
Cappadocia tour day!
Goreme, Turkey, Europe
I got to see Cappadocia today and it was brilliant! The day started out with a pretty good breakfast at the hotel on the terrace overlooking the village of Goreme. My tour guide picked me up at 9:30am with three Chinese girls from my hotel too. We got on the bus to find out the rest of our tour group consisted of four more Chinese people, and two Koreans. That is a pretty good representation of what it looks like in downtown Cappadocia. All tourists.
We started out with the Goreme Open Air Museum, which is a tightly knit group of homes and churches. A lot of the buildings have eroded pretty badly, but it is impressive to see how many of the paintings inside are still vibrantly colored. The only problem with this place is that we came on a weekend so there were way too many people. Every room we tried to go into was difficult and annoying because of all the tourists. Our tour guide, Serkan, said that most tourists were okay, but on the weekends you got a lot of Turkish tourists, and they are the worst. They are rude, and refuse to wait in a line to get in anywhere, so they are always cutting people in line.
We were there for about an hour and a half and then we moved on, happily. The next place we went to was called Pashabagi and the scenery was amazing! This is where I got to see the cool rock formations in a much less touristy area. It was excellent. We got the chance to walk around for a while on our own so we really got to explore the area.
We then did the obligatory tour stop at a shop, but they showed us how they make clay pots on an old kickwheel. It was pretty interesting to hear about and see. The prices of their pieces was pretty low too. If I wasn’t travelling for so much longer I would have considered getting something, but that was a headache I didn’t really need so early on this trip. The Koreans (on their honeymoon) bought something, so I guess it made the stop worthwhile.
Our next stop was at a place called Imagination Valley in Avanos, where the rock formations are said to look like certain animals. There’s a camel, a pair of kissing ducks, an eagle, and a single rock that is supposed to look like a penguin, a dolphin or a seal. It doesn’t make sense to me how a rock could look like any of those things when none of those animals look anything alike. I could kind of see the camel and the eagle though, so I guess some people just have a better imagination than I do. The scenery around this place was amazing though, so I was happy to be there.
We stopped for lunch and had a traditional Turkish Kebab Pot, which was excellent. It was a lot better than I had expected it to be for a tour lunch. Especially when the tour for the whole day only cost £22. After lunch we stopped at a place called Uchisar Castle. It was another massive rock with a lot of rooms carved into it. It was more of a fortress back in the day than a castle. It was a great sight to see. And just across the road was the Badlands, which was another cool looking landscape that I hadn’t seen before. This kind of rock called Tuff is very soft, because it’s basically compacted ash, as these are all formations that come from old volcanoes in the area.
We finished our day at a place called Rose Valley. Not because it has roses growing in it, but because the stone in this area is a rose color. It wasn’t my favorite place today, but still cool to see. I was also impressed with how well the group got along. The Chinese people made a real effort to speak English so that was nice. All in all, it was a really good day. Tomorrow morning I’ll be getting up at 4:30am to be prepared for my hot air balloon ride. I have been told there is a 5% chance that the flight could be cancelled due to possible wind and/or thermic problems. Fingers crossed I don’t get up at 4:30am to find out I’m not going anywhere!
By seeing Cappadocia today, I also got to cross off my 58th item from my top 100 list. I’m getting there…