The next morning we awoke to an absolutely freezing room and to top it off a nice cold shower as well. We went and sat outside in the sun for breakfast and while warming up we decided to change hotels to something a little warmer and without a cave. We wandered around for a bit that morning looking for one and decided on the Flintstones Hotel, and man was that a gem. We quickly moved over to that hotel and got some advice for checking out the surrounding area of Cappadocıa and then headed off.
Cappadocıa is famous for its landscape and for the fact that people used to live ın hundreds of caves that surround the area. The country side around Cappadocıa is very similar to Drumheller as there are sandstone valleys throughout the area and even a few hoo-doo shaped rocks (although they call them fairy chimneys). While wandering through the sandstone valleys it is extremely common to see tons of caves in the valley walls where people used to live back in the 9th through 13th centuries (and to a lesser extent even before and after that range). So to get an understanding of the area our first stop was the open air museum in Göreme which was more of a park containing several cave churches and houses. The museum was fairly interesting and most of the cave churches were beautiful with very well preserved frescoes in most of them. However the only downside was that the museum didn`t provide any information about the people that lived in the area and used caves as their homes. It just described the caves that we saw so we didn't learn very much. After lunch we decided to go for a hike through the country side to see more caves that people lived in and for the spectacular landscape. We spent the afternoon walking through the red valley and the rose valley, both of which were extraordinary and contained hundreds of "holes" as my mom calls them (caves). After spending the afternoon hiking through the country side and exploring lots of caves we returned to Göreme to enjoy my birthday dinner at the Flintstones Hotel. The dinner was pretty average but the company was great and the staff even surprised us with a birthday cake! All in all it was a pretty good way to spend my 23rd birthday.
The next morning we woke up and decided to spend another day hiking around the country side. We started the day off by heading up the Pigeon valley towards Uçhisar. The pigeon valley wasn't as spectacular as the red or rose valleys we thought but the walk was still enjoyable. Once in Uçhisar we wandered through the town a while and ended up climbing Uçhisar castle which provided some great views of the surrounding landscape but aside from that it wasn't anything special. After Uçhisar we proceeded to walk through Love valley (but we also heard it was called Long valley and White valley so not really sure the real name) back past Göreme and towards Çavusin. Walking through this valley was extremely beautiful and probably the best walk that we did while ın Cappadocıa. Although the valley didn't contain very many caves, the rock formations and scenery were the best we had seen. When we arrived in Çavusin we proceeded to sit down and enjoy an expensive class of orange juice while playing the national game here, backgammon. After relaxing for some time we found out we had to hurry to catch the last dolmus (local bus) back to Göreme and didn't have any time to explore the town.
Our third day in Göreme we decided to join a tour to visit a few of the sights located a ways out from the city and hard to see otherwise. The tour started off with a viewpoint over the pigeon valley looking back at Göreme, something we had already seen so we weren't too excited by that. Afterwards though we stopped at the largest underground city in the area, Derinkuyu, and got to explore it for about an hour. The underground city was really amazing to see how big it was, it seemed to extend for ever (apparently it went 7 stories underground), and how much detail had gone into it. There were several points where they could lock themselves in by pushing a giant stone wheel over a passage and it seemed that each room served a specific purpose. Truly amazing. After the underground city we continued on to Ihlara valley which is more like a canyon than a valley and slightly different then the valleys near Göreme; however we thought that the valleys near Göreme were much better. After a decent lunch in Ihlara valley we proceeded to visit a cave monastery which provided some pretty good views but wasn't anything that we hadn't seen before around Göreme. Finally on the tour we stopped at one more view point and visited an onyx factory (just a stop to try and make us buy jewelry) before returning back to Göreme.
Our final day in Cappadocıa we spent the morning just relaxing around town and getting a few chores done, like updating our blogs and carpet shopping for mom. In the afternoon we arranged to get driven to the nearby town of Avanos to experience our first Turkish Bath. We had arranged it through our hotel and asked for it not to be one just for tourists but we were let down. The bath was fairly nice but we felt kinda rushed and compared to other peoples stories it didn't sound nearly as authentic. The bath consisted of first entering a steam room to heat up for a few minutes before jumping into a cold pool for a few seconds and then returning to the steam room. After warming up again we entered a different room where we got to lay on slabs of marble that were being heated up by more steam. After enjoying the warm marble for a few minutes we got the cleansing part of the bath my being scraped by someone with a fairly rough pad before getting washed with soap and a short massage. To finish off the bath we lay on the hot marble slabs again before drying off and returning to the outside world.
That was about all that we did in Cappadocıa and the next day we proceeded to head off towards Konya where we stopped for a few hours before continuing on to Antalya but more about that next time. More pictures will follow soon but it's taking too long here so you'll have to wait a little while for them.
Our cave room in the first hotel we stayed in.
Flowers in front of some caves in the open air museum ın Göreme.
Standing in front of some frescoes in one of the churches in the open air museum.
Mom gazing up at some more frescoes in another church in the open air museum.
Mom enjoying my birthday picnic lunch on our walk through the red valley.
Mom standing next to one of the huge stone wheels that they used to cover up entrance ways into the underground city.
A view of a school in the underground city.
Mom and I standing at a lookout point over the Ihlara valley.
A view of the rock monastery that we stopped into on our way back to Göreme from the Ihlara valley.
A view overlooking the Pigeon valley with an extinct volcano in the background. Notice all the small covered up caves in the valley walls where originally people lived and in later times they were converted into Pigeon houses to collect their droppings to use as fertiliser.
The interior of the beautiful (although touristy) Turkish bath that we visited in Avanos. This is the room where we lay on the warm marble slabs (in the center) and were srubbed, cleaned, and massaged off to the side.
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