Not in Istanbul: Cappadocia

I guess it has been 2 months since I updated this thing and probably, the only reason I have time to do so is that I'm too sick to leave the house. It has been a very busy couple months: Roshan's parents arrived in the beginning of November; my parents arrived in the end of December; and various Scandanavians who used to work for Nancy and their significant others began arriving mid December. Of course, they were all very welcome here and I've had a lot of fun in the last couple months. Unfortunately, I am completely exausted and have managed to get sick as the last of the visitors left this week.

Naturally, the trip to Cappadocia could have been what did me in. Mom, Dad and I booked a two day tour for the three of us. My preference would have been to just go there with my copy of Lonely Planet and follow that. Our plane was supposed to leave at 8:40 AM. I got to the airport after Mom and Dad. They had already checked in. As I showed the ticket agent my ticket, she informed me that I couldn't check in. "But my parents have already checked in!" I complained. "The plane has just been delayed," she said. "Come back in an hour." I went to tell my parents the news just as "Kaiseri flight delayed 1 hour" flashed on the "departures" screen. We headed to the airport restaurant to kill time by consuming over priced foods and beverages. At the end of an hour I returned to the ticket counter and was told there was still no news. "It could be the weather," the ticket agent said. A few minutes later, "Kaiseri flight delayed 2 hours" flashed on the "departures" screen. I went back to restaurant and tried to study Turkish... something I haven't been doing nearly enough of. An hour later I returned to the check-in counter. Still no news. I went back to the restaurant. The "departures" screen now read "Kaiseri flight delayed 2.5 hours". They'd been fairly good about announcing things in both Turkish and English. However, they failed to announce that passengers on the Kaiseri flight could now proceed to check in in English. I heard the magic flight numbers and went running to the check-in counter where boarding passes were being doled out. The plane finally left 3 hours after the scheduled departure time. This series of delays and the knowledge that the Kaiseri airport had actually been closed a couple days before due to snow, got us a little worried about how we would manage to get back to Istanbul in time for my parents to catch their flight back to the States, which was early in the morning after we were supposed to get back.

Kaiseri, and the rest of Cappadocia was enveloped in a snowy fog when we arrived. Definitely, it was not the best weather for site seeing. We were met at the airport by a driver and a guide from the tour agency. They told us it was an hour and a half drive to Ürgüp where we would be staying. The heat was blasting and it very quickly went from being slightly comfortable to being downright difficult to breathe. I opened my window. Later, I noticed the driver opened his window too. Maybe the heater just had 2 settings, "off" and "broil". We finally got to Ürgüp and our 4 star hotel. It was very empty. Empty hotels in small snowed in towns make me think of horror movies. The hotels heating system was similar to the car's except "off" wasn't an option. It was either "roast" or "broil".

Since we'd already lost 3 hours of our free day, we quickly left the hotel and set out to explore Ürgüp and find lunch. Ürgüp is a nice little town. The old town is built into the sides of a large hill. When the town people began to worry about errosion, they moved out of their caves and built unexotic houses around the hill. I suppose I should write a little about what makes Cappadocia such a cool place. To put it simply, it looks like something out of a Doctor Seuss book. The landscape is similar, as far as I could tell since it was covered with snow, to Southern Utah. There are red stone formations like those at Arches National Park and stone towers similar to Bryce. What really sets it apart though is how the people who lived in Cappadocia chose to use the stone formations. They dug their houses into them. Some of the houses were six stories carved into a stone cone. There are fortresses that fill entire hills. There are also monastaries and churches complete with frescos inside. Today the inhabitants dig cave hotels, bars, houses and souvenir shops. Apparently, the hillsides weren't the only places the inhabitants of Cappadocia chose to live in. There are also over 100 underground cities. We visited one that was 8 levels. It included a church, living quarters, wells, wineries, ventilation shafts, stables and defense mechanisms. It was discovered by a local when his chicken fell into it.

Ürgüp was as peaceful as a Christmas card as we walked through its streets. The snow draped itself over the points of the cave houses like icing. Women dressed in traditional outfits of baggy "harem" pants and large shawls walked around accompanied by children who slid in the snow. We had lunch at the "Shomine" restaurant, a place that we returned to the next evening as a welcome substitute for our "free" hotel meal. The "Chimney", had a large fireplace in the middle, good food and played tasteful Turkish classical music. After lunch we took a quick walk around the town since it would be our last chance to see anything in Ürgüp. (The next 2 days were filled with touring until dusk.)

The evening was spent being roasted alive in the hotel and eating a rather unsatisfactory hotel restaurant meal. I reclined in front of the TV trying to comprehend the Turkish news reports. There was a big story about how everyone everywhere was getting the flu. Eventually, I switched to the BBC and watched a program on the dissasterous effects of global warming.

We got up in time to eat breakfast before the tour was supposed to start. Unfortunately, the restaurant crew hadn't, in spite of the sign that stated breakfast started at 7. (Just in case you ever visit Ürgüp, don't stay at the Almira Hotel!). We finally got our breakfast and met our driver, Yüksel and our guide, Ali. They took us to our first stop, Pigeon Valley. It was very snow covered but the pigeons were there. The former residents of the area had carved pigeon houses into the cliff sides with signs in Arabic welcoming the pigeons. Ali told us the pigeon is sacred to Moslems because when Mohamad was fleeing someone hostile he hid in a cave with a bunch of pigeons around it. The pigeons didn't startle and just sat calmly. The pursuers saw the calm pigeons and decided no one was there and went away. Across from the pigeon valley look out point was an Onyx factory. This was "get-the-tourists-to-buy-something" stop number one. They gave us a quick demo of how to make an onyx egg (presented to me as a souvenir....what a waste of a limited resource), how to tell if meerschaum is real (during the demo, however, since the demonstrator couldn't find the "fake meerschaum" samples he used a "real" meerschaum sample in place of the fake one to demonstrate how the fake one sunk and the real floated.... I thought this was a bit suspicious.), and how to tell real Turkish turquoise (break it open... like any shop would let you do that!). Then we were welcomed into the display room and given tea. Mom was polite enough to be interested. I personally, wanted to get back to seeing cool rock formations.

There is a tourism high school and college in Cappadocia. This was apparent in the manners of the people at the crafts workshops. They let us leave without buying anything and without forcing us to be rude and yell at them. In Istanbul, and other places, it can be quite an effort to extract oneself from the clutches of the overzealous carpet/ souvenir dealer.

Next we headed for an underground city. Although the concept is really amazing, it isn't the most visually exciting place in the world. It was a lot of low passages, narrow stairs, dug out caverns for storage and living spaces. I wonder if the inhabitants suffered from vitamin D deficiency. It is impressive to think that people lived there. I've always felt that people have a sort of natural claustrophobia that would make underground cave living an absolute last resort.

We had lunch in Selime, a pretty little town in a river valley. Once there was a monastary and town housed by the conic rock formations. Now the people live a little further down the hill. We made a stop at an old Caravansaray and were informed that the road we were driving down was actually the Silk Road. Later, we hit another factory (ceramics this time... I bought a cheap clay pot (produced elsewhere) to replace the one that Roshan had bought and which had broken the first time he used it. When I explained that I wanted to use it for hot wine, it upset Ali and the ceramics salesman. Cappadocia is apparently known for its wine. I suppose it was like going to someone in Napa Valley and mentioning heating up their precious Napa Valley wine and throwing bunches of spices in. Of course, the bottle of Cappadocia wine I bought was about 3 dollars. Mom fell in love with a beautiful plate painted with the ceramic family's special pattern. At the end of the tour, the driver took us to his cave bar in his cave hotel. He enthusiastically described all the work he'd put into it, all the interesting tourists he'd met and all the injuries tourists had suffered while hiking in Pigeon Valley.

The next day was full of more site seeing. We started the morning off by climbing up the outside of the Ortahisar fortress. The top gave us a view of the town and of Göreme in the distance. We looked at another village built into the rocks and then headed to Göreme. Göreme is the home of a huge open air museum. The area in the hills once was a monastary. There are bunches of churches with beautiful, but terribly defaced and grafitti covered, frescos. We had lunch in Göreme and then headed to the valley of the Fairy Chimneys. The Fairy Chimneys are tall and extremely phallic rock structures. They were created by the uneven erosion of rock (the harder stuff was on top). They stand in rows like a small army. Some of them have even had house carved into them. After that we drove through "animal valley" which was filled with rock formations which resembled animals. The most notable one was the camel. By this time the sky was actually beginning to clear a tiny bit and it looked like there was no need to worry about flight cancelation. We made a stop at a winery (for my destined-to-become-hot-spiced wine) and made our last stop... the dreaded carpet factory. Ali assured us it was actually a school. Mom and Dad had been to a similar school on their tour in Pamukkale. Apparently it had been quite difficult to escape from the show room. "I'm not going into the showroom," Mom said firmly. Dad seemed none to thrilled either. The school room was a small room with looms all along the walls. Women sat on low seats (that looked a bit like a rolled up carpet) and made carpets. We were told how to make the proper knot. My conclusion is the art of carpet making isn't so much about skill but rather the ability to do the same boring action over and over again. I'm not sure what they could have taught in carpet making school. We left without going into the showroom, to the dissapointment of our guide. "I don't want to buy a carpet. Why should I waste their time?" Mom explained. That was the last stop before the airport. We got back to Istanbul on schedule and I got home with enough strength to fall into bed.