out loud to the empty vehicle, "I'm driving a car! In Turkey!". After almost an hour and a half, with nearly $60 of fuel in the Toyota Corolla-sized car (it's easy to forget how much the USA subsidizes gas :/ ), I finally pulled back up to the bus station and Susan helped me load the bags.
We proceeded to spend nearly half an hour getting to our hotel just a few hundred meters away, circling around on the circuitous, narrow, and mostly-unsigned streets, suffering a slight heart attack every time we met a car coming the opposite direction. Eventually we found a place by a mosque to park, hopped out, and explored on foot, feeling a little vindicated because we found it along an alley off the road, hidden among a nest of other hotels and restaurants. The manager was really kind even though we were late, and only tried a little bit to sell us on some tour packages before showing us to our "cave suite", which bore the trappings of luxury but also a musk that we should have expected to find in a cave equipped with a shower.
Despite the hotel manager's assurances that we only needed 3 days to see the sights around Göreme, Susan and I had no difficulty filling 5. Some people might consider us slow, but I think we just have an overdeveloped faculty for appreciation. One of our first stops was the Göreme open-air museum, a cluster of well-preserved mostly religious buildings from between the late 800's to about 1200 A.D. Most of the structures were uniformly-shaped churches, collections of rooms (labeled with church-anatomy terms that I never got straight) laid out in blocky cross patterns, typically with a crypt tacked on to the side or underneath. Signs around the museum explained a bit how the early Christians had come to the area to go "underground" (so to speak) and avoid persecution, leaving a legacy of churches that evolved in the Eastern tradition; it was an "oh yeah" moment for me and Susan, making it tangible to us how Christians came out of Israel and spread to the rest of Europe via Anatolia and Greece.
While the layouts of the churches might have grown predictable, the bright fresco iconography adorning the walls provided fresh entertainment (although the choice of scenes was also predictable - there's always St. George killing the dragon, always the Annunciation). We really enjoyed seeing the Christian myths and stories played out among 1000 year-old paintings popping with reds, blues, whites, greens, and yellows that would keep a kid awake during a sermon. Most of the chapels didn't allow photographs inside, but I did sneak a few of the Apple Church. The other buildings in the open-air museum weren't as elaborately decorated, but the structures themselves made up for it; Susan and I got our first taste of the twisty webs of tunnels and rooms that industrious folks of ages past scraped out from the mounds of compacted volcanic ash, intricate warrens that prove humans are a burrowing animal as clever as any mole or groundhog (is that a compliment?). We were a little disappointed because the biggest building, the convent, was closed to visitors (low season does have its drawbacks), but we'd have plenty of chances to see more of this later on.
On another day we made the long-ish drive out to the Ihlara Valley (of course I'd insisted on figuring out how to connect my phone to the car's Bluetooth by that point), which offered both a splendid hike as well as more frescoe-adorned rock-churches. More of a canyon than a valley, we followed a stream as it meandered among leafless winter trees below steep cliffs and giant boulders. The rock seemed so clean, with blank faces and "splitter" cracks, we had to touch some from time-to-time just to feel it rub off on our fingers and remind us that it'd be no good for climbing. The hike goes along the canyon floor, where we came across some ducks and one very attention-starved cat, and periodically other trails break off up the steep slopes on either side, leading to decorated churches carved from the cliffsides.
There are nearly a dozen churches in 7 km canyon, so of course we didn't get to see them all (I was a little bummed because we didn't make it to the Selime Monastery at the far end), but true-to-form we lingered until a security guard started closing up the last church we checked out as dusk approached. I also really appreciated seeing a couple unique buildings there, like a massive press used to make linseed oil. I ran over a cat during the long drive back at dusk but thankfully that was the worst accident we had with the car.
Aside from churches and frescoes, we spent a good deal of time getting almost lost among the tunnels of the rock cities. We first visited Uçhisar Castle, but aside from the height it bore little resemblance to the castles of England and Scotland. In the first millennium, settlers in the area began carving away at this massive outcropping of beige tuff, recognizing its suitability as a shelter. As time went on more and more people scraped more and more rooms from the rock, connected with winding halls, narrow stairways, and "squeeze" chimneys with hand and footholds chopped into the stone. Susan and I had fun wondering how often someone might decide they'd like a little more space or maybe a closet, only to accidentally break through a wall into the rooms of a family next door. Or what kind of 3-D spatial logic you'd need to ever find a particular person or location within the tangle of tunnels.
It's estimated up to a 1,000 people may have lived in Uçhisar castle, the precipitous stone sides offering protection from any would-be attackers (although perhaps hazards for unattended toddlers). Like any good castle, it was even equipped with extensive storage basins and wells to wait out sieges. We wandered through nests of intertwining passages and steps, through bright rooms with tall, domed ceilings where light streamed through (perhaps accidental) openings and small, dim spaces where you always risked bumping your head, more than once dead-ending at a sudden window 50 feet in the air, a vertical shaft leading to the next floor, or some stairs so steep that we wanted for ropes and rappel equipment. The whole place felt like it could have plugged straight into a Studio Ghibli film; you could imagine the entire castle breathing in and out with its 1,000 inhabitants bustling inside, parents hanging colorful laundry out the windows and sending the smoke from cooking fires out through chimney systems, while children tumble down tunnels playing tag, teenagers sneak off to quiet, unfinished corridors, and strangers bumble into the wrong family's cave looking for a friend in a part of the castle they've never visited before.
If you took Uçhisar Castle and buried the whole structure, so that you entered at the top floor and then meandered down, deep into the earth, you'd end up with something like the underground cities of Derinkuyu and Kaymaklı. Visiting these two sites seemed like a good option on a cold, rainy day, and they inspired a similar sense of wonder. Multiple tour groups shuffled pasts as we took our time and checked out every nook and cranny we could, never sure what would lie through the next small door or passageway (it was usually just another round-ish cave room), plumbing a few ever-narrowing passages by the light of our cell phones until they dead-ended at walls of collapsed earth.
Like the castle, these sites housed hundreds or even thousands of people, and were stocked with wells and storage rooms so that the inhabitants could dive underground and hide from marauding armies. The underground cities also had a few unique bits illustrating how fully-functional they were: more churches (although not with frescoes), crypts, mills for oil and flour, and big, heavy, circular stone doors that could be rolled in front of passages to cut off any enemies that might happen to make it inside. We had a blast taking every turn off the marked path, exploring these rooms in "side quests" that felt like a mash-up of spelunking, archeology, and a ride from Disneyland.
After a lot of hemming and hawing, we also decided to burn the money to do *the* activity you can't avoid in Cappadocia - a hot air balloon ride. Google “Cappadocia” and invariably you'll get a view we'd already enjoyed from breakfast in the hotel's roof-terrace restaurant: hundreds of plump fabric balloons, brightly colored as rainbows or subdued shades of blue and white, most sporting advertisements, defying logic to remain suspended in a clear morning sky like fat globs of wax dripped from candles in heaven. The hotel manager, probably relieved we'd signed up for *some* guided activity, was happy to find us space with an operator, and before we knew it the alarm went off at
Our pilot might not have been the best English-language guide, but he was plenty skilled, taking the balloon within almost touching distance of rock spires and buildings of Göreme, before letting us drift over the etched fractals of Red and Rose Valleys, and then taking us high into to the sky for a sweeping, holistic view of the entire area. We were pretty squished against others in the basket, awkwardly shuffling to trade places with a few young Chinese ladies also jostling for photos; we did a quick head count wondering if it was overcapacity. But overall it was a really neat experience, hanging so far in the sky with nothing but space around us, quiet and peaceful as a cloud, gazing at canyons below and the volcano Erciyes on the horizon in soft morning light.
We also spent a good chunk of time hiking through these neat landscapes and laughing among the wacky shapes that could only be created by the random hand of erosion over thousands of years, wind and water playing their own game of Jenga to see who could most precariously shape the stone without it crashing down. One afternoon in Imagination Valley we saw the famous camel, I played a scene from “Dr. Strangelove”, and teapots and horses revealed themselves along sandy, twisty scrambles. On the way there we made sure to stop for the three famous Graces of Ürgüp.
It took a couple of attempts for us to find Love Valley (the name a “I'll tell you when you're older” joke about the shapes of the rocks), since at least 4 different places on Google Maps are marked as the location. The first time around we actually ended up in Rocket Valley (yes, those are *totally* rocket shapes), and while we were impressed by the field of massive pillars and their funny pointy hats it was a bit confusing that such a supposedly popular spot would be so empty. Once we realized the error, and after half an hour of Google sleuthing, on another day we made another attempt to find Love Valley, starting from a random 4x4 track off the road that we were 80% sure was the right spot. This did end up being the right hike, and we spent another couple hours wandering and gawking at the Fairy Chimneys.
Similar misadventures waited for us in Red Valley; plenty of sources online described a straightforward hike where you could also link up with trails in neighboring White or Rose Valleys, but a plethora of braided social trails, directional markers festooned with sloppily spray-painted arrows, and trail signs fallen-over and buried in brush conspired to make the whole day a guessing game. We also grew suspicious that the owners of the numerous little tea houses speckling the landscape had taken the initiative to paint their own arrows and markers in attempts to lure in more tourists, which is fine if you're looking for tea but very aggravating when you find yourself bushwhacking through a narrow canyon on what's supposed to be a casual day hike.
Otherwise, and aside from one of the churches being closed (did we have to buy juice from that guy to get him to unlock the church?), we did enjoy our hike through the landscape and saw a couple other neat buildings, the massive Columnar Church, and a vineyard. Red Valley reminded me of the Badlands in South Dakota, a type of terrain that never fails to surprise and astonish, the sharp contours and ridges of the land a photo-negative of the flows of water through the crumbly red and tan earth. We eventually did manage to hook up with the path through White Valley, more of a canyon landscape with steep pale walls on either side, and enjoyed how the trail followed water-worn tunnels (or were they first excavated by medieval humans?) through rock formations and under massive boulders.
On our last night in Göreme we indulged in one more peak-tourist activity - going out for testi kebab. Testi is in fact a traditional Cappadocian dish, and while we weren’t sure quite how authentic ours was, the “Mad Chef” recommended by our hotel provided a good show. It’s basically a stew of meat and vegetables, but the distinctive part is that they slow cook the whole mixture in a piece of pottery sealed by bread. When it’s finished, with the bread bursting from the top of the jar, you break the pottery open with a hammer and savor the results. Sadly, though, the kebab pottery wasn’t all we broke that night - Susan’s trusty blue Nalgene, a faithful companion through hikes, climbs, trailcrew, teaching, and more, fell off a table, landed just wrong, and shattered along the top. Au revoir, dear friend!
After 5 very full days I dropped off the rental car and walked back to the bus station to wait with Susan for our bus to Ankara, and she spotted the most hilarious advertisement sign I've seen all trip. Despite a few small setbacks her back was doing even better, and I was much less nervous for the upcoming bus trip. The ride to Ankara was uneventful, and after some confusion we managed to find the exit for the bus station and pile into a cab to take us far out of town towards the airport. Our friendly taxi driver introduced us to his parents on a video call during the drive (sweet, but do you really have to do that call while speeding through traffic??) and even called our hotel when no one was there to let us in, refusing to leave us until we got inside. Our place at Dr. Aslan's (apparently this dentist runs a hotel on the side) was a whole apartment, way more than we needed for one night, but its cheap price and location a few minutes from the airport couldn't be beat. Almost time for snow and ice!
You ran over a cat!??!?!
ReplyDeleteIt was an cat-ccident, officer, I swear! Besides it probably had at least a couple lives left...
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