Talkin' Turkey

Update #2: Cappadocia

March 24-26 2006

Shiny Turkish bus (photo swiped from the 'net).

As it turns out, in a land where gas is seven bucks a gallon and the terrain is too mountainous to lay down a lot of train track, the mainstay of Turkish transportation is the intercity bus. By the thousands they teem in every city center, enormous, gleaming, sprouting mirrors like giant bug antennae, trundling up & down every road at all hours. In fact, most long intercity trips — such as our 11-hour ride from Istanbul to the town of Göreme in the heart of Cappadocia — are overnight. Our modern coach was equipped with TV screens showing some lame Turkish movie, and a flight attendant ... but not, unfortunately, leg room. So while you save on accommodation, it's not exactly restful. Rest stops do occur, tho' we soon learned that in Turkey, you pay to pee; public WCs are attended, charging around 20-40 cents. One traveler I met commented that your bottle of water costs more going than coming.

One Turkish travel tradition is rose water: After rest stops, or when entering the destination city, the attendant goes down the aisle of the bus with a plastic bottle; you hold out your cupped hands and she squirts a dash of a rosy-smelling alcohol & water concoction into them. Then you rub vigorously. Some less-reputable companies were rumored to use a cheap ethanol-based mixture, but Mark & I came through with our vision intact (tho' Mark got a little woozy once after snorting his hands).

Every Turkish movie ever made, BTW, has the same plot: Mother/husband/brother, trying desperately to save their son/wife/baby sister, who is suffering from a bad fall/terrible disease/head lice, crosses untold distance with pathetic victim on their back/in a wagon/on the dog, begging for help from a stern hospital administrator/unsympathetic policeman/mean politician until the day is saved by a handsome doctor/handsome doctor/handsome doctor.

Göreme

Downtown Göreme.

The Shoestring Pension.

At eight in the morning, our bus finally rolled into the village of Göreme ("GOO-re-meh"), the unofficial backpacker's capital of Cappadocia ("ka-pa-DOE-kee-ya"), and it didn't take long to see that we were in a wild place. Cappadocia is a sprawling region of several hundred square miles of unusual rock formations. Most of the soft tufa eroded away eons ago except in places where hard rock caps protected the underlying softer rock. The result is a landscape peppered with unusual rock spires, chimneys, hills and cliffs. Turkey's answer to Bryce Canyon. And although this in itself would be enough to make the place interesting, it gets better: Sometime way back when ... well, estimates vary greatly, but perhaps as far back as the 4th century A.D. people in the area began to discover that if you could hollow out a space in the soft rock, it might make a nice place to live. Cave cities began springing up. Many of the residents were Christians fleeing persecution who found that isolated & malleable canyons made good places not only to live, but to establish churches & monastaries. And these ancient dwellings are still there to see — and explore, as most are unfenced.

Our cave room.

Fresh off the bus, we checked into the Shoestring Pension; our room was in fact a cave — although with amenities that more traditional caves lack, such as electricity and running water (left). Also, now that we were out of the most touristy part of Istanbul we were no longer subject to the "Sultanahment Surcharge" — and thus paid only about $10 apiece for our beds.

BTW it was early for a visit to Göreme — Turkey's tourist season really kicks off around April/May — which was just fine, not only because of the hoards of backpackers who swarm there in the summer, but the temperatures that apparently flirt with 100°F ...

Göreme suburb.

After taking care of a little business (breakfast, laundry), we rented a pair of what might be the world's crappiest mountain bikes and began our exploration. The guy at the bike shop gave us a hand-drawn map of a suggested route ... but we only made it about a mile out of town before we diverted onto a dirt road leading past a horse farm to our first close encounter with Cappadocian cave dwellings (right).

Note the tiny squares cut into the walls for light & ventilation (don't know how old the brickwork is).


There were plenty of doorways well above ground level; it was not always clear how one reached these doors, tho' in some places there were signs of staircases or ladders carved right into the rock.

Mark pays a call.

Dwelling interior. Note all the nooks & crannies for storage ... and sleeping. But not all of these caves were personal residences ...

... Some were churches! Everything you see was hand carved, perhaps a thousand years ago or more. Near the bottom of the photo, you can see soot in what we assume was some sort of shrine or altar. Note the red pictographs & ornamentation, you'll see more of that soon.

One complaint we had about Göreme: Very little of our new favorite staple food, the kebab sandwich. But we did discover an alternative to the traditional Turkish breakfast (bread, jam, honey, a boiled egg coffee, and a mound of olives): Menemen (scrambled eggs with garlic & tomato). Yummy!

Kaymakli Underground City

Kaymakli.

Day 2 in Cappadocia was cold & rainy, so we figured it was a good day for a visit to one of the region's most famous indoor attractions. Right, Mark explores the top of an unusual rocky hillside in the village of Kaymakli, but the real action is beneath! Ancient residents of Kaymakli lived normal lives above ground most of the time ... but to escape marauders & crusaders, they built an amazing hidden underground city, eight levels deep, a city capable of housing 1000 people for up to six months! Of course, the Turkish Tourism board has since discovered the cities, and the idea of charging 10 Turkish Lira (about eight bucks) for tourists to visit.

Kaymakli is only one of over 30 known underground cities!

You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.

The large donut-shaped rock Mark is guarding is in fact a door, one of dozens throughout; wrestled into place, they were presumably pretty effective in keeping out invaders.


Two of the most important spots in the underground city are the altar ... and the winery.

Ventilation shaft (the bottom of which we could not see).


Navigating the smaller passageways was not always easy (but note the convenient handhold). And how smart were we that we brought our headlamps??

Don't know if this was a regular source of water, but some cooler rooms had plenty of moisture.

Turkish Nights

"Turkish Nights" is a generic term referring to tourist-oriented package evenings that include music, dancing, a whirling dervish, belly dancing, and food & wine. Perhaps not the best immersion into Turkish culture as most of our fellow patrons were tour groups, but at least the package our pension owner signed us up for that night was cheaper than its equivalent in Istanbul. Oh, and there was audience participation too, but ... those pictures got, uh, lost in the mail.

Open-Air Museum

The grounds of the Göreme Open-Air Museum.

Our third day in Cappadocia was going to end with another overnight bus ride, so we checked out of the pension (which was slightly tense, as the laundry we submitted two days before had not appeared). We had contemplated staying in Göreme for the eclipse, as it was within the band of totality — and I thought it would be cool to photograph the eclipsed sun through some high chimney window — but the weather had been marginal & forecasts gave the odds of seeing the eclipse there as poorer (43%) than the coast (60%), so we decided to stick with plan A & asked the pension owner to look into bus tickets for us. Then it was off to see Göreme's coolest attraction.

At first glance, the open-air museum (right) looks much like the rest of the terrain in the region; rock spires with doors and windows, etc. But the community was a monastery, containing no fewer than six churches, with some of the most extraordinary artwork within! Keep in mind that all of the following pictures were taken inside unsealed (open-air) caves.

Dining hall - one of about a dozen on the grounds! Yes, the table is solid rock; the groove was excavated to make a seating area. Each dining hall had an adjacent kitchen, with lots of storage nooks & smoke-blackened ceilings.

Note the beautiful (but damaged) rendering of the Last Supper.

Here's the entrance to one of the churches. Remember the red icons & ornamentation from the caves we explored the first day? These churches were similarly decorated when they were founded around the 7^th century. Then, sometime around the pre-Renaissance period the residents decided they needed an upgrade, so simple red lines were plastered over and replaced by ...


... Extraordinary frescos! Yes, these are from the ceiling of the same church! Sadly, many of the frescos have been badly damaged; in some places, it appears that some deranged person went around scratching out the eyes.

Here's a fresco from another church. See where the plaster has fallen away, revealing the original art.

The "Dark" church contains the best-preserved art ...


Frescos from the "Dark" church.

And speaking of museums ...


... what trip to Göreme would be complete without a stop at the UFO museum?

	Last look
	Our last few hours in Cappadocia were spent on rented ATVs, looking for the last bits of scenery we'd missed. Oh, and the sun finally came out.

One last look at Göreme from the off-road trail.

Our tour guide leads us toward ...

... the "ghost" city of Chavusin.

Nice view of Chavusin from the hill above.

As our two-hour off-road trek was drawing to a close, and I was thinking about how much to tip our tour guide, he led us to our final stop: His Uncle's tiny hillside bar where we were badly overcharged for drinks (and a look at yet another cave church). So darn the luck, I had to spend his tip on the tab. Hope you enjoyed your commission, pal.

On the bus to Antalya that night we met some hippie folks who were heading to a "trance" festival at the village of Side (ground zero for the eclipse). Not being sure what a trance festival is — although the prospect of cavorting with ten thousand naked hippies seemed like it might be worth investigating — we decided to press on to Olympos.

Bonus Pictures

"Meow, yes? Come, I sell you carpet cheap — made from my own fur!"

Check it out — 3-D Cappadocia!! Try to diverge your eyes as if trying to view one of those magic-eye pictures. Placing a card between the images may help.