30th of May 2011
We were a bit reluctant to wake up after our day on the bikes, but by 8:30 our stomachs couldn't take it any more and we had to go for breakfast. The hotel owner served us some sort of molasses that was made out of grapes and sweet peas, it wasn't really my cup of tea, although the delicious Turkish tea sure was. When we had finished the molasses, we walked to the Goreme open air museum, the admission price of 15 lira (10 dollars) made us a bit unsure but because it was “the” sight to see in Cappadocia, we decided to go anyway. There were lots of rock cut churches with very impressive frescoes although you had to wait in line because of the many tour groups. We had a watermelon for lunch and then Mhari and Dad went back to the hotel while Mom and I took a minibus to Nevsehir. From Nevsehir we took another bus to Derinkuyu, home to the underground city. The city was dug a long time ago by some people to hide from other people, it was then used by different people to hide from other different people who then turned it into a museum. The admission is a lot but it's worth it. There were a ton of tiny tunnels leading into unlit mazes of rooms and the main staircase goes down 8 storeys. From the bottom you can look up the ventilation shaft to the tiny spot of light above you. There were a few tour groups at the start but later on it was mostly empty making it a bit spooky for going down to places such as the graves.
31st of May - 2nd of June 2011
From Goreme we took a bus to Kayseri and bought train tickets for the 2am to Erzurum, a 16 hour journey. We had about 12 hours to spare so left our bags with the snack shop owner and walked downtown. We spent about 2 hours in the Bazaar, the second largest in Turkey, I bought a Kayserispor Football club scarf that has something in Turkish written on it. With a dictionary and a travelling linguist we met later on, I figured out that it includes the words “fall down” and “reciprocal love”. We also spent an hour chatting with a carpet salesman who told us that he thought backpackers were “low-quality tourists” because they did not buy carpets (he didn't know we were backpackers). We returned to the train station and sat around all night because the train was late and arrived at 7.20am, not 2am. We got off in Erzurum at11pm after a spectacular ride. We only stayed one night, We saw the beautiful “Çifte Minareli Medrese”, reminiscent of “A Thousand and One Nights” and got on a bus to Yusufeli.
3rd of June 2011
Yusufeli is an interesting town, there are far to many hair salons and cay shops, and the restaurants all close by 7pm. We managed to find one place open serving pide (turkish pizza). When we asked what kinds of pide he had, he replied “Meat or Cheese”, he then hesitated before adding “Meat and Cheese” not health food by any means. We ordered one of each and they turned out to be very good, and for 3 lira (2 bucks) per pide, a bargain as well. Today we went for a walk up into the hill, we stopped near a stream to eat apricots and made a series of dams to divert the water flow. We returned to the pide place for lunch and are now napping or blogging.
No comments:
Post a Comment