Goreme (Sam)

(Sam)

28^th May 2011

I have written about our time between Orhaniye and here but because it's on paper I don't have time to type it all out at the moment, maybe I will post it later, when I have time. So basically, from Antalya, we took a night bus to Nevesehir and then a quick bus ride to Goreme. The night bus was good but I only slept for 1 hour. Eventually I gave up trying to sleep and just watched movies. I watched one movie about Turks in America's wild west, and one about Americans in Turkey's wild east, I'm not kidding. They were both in Turkish but I got the gist of things. At about 4 am we figured we should try out the bus's Wi-Fi and sure enough, it worked very well. I don't think I will ever be able to travel by bus in any other country ever again, “What, no snacks, no tea, no Wi-Fi?”

Upon arrival in Goreme, we searched high and low for a reasonably priced hotel, when we found one, we had lentil soup for breakfast and went to sleep.

I guess I should probably now explain why we are in Goreme. Goreme is the tourist hub of the region of Cappadocia, the main highlight being the landscape. A very long time ago, there was a volcanic eruption, slowly, erosion wiped away the volcanic rock and only the “tuff” (which the book describes as “consolidated volcanic ash” basically a soft yellow stone) remained in solitary pillars. What all this means is that the landscape is dotted with huge cones and pillars, a lot like the hoodoos in the Badlands of Alberta.

When we woke up at 2pm we went for a nice walk, had supper and then went back to bed.

29^th of May 2011

Today was bike day, we got 4 nice mountain bikes and headed out on the road to Çavuşin. On our way we stopped at Love valley. The fairy chimneys here are have particularly umm... interesting shapes, it is also a nice place to go for a walk through the vineyards. The next interesting place we went was Çavuşin village. There was an extremely large fairy chimney here that doubled as a castle. We had a very bad lunch here and then took a donkey cart track to a valley that started with “P” this one was like Love Valley except it had more tourists and was therefore more accesible. It was a short ride to Zelve open air museum, an abandoned rock cut village. It was a monastic retreat from the 9^th to the13^th century and then a village from then until 1952 when it was deemed to dangerous to live in. There were some nice old churches here and the monks quarters were interesting because you could see things like where the window frame was and where the bed was. The highlight of the museum was definitely the system of narrow tunnels that connects one valley with the next. The steep staircases and pitch black corridors were indeed very spooky. Our last stop of the day was the Devrent Valley, a 3km uphill slog. We had a look a the fairy chimney shaped like a camel (it wasn't really) and then flew back down the hill to Zelve. The rest of the ride was slowly uphill and hard at first but the last bit was easier.

Photos: Hot air ballooning -a very popular activity; Downtown Goreme; Ummm... Rocket Ships?; Fairy Chimneys; 

Does that look like a camel to you?