Cappadocia - Ballooning and Our First Day of Tours

Kati and Me in Rose Valley

Our trip from Istanbul to Cappadocia was relatively uneventful.  The airport is nice, the flight was a little under two hours, and the travel agency took care of all of the logistics.  It was also really nice being able to carry my water bottle into the airport and onto the plain (and to not have to take off my shoes when I went through the X-ray machine).  We really do need to reclaim some of our privacy rights in the area of air travel.  On the drive from the airport to our hotel, we shared a van with an Australian family.  As it turns out, Paul is a senior barrister (litigator) in Australia, so we kind of bonded on the law stuff.  Although, he was pretty taken aback when he got me on the subject of law schools and I couldn’t resist talking about how broken and horrible the US system is.

Our Cave Hotel

Our hotel is in Ürgüp, one of the four main towns in the Cappdocia region.  It’s a cave…literally.  Our room is built into the mountainside and everything, from the walls to the ceiling, is stone.  Not only is our room a cave, but it’s cavernous.  I don’t know how we got such a giant room, but we’re not complaining.  Our Charlotte apartment could fit inside just the bedroom, with space to spare!  We had a giant double bed, an additional single bed, and a wall-length (built-in) Turkish-style couch.  The only issue with the hotel is the bathroom.  I took a shower after we arrived and small bits of the cave ceiling started falling down on me.  Now the bathroom floor is covered with little dust/rock particles.

Panoramic of Cappadocia From the Balloon

The morning of our first full day here was long.  I had to wake up at 4:30 to go on a sunrise balloon tour over Cappadocia.  Kati had been going back and forth about whether she would accompany me or not but ultimately decided that the height coupled with being scrunched in a basket with nowhere to go would be a bad idea, so she caught up on some sleep instead.  The balloon ride was really cool!  There are tons of companies that do these trips in Cappadocia and when we were going up (5:45) so there must have been dozens of these balloons lighting up just before sunrise.  It was truly a sight to see.  They fit about 20 people in our balloon basket, which had four compartments—one for the pilot in the middle and four on the sides where they allocated us evenly.  We were up in the air for just over an hour.  The pilot was amazing, he could take us down to such a low altitude that the bottom of our basket was brushing against the grape vines and bushes below.

The rest of our day was spent seeing various sights in the area.  We started with a 1.5 hour walk through Rose Valley, named because of the reddish hues of the rocks.  Despite the fact that our feet were covered with dust by the end of the hike, the scenery was absolutely gorgeous!  Cappadocia is one of those places that’s very difficult to adequately describe in words.  It’s also one of those places that, when you’re there, you feel like you have to take pictures constantly, which accounts for the absurd number of pictures during our trip.  Our tour guide, Görkhan, was amazing!  He taught us all sorts of interesting tidbits, like despite the fact that most tour guides tell you Cappadocia means “the land of beautiful horses” they are completely mistaken because the origins of the word are much older and completely different.  He also gave us the full history of the iconoclastic period of Christian art and the true origins of the ictus symbolism.

Our hike through Rose Valley terminated at Sinasos, an old Greek town in the region.  After World War II, Turkey and Greek engaged in a resident exchange program, whereby Turkey removed over 850,000 Greeks and sent them to Greece in exchange for around 400,000 Turks residing in Greece.  The cave houses in these old Greek villages are hard to maintain and, seeing as the only people who knew how to maintain them were shipped away, the newly relocated Turks could not live in the cave houses and most of them fell in.  Sinasos is one of the dilapidated old Greek villages in which you can see all of these neglected and collapsed cave houses.  Right before lunch we made a pit-stop at the ATM because Paul, the Australian barrister, needed some cash.  About 10 minutes after our stop, en route to lunch, Paul stopped the van and had it turn around because he had forgotten his debit card in the ATM machine.  Unfortunately for Paul, Turkish ATMs will suck in a card that is left in the machine within a minute!  By the time we got back, his card was nowhere to be found.  Luckily, his wife had a card that they could use for the rest of their three-week trip.  I’m just glad that it didn’t happen to us!

After the excitement surrounding the ATM, we finally stopped for lunch in Pigeon Valley.  One of the interesting things about Cappadocia is that its residents have used pigeons in agriculture for centuries.  They would build pigeon houses in the sides of the cliffs in which hundreds of pigeons would live.  Then, the farmers would climb up to these houses and collect all of the pigeon droppings to use on the fields below.  In fact, pigeons are still used in agriculture in the area today!  Pigeon Valley is so named because it has some of the largest pigeon houses and populations in the area.

Our first stop after lunch was an Onyx workshop.  I never really thought about onyx being anything more than a mass-manufactured gift-shop trinket, but apparently the stone is from Cappadocia and they take it very seriously.  We got to see a master carving an onyx stone which was really neat, and then they set us free in the onyx gallery to buy whatever we wanted.  The other interesting stone-related fact about Cappadocia is that it is famous for its turquoise.  In fact, the word turquoise means “Turkish stone.”  It was so named when the English would bring the stone back to London and didn’t have a proper name for it, so they started simply calling it the Turkish stone.

Me at the Kaymakli Underground City Winery!

The last stop we made on the first day of our tour was at Kaymakli, an underground city.  In the Cappadocia region they have found over 20 underground cities, but archaeologists believe there are over 100 underground cities in the area!  These underground cities were built by Christians who sought to escape persecution and torture from the various Muslim oppressors that came through the area.  Kaymakli is not the largest of the underground cities, but it still consists of eight subterranean levels!  We saw everything from stables to wineries and kitchens to personal living quarters.  It’s crazy to think that people actually lived down there.  While it was never necessary to occupy the city to its maximum capacity or for extremely long time periods, archaeologists have calculated that Kaymakli could house over 5,000 people for over two years!  Kaymakli was hands-down one of the most unique and coolest places we saw in a region renowned for its lunar landscapes.  (In fact, we were told that George Lucas even filmed some of the Tattoine scenes from the first Star Wars movie in Cappadocia because of the scenery!)