Indiana Jones of Cappadocia

Yesterday I woke up at 6:15 and counted 26 hot air balloons floating across the sky. Today I woke up at 5:45 and there were too many to count. Six days in, and this adventure is still going very strong.

Prior to arriving I knew nothing about the logistics of visiting Cappadocia, and not wanting to lose even one day of this trip I had made advance arrangements with a trekking company for the first day here. After arriving I realized that there is TONS of great history and landscapes surrounding Goreme (the town I’m staying in), so today I was happily able to return to my lone, free ranging ways. A hike through any of the surrounding valleys literally passes by hundreds, if not thousands, of stone structures that date back a couple thousand years, so I was in full-on Indiana Jones mode as I scrambled through ancient churches that had been hacked from stone, roamed through eroding rock formations, and explored old monasteries that crept up multiple levels inside of the rock. Without trying to sound like a broken record, it’s unbelievable what people have been able to carve out of the rocks here – at one point today I stood in a church that was three stories high, all chiseled out by hand deep inside of a cliff.

After returning in early afternoon and getting a much-needed nap during the heat of the day, the late afternoon activity was a visit to Uchisar Castle, which is the high point in this area, and which was hacked out of the top of a stone hill (of course). From there it was a nice stroll back to Goreme through Pigeon Valley, so named for the high density of pigeon houses carved into the cliffs and built by ancient people since they used pigeon droppings for fertilizer.

One last note, put here mainly for my dad – no matter where I travel, his first question is nearly always about the food (“Antarctica, huh? What was the food like?”) Gotta say, while I haven’t been spending much time eating, Turkey does the culinary thing right. Best olives I’ve ever had. Fresh fruit that is smaller than what we get back home, but seems to pack in more flavor. Grilled meats that have all brought great joy to the tastebuds. And while I’m not yet a card-carrying member of the Turkish tea fan club, I could see how that ubiquitous drink would grow on you. The only downside for me has been that this is the wrong place to not like eggplant – at one point I politely declined some sort of curried eggplant from the guy working the breakfast buffet, and while he didn’t say anything out loud, the look on his face was pretty clearly one of very deep-seated disgust towards me and all of the evil that I represented. In my defense, I had tried the dish he was offering earlier and re-affirmed that eggplant continues to keep its position on my unapproved vegetable list.