Day 10, 11 & 12: Cappadocia

After the little adventure in the village, we were off to the penultimate place on our journey - the valleys, mountains and cliffs of Cappadocia.

Cappadocia is the most bizarre place I've ever been to. Cappadocia itself is a region between three ancient volcanoes that spewed rock, silt and lava for thousands of years. The hundreds of meters of silt were worn down by wind and rain and formed cliffs and rock formations that are utterly weird in every sense of the word. Besides the weirdly shaped cliffs, erosion caused the formation of rock formations called "fairy chimneys".

We arrived at our hostel in Uchisar, which is a town on the base of the tallest of the fairy chimneys in the Cappadocia region. People have been coming to the region for thousands of years because it is so attractive to people who are fleeing persecution. These people, especially early Christians who settled the region around 300 A.D., built caves into the cliffs. Uchisar is actually Turkish for three castles - the settlers of Uchisar actually built a series of dwellings into the mountain, and I actually climbed to the top of it was able to see caves and rooms people had used.

The hostel where we stayed, the Kilim Pension, was probably the nicest place we stayed at in all of our journey. The place had a magnificent view of the entire Cappadocia valley:

Apart from the great breakfast and dinners we had at the pension, the coolest thing about it was that we got to stay in caves. The hotel rooms were actually carved into the mountain, which we all thought was the greatest thing since sliced bread. It actually turned out being kind of irritating, since the rock in the cave was so soft that any vibrations caused rock and dust to fall from around the cave. By the end of it, all our bags were covered in rock dust and we were all very annoyed. Still, people continue to live like this throughout the area - people still build into caves:


By far the coolest thing I did in the entire trip was going ballooning. They say Cappadocia is second best place in the world to go ballooning, with the first being over the Serengetti. Our balloon captain thought different, and he's probably right. I got up at 4 am with Edward, Amanda and Kelly and after getting ready waited in the cold to be picked up. A mystic Turkish driver tried talking to us for 10 minutes before finally telling us to get into his van, and we headed off to the balloon launching place. We saw them inflating the balloons, which was cool in and of itself:



After a while, the Turkish guy in charge told us that two little girls would find us and take us to the correct balloon. Sure enough, two little Turkish women came up to us and told us to get into another van, which took us to a balloon on the other side of a cliff. It was perfect - the balloon ended up fitting 6 of us and the captain and copilot, instead of 20 like the other balloons. The Aussie captain got us onboard and we were off.

Let's just say that ballooning was, along with Bursa, the best experience I've had in Turkey. I think the others with me were annoyed by how giddy I was about how beautiful the scenery was. The captain took us over a plateau and once we went over the ridge the entire Cappadocia valley spread below us and into the distance, with Uchisar on the horizon. Words cannot describe how beautiful everything was. I took 400 pictures in one hour - here's a sample:


Uchisar Castle is the mountain jutting out. Our hotel was near the top of it.

There's a lot of ballooning in Cappadocia, which makes for a really pretty view. Here's a whole bunch of them with Uchisar in the back center.



At one point, we were so low that we could actually pick apricots off of some trees and eat them:


A view of our balloon from the hotel - William took this:



After about an hour and a half in the air, we came down. A pickup on the ground follows the balloon while the balloon captain carefully lowers the balloon into an empty field or road. The landing was very smooth. Afterwards, we were given champagne by the captain - apparently, it is a tradition to drink champagne after every balloon flight.

After we got back, we ate breakfast, took a nap and then were off again. We hiked with everyone for 2 hours from Uchisar down to Goreme, the main town in Cappadocia. The hike was long but nice - we walked through a beautiful canyon full of the weird-looking wavy cliffs Cappadocia is famous for:
After eating lunch, we got in a bus and went to the open air museum at Goreme. The open air museum is basically a collection of monasteries, churches and other buildings built into the caves in the earliest centuries after Christ. This monastery used to house 300 priests:



I don't really understand why early Christians used this area as a way to hide from their enemies, since the region was along a major trade route and the entrances to the caves weren't exactly hidden from sight, but it's still impressive to go into them. They painted really impressive frescoes onto the walls of their churches:





After the Open Air Museum, we got some dinner back at the hotel. The next day, we loaded up on a van for a thirty minute ride to visit one of the many underground cities built in the area. Whoever built the cities did an extensive job of tunneling underground - the largest city goes 9 floors underground, had stables, churches, food storage, air vents, baths and more, fitting more than 60,000 people for more than a month at a time. It was very impressive. It was also very claustrophobic - the tunnels were apparently built for midgets, as this picture attests:


At one point, we were at the deepest level and were stuck because people kept coming down the 1 way stairs. It got kind of scary because we had at least 150 people crammed into a small room at the bottom of this cave with more people coming down the 1-way stairs. We did finally make it out though.

After the city, we went to another canyon where cave houses and churches line the rocky cliffs on either sides. The coolest thing about the caves is that there's no signs or bars or anything promoting or hiding them - they were simply there. It was up to us to clamber up into them and see if it was just a room or an actual system of caves. Here's us climbing into one:

We walked into one that had tunnels stretching far into the interior of the mountain - guided only by the light of our phones, we started to get very freaked out and half-expected something to pop out at us (something that I ended up doing to Edward and Amanda, which scared them so much that Edward fell over). Here's one of some of the group at a church:

And one of Emily with the canyons behind her:


After hiking the 7 kilometers and visiting three of the churchesand some other houses, we finally arrived where Prof Shields was waiting for us. We then got on the van and headed for an old volcano crater turned lake:

We went swimming and soon found that the ground wasn't actually earth or sand but decomposing reeds that we would sink through like quick sand. It was gross. We decided to swim across it which was pretty impressive for me, since I hadn't really swam since middle school. It was a distance of probably 8-900 meters, so close to a kilometer.

We were all exhausted afterwards but still managed to sing songs from Mulan and other movies for the entire ride back. Yes, we're a bunch of 4th graders, but that's ok.

The next day we met with Prof to talk about Cappadoccia and about our experience in the village. It was really interesting to compare Memed My Hawk, a Turkish novel about life in rural Turkey we all read with the actual thing.

After that, most of us got back on the bus and were taken to walk through Red Valley, which is one of the famous valleys in the area. It was a nice hike and went close to the cliffs which seem to compare to the Grand Canyon:

We also got to go into a cave that ended up being a magnificent church with huge columns. It was really nice - and it was crazy that we had just stumbled into a random cave to find something like this. Incredible.


After Red Valley, we got all our stuff and headed to the point where we'd get picked up by Fez. Cappadocia was incredible - if you ever have a chance to come here, do it. It's amazing.