Goreme, Turkey, Europe

I took a hot air balloon ride over Cappadocia today and it was incredible! It started with a ridiculous 4:20am wakeup call, but it all ended up being worth it. I was picked up at my hotel at 4:45am and I was the first one in the van. We went to a few other places to make some pick-ups.

The first people we picked up were two Colombian sisters who are travelling together. They were lovely. They both speak impeccable English and were really excited to hear that I’m going to be checking out Colombia in July. Vanessa lives in England right now, but Melissa is still in Bogota, so she has offered to show me around a bit when I get there. This is why I love travelling!

Unfortunately, we were split up and put in different balloons and I was put in a basket with 17 Germans and two South Africans. So I didn’t really have anyone to talk to because they were all in their own group. There must have been over 100 balloons that all took off within 30 minutes of each other, and it was so cool to see them all in the air.

This was my first real hot air balloon ride, and it was incredible. It was so quiet up there, and the scenery was amazing. The area of Cappadocia isn’t too big, so I was able to see all the places we visited yesterday and get a different perspective of them. The ride lasted about an hour and our pilot was excellent. We saw a lot of other balloons landing and they were skipping across the ground and the people in the basket looked pretty uncomfortable. Our guy actually managed to land the basket right on the trailer! I wouldn’t have believed it if I wasn’t there.

We had a little champagne toast at the end of the flight and then we got rides back to our hotels. I went down the road to the Colombian girl’s hotel and sat with them for breakfast. It was really nice to chat about travelling and what all our plans are. They were going on another tour today, so I left them at about 9:30am.

I saw everything I wanted to see yesterday so I took the rest of the day off. I started planning what I’m going to do after Turkey. It looks like a flight to Athens on the 17th will be my next plan. I grabbed dinner in town at a restaurant called Fat Boy’s. I had a traditional Turkish meal of a beef hot pot cooked in a clay pot and then cracked open with a hammer. It was pretty cool, and tasty.

Tomorrow I head back to Istanbul and I’m looking forward to it. Such a cool city definitely deserved another couple of days.