Capadoccia Wanna Come Here?

A lot has happened since I last wrote. I met up with Erika at the airport, I moved cities a few times, and I saw some of the most beautiful sights in Turkey. Thankfully I have this blog to share it all with you because I fear that I will keep being overwhelmed with good times and I'll forget the older great moments and they'll be lost to everyone. That would be a shame. I am also thankful that I've got this sweet new netbook (Dell mini 10, Atom Z530, 720p, awesome) to write this on that has a US keyboard with an 'i' character. When I had to use Turkish keyboards and could not use that character' it would ruin my spell check so I'm sorry that it's been so bad for so long and I hope that things get more tolerable.

The last thing that I did in Ankara was to try and see the tomb of Kemal Attaturk. My guide book just said that it's 2 km NW from the town center so I thought that it was walkable. I more or less went N-NW through some pretty bad places walking along side a lot of freeways. Still' I didn't want to pay for a taxi so I figured that once I thought that I'd gone far enough I would just start asking for directions and find it in time. Well, I eventually did but it took 2.5 hours and it was closed when I arrived. At least I got to see it from a distance, and it was very large situated atop a wooded hill, and looked remarkable like the Lincoln Memorial. It felt like a really long walk back to my hotel, straight East of the monument.

The next morning I rode the bus into Konya to meet up with my sister, Erika. Erika flew out to see me for several reasons. One is that we've got a tradition of going on adventure vacations together around the globe and it had been a while since we've done one without our father. Another is that she's got a horde of airline miles saved up from her business flights. Also, I think she just likes me and wanted to help me out by bringing my laptop, fleece jacket, and by taking home the 6 pounds of gear/clothing that I really don't need to have on this trip. I'm really thankful that she's here as I just love her company. It would have been cool if her bf Rob could have made it too, but work is a bitch.

Anyways, when I made it to downtown Konya to start looking for a hotel I was met at the bus by a carpet dealer named Mehmet. He invited me in for tea and we talked about his winter home in LA that he lives at to sell carpets to Americans. Since then, I've also met another carpet dealer who has a winter home in Seattle for the same purpose. The tourists come to Turkey to buy carpets in the summer and buy them in America in the winter. Well, I ended up getting a hotel room from his close friend who owns a hotel at a 'discounted' rate, though I thought that the price seemed right on track and it was in a great location near the Mevlana Mosque so I bit. After that his friend drove me to the airport (for free!) to pick up Erika.

She had a very long flight out to see me... 16 hours in the air, and an 8 hour layover in Istanbul. She used the time in Istanbul to take a train into town, tour the Hagia Sophia Mosque (my favorite building in the world) and walk around a bit before catching the next flight out to meet me in Konya. Still, she's an expert at flying and timed her sleeping well enough that she was fresh and ready to party when she got here. We went on a short walk around town and then met up with Mehmet and his friends for dinner at the hotel. Afterwards we went out for drinks and live music at a bar with a pretty great cover band. They played Hotel California at out request.

The next day Erika and I had a lot to see in Konya. We started the morning by visiting the most famous site in Konya, the Mevlana Mosque. It's the burial place of Jelaleddin Rumi (1207-1273) who founded the order of 'Whirling Dervishes, a branch of Islam. He wrote moving poetry that's still recited today be people not of his order and his practitioners are known for the dance that they perform when praying. They wear flowing robes and as they spin they arms are extended with one hand palm up and one palm down, meant to the receive the blessings of heaven and to pass them on to the earth. The Dervishes were banned in the 30's by Attaturk who banned many old things in search of modernity but their order lived on in obscurity until it became a bit of a tourist attraction. Over 1.4 million Muslims visit the mosque every year, but most of them are Turkish.

The mosque was packed with pilgrims and a few tourists lost ion the crowd. It seemed like most of the pilgrims were women and Erika loved how tall they made her feel in comparison. The most iconic part of the mosque is the unusual turquoise tile tower that looms overhead in most of my photos of the place. Inside the mosque was the grave of Jelaleddin and of several of his followers who knew him in life. Also there were several treasures that the hordes of short women crowded around. These included old clothing, gold leaf embellished Korans, and most significantly, a small box holding the beard of Muhammad himself.

After the mosque we headed across town to see a museum dedicated to tile work. It was pretty small but had examples of several different tile decoration techniques that have all been abandoned since antiquity. We also visited the stone carving museum that was again very small. Probably the most interesting part of it was the elaborately carved entrance to the building. Both of these two museums are housed inside very old madrasas (schools) and had some great architecture.they were not super interesting but we passed the rest of the day wandering the bazaars, eating ice cream, and passing time until dinner.

We found dinner overlooking the Mevlana and tried the local specialty, minced lamb baked on a thin pizza bread. It was kind of bland but enjoyable. We heard that this night the local culture center was putting on a free Dervish show. The culture center was a huge stadium and was completely filled with tour bus groups, and locals. It was a pretty great Dervish show and had about 30 actors/practitioners involved. Some of them acted as the band and the rest lined up for a solemn ceremony before they made with the spinning. I don't want to get into how the whole ceremony proceeds, but basically the master Dervish leads the rest in prayer and then they take turns starting their spins after a long series of bowing and meditation to music. One dervish wanders in between the spinners and makes sure that they are spinning in prayer and not in fun. It was interesting, but ran on a bit long.

In the morning we caught the bus to Capadoccia that I had bought tickets for a couple days earlier. Capadoccia is a volcanic region of Turkey that's famous for its underground houses. It's a place of such beauty and character that it's become one of the most popular destinations in Turkey and has made my list of one of the most charming places on Earth. A long time ago a nearby volcano erupted (over many centuries) and deposited a tremendous amount of ash in the area that has since been eroded into stunning canyons, cliffs, and freestanding pillars of sandy ash. It's colored in alternating layers of red and white and looks a lot like the 'badlands' in British Columbia, but with far deeper canyons. The ash is very soft and easy to cut into, but hardens rapidly when exposed to air. This makes it an ideal medium to carve houses, churches, cellars, and whole communities into. The only problem is that over time your house melts away in the winter rains.

We found a hotel in one of the most popular towns in Capadoccia, Goreme, and our room is carved out of the hillside in elaborate fashion. It's got 3 beds, a very nice clean tile bathroom, a carved stone balcony facing the sunset, and is decorated with local rugs, kilims (woven throw rugs), and other crafts. After haggling down a good price we moved in and set off to explore town.

The town of Goreme is pretty small... just 2300 population and probably twice that number of tourists staying in the dozens of hotels, pensions, and hostels carved into the stones and cliffs scattered about town. There are about as many carpet, kebab, jewelry, antique, and pottery shops and they are all very happy to have you in for tea as you handle the local wares. A lot of the stuff is pretty nice, but too much money for me. A 6' silk rug is about $5000 and a wool one goes for $1000. After a day or two of coming around making offers and drinking gallons of tea, you might get that price down %25. That's a fun game if you have the time and energy for it, but that's mostly a game for the 2 week tourists who have a place in their home waiting for these new trophies.

Erika and I hiked up a steep street to get a good view of the town and it started to rain, so we ran back down into town and found a dry seat in a bar. The region is known for its wines and they have been made here as long as wine has been made. More generally Turkey is known for a strong spirit called Raki that's like Greek Ouzo (but better) and tasted like black licorice. The locals drink it by mixing it with water, one girl I met mixes it with grapefruit juice, and I think that it's pretty good. The final and most popular drink is Efes beer, which is also very good. We made friends with an older Swedish couple who are on a 2 week holiday and later on we joined them again for dinner. By the time that was all over it was pretty late and we hit the hay.

The next day was a busy one. First we took a couple buses to reach the underground city of Kaymakli. The region has several hundred underground cities though only a few of them are open to the public since they all look the same anyways. The cities were mostly built by early Christians around the year 500 and were intended as a defensive measure. Persian warriors would come through and the Christians would retreat to the cities along with enough supplies to last for up to a year at a time. The city that we visited held 3000 people but some of them held over 10000. We joined up for a guided tour with several other people because you really need narration to make a series of underground tunnels seem like history.

The cities were built in sections consisting of many levels, and easy section had a main stone pillar that ran from top to bottom that nobody would cut through. The overall design resembled an inverted tree where rooms would branch off from this central column and series of ventilation tubes. Most of the rooms were about 6 feet tall, and 10 by 20 feet in size, though they were rather chaotically placed and many of them connected with neighboring rooms by at least 3 points. Closer to the surface, the stables, toilets, and communal cooking areas were located. Smoke would go towards the surface but the porous volcanic rock would absorb most of it and mask where the city was located. Further down many of the rooms were used for crushing and fermenting grapes into wine in times of peace and war. I guess that if I was stuck underground, drink would be a priority for me too.

Doors to the surface were cleverly hidden and sealed off with rolling stone doors. Traps were also made for would be intruders, but no underground city was ever conquered because it would be a deathtrap for anyone who attempted because ambush would be easy in the messy maze. After the tour, Erika and I bargained for some souvenirs from the vender's outside and went back to town.

We had a rough map of the area, and on our way to find the Goreme Open Air Museum we got to scramble over some hills and into the Love Valley. The way in was treacherous. We were atop a hill overlooking the valley on one side and the town on the other, but most of the hills in the area have sections of smooth white stone often ending in a cliff before reaching the valley floor. This white stone looks smooth and firm like the rounded bounders of Joshua Tree but it's very soft and slippery like packed sand. Only some of it is actually firm enough to carve a house out of, and you can usually tell by the color. We found a section that allowed us to slide down on our butts but there was no climbing back up.

The Love Valley is one of many romantically named sections of the Capadoccia area, but my guess is that it was named as such because of the many many phallic shaped stone columns that had formed naturally. Frankly, it's like walking through a forest of 80' cocks. A few of them had some carvings in them but most were left unspoiled. Farmers grew grape vines, apples, apricots, and walnuts in the valley floor. We wandered around for a while enjoying the flowers and taking suggesting photos as seems appropriate in such a place.

Later on we reached the Open Air Museum. It wasn't too hard to find, we simply needed to follow the unbroken chain of coach buses winding down the narrow country road to the parking lot. There were Germans, Australians, English, French, Italian, and Japanese groups all crowding anything that might be worth seeing. The main attraction of the place, besides the lovely valley scenery, were the old carved churches. Like I mentioned earlier in the underground cities section, this area was a hotbed of early Christianity and some famous saints lived here like St George and some others. He's the guy always depicted slaying a dragon, which represents paganism.

Most of the churches were of a very old style and were carved into the mountainside and then had red lines painted on the walls and arches in simple geometric patterns. They were very crude and looked like some elementary school notebook doodles. The standard size for one of these churches was about 20 feet by 15 feet and maybe 10 feet tall. The rooms were in a crucifix layout and had domed ceilings. Every one of them had grates covering the floors because every possible spot had a grave cut into the floor. These mostly belonged to the donors that paid for the construction though they are all empty now. We saw at least a dozen like this.

A few of them were much more elaborate. All of the caves here were carved by Byzantine Christians around the year 1000 AD, but some of them were painted over later, maybe around the 12th or 13th century. One of the painted churches, the Apple Church, you could see chipped paint showing the old red and white work of an earlier time, but over that was put a rich color tapestry depicting all the biblical figures and famous scenes. None of them seemed to include monarchy because this was an intensely religious area and largely free from the overwhelming money that's needed to make a normal church where you must pay an army of stonemasons and porters.

Beside the churches there were other simpler homes that showed signs of cooking from the soot on the ceiling, and had long tables with benches carved into the ground. The other kind of rooms that was carved into the hillsides are pigeon homes. They look like a small room with a grid of smaller holes on the walls that pigeons could roost in. Traditionally they were constructed so that the owners could collect the droppings for fertilizing the crops. A man without a pigeon home could scarcely hope to woo a bride. Now they are mostly in disrepair from the gradual erosion of the hills and new ones are not being carved. Also, we haven't seen very many pigeons living in the ones that are still there anyways.

The next morning we had a crazy plan in mind. Well maybe not so crazy, I just wanted to rent a scooter and ride around Capadoccia like Erika and I did on the Greek island of Samos a few years back. It's great to see the land cruise by close enough that you can smell the fig trees and hear the dogs. Also, we get to stop at every scenic vista at will and visit all the places too obscure for a bus to take us. We haggled at a bunch of different shops and ended up with a 125cc at $25 for the day.

The first place we went was called Cavusin and like pretty much everything around here, it's a small town built around a large rock outcropping that's been carved into a castle and series of homes. There was an amazing view from the top and the region looks a lot like the grand canyon in some parts with the red and white striped cliffs. After that we drove on to another small village but it wasn't so interesting so we found a canyon to hike instead.

The canyon is called Zuni Valley and it connects back to Goreme if you hike the full 8km but we just went about 2km down it looking for a nice place to break out our lunch. We brought tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, bread, and my pocket knife. The canyon was narrow, with smooth white cliffs and an occasional old carved pigeon house high up. A small stream kept the area very green with birch and sycamore trees. Because people used to live here long ago, the valley was also thick with old apple, cherry, walnut, and grape vines. The birds were out in force, there was plenty of shade, and it turned out to be a very pleasant little hike. Also, the stream carved out half a dozen arches in the cliff that the trail passed under. On the way back we found a large tortoise near the trail.

The next stop was the town of Uchisar, pretty much the same thing as Goreme, but the buildings were a little more tasteful, there were more cars, and many art galleries and tasting rooms. The guide book described it as chic and I can agree with that. We also went to the old Greek town of Mustafapasha. It's mostly just a quite scenic little place where all the buildings are made of yellow blocks of stone and many of the trimmings are painted in a bright blue against the stone. Very pretty, but not overly exciting so we went home and had some beers and dinner.

Got up early the next morning to see the hot air balloons. We're too cheap to pay $250 each to fly for an hour at the crack of dawn, so we set out alarm for 6:30 and raced up to the top of a hill to take some photos. We were not the only cheap tourists with this idea. It was a classic scene, and pretty similar to the cover of my guide book.

Finally it was time to leave the area and get on with our tour of the coast, so we took a bus to the town of Silifke. It was a seriously long series of bus rides... maybe 8 hours. We found a cheap hotel and set off to hike up to the kale overlooking the town. There were a few old Roman ruins dating back 2000 years, just a pile of columns that used to be a temple and an old cistern. The hike to the top was pretty brutal in the heat and jeans, but we had ice cream along the way that raised our spirits. At the top of the castle we loafed about a long time waiting for sunset and savoring the scant breeze. I was hoping that the coast would be cool, but we were a few miles inland and it's just hot and humid.

On the hike back down the hill and towards the hotel we stopped an talked with a group of 8 guys that had their cars parked along the edge of the road, overlooking town, and drinking a case of beer. They gave us some too, and told us a little about their town. Supposedly 2000 years ago this was a huge city and had over 2 million people living here. They also said that up in the mountains overlooking town, there are some roman ruins that are worth taking a day trip to but we don't have time unfortunately. After the beers were gone we went back and rested up for the next day's shorter bus ride to the beach town of Anamur.