Cappadocia

From Istanbul we drove south-east towards our stop for the night in Beypazari.

We passed the Marmara Sea where many boats were waiting for approval to enter the Dead Sea, an area where we saw multi-coloured mountains

and we even drove on a musical road – I kid you not, the road plays Mozart’s Turkish Rondo when you drive on it at the speed limit!

Arriving in Baypazari we checked in to our hotel, then the group headed out to the living museum.

The living museum was in a house built during the time of the Ottoman Empire. In the courtyard was the family oven, with the preparation done in a nearby room. The original occupants were a wealthy family that fed the poor. This was done via a serving wheel, the person knocked 3 times, the wheel turned and there was the food. At no time did the server or the person seeking food see each other.
The ground floor shows traditional crafts and also a traditional puppet show. The middle floor was the living quarters, when of marriage age daughters would leave and move in to the family home of her new husband.
The top floor was set aside as a weaving area, with local products for sale.
The museum has won tourism awards and the lady who started it all has also won awards from the Turkish government.

We left our accommodation after breakfast and headed east. Our destination was the region of Capadocia. We have fingers crossed for good weather as we’re hoping to get up in a hot-air balloon tomorrow morning. Capadocia is famous for hot-air ballooning, over 100 take to the skies each morning for sunrise.

Arriving in a town for lunch, the van turned the corner on the road and WOW. We were looking over a valley of rock towers and cliffs dotted with the windows and doors of the houses that were once lived in.

Our lunch was a local specialty, pot cooked meat that requires you to take a hammer to the pot to open it up. The meat was delicious.

After lunch we drove to our cave hotel in nearby Ürgüp. We’re here for three nights so will get a good look around the area.

After enjoying a nice hot bath we met up with the rest of the group for a walk to the bazaar and dinner.

Our day started very early as we were off for a sunrise hot-air balloon ride. Cappadocia is famous around the world for this and it was easy to see why.

Over 100 hot-air balloons take to the skies each morning, reaching heights of over 1,000m (3000ft) and dropping to about 200ft to get closer to the rock formations.

We saw an amazing sunrise above the rocky landscape and could see for miles.

There were also many people watching the balloons from viewpoints, others watching whilst riding horses or ATVs and close to a dozen couples having wedding photos taken with balloons as the backdrop.

This is definitely right at the top of our memorable experiences this year.

After a rest (more like a 3 hour sleep!) we headed out to lunch hosted by a local lady Nourie in her cave house. Intrepid has many tours where you visit a locals home for a traditional meal, it’s part of Intrepid’s committment to responsible tourism. We were served a pasta and lentil soup, followed by roasted vegetables with yoghurt, pasta, a capsicum stuffed with rice and meat and finishing with a deliciously moist poppy seed sponge. Nourie told us about her family, the traditions of a Turkish family and her life. (We also looked at her daughters’ wedding photos to see the end result of the photos we saw taken this morning. They were stunning photos.) It was a wonderful two hours.

Özkonak underground city was next on our agenda. It is an underground city, built perhaps during the Byzantine period, but could be older. The cities were built to provide a safe haven for the local population during times of conflict.
There are many of these cities (they think about 200) and the first was discovered in 1963.

One of the cities has 18 levels underground! Communities and their animals lived in these until it was safe to return to the surface, sometimes for months. They had sanitation, lighting provided by linseed oil lamps and ventilation through shafts to the surface.

There were small holes for communicating and passing messages between floors. They even had wineries!

We had some fun squeezing through the low, winding tunnels and back out again and enjoyed the fact it was only 20° in there!
Our final stop for the day, once it was a bit cooler (33°) at 1730 was the Göreme Open Air Museum.

This allowed us to get up close and inside some of the many caves we see from the roads. These caves were mostly churches that belonged to a monastic settlement of some kind.

They have a range of decoration types, some incredibly colourful, detailed and well preserved,

others somewhat more primitive.

We got dropped off in town on the way back and found a pide restaurant for dinner then walked back to our hotel for a cold shower.

A bit of a lie in this morning, the alarm was set for 4:45am instead of 4:10am.
We were going to be watching the balloons this morning, rather than riding in them. There were CROWDS of people doing the same thing; we didn’t see that yesterday where we boarded our balloon.

The experience, although less exciting than yesterday, was still spectacular and beautiful.

Watching over 100 balloons take-off and float above/below/abeam our heads was very cool and something we won’t get to see again. We were really glad we made the effort.

After a nap and breakfast we headed to Ortahisar. We were here to taste Turkish coffee, specifically some made from pistachio or hazelnuts and an Salep, an orchid milk tea. The coffee shop was on a hill overlooking the town of Ortahisar with an impressive rock castle in the middle.

The coffees were a bit different. Initially the pistachio one tasted a bit like gravy, whilst the hazelnut one tasted like steak! They both improved with additional sips. The Salep was like a bedtime milky drink, tasting a bit like a Chai Latte, and was the tastiest.

That done, we jumped into our transport for a quick trip to our next location, a carpet weaving collective. We’ve seen lots of fabric and carpet weaving on our travels and it never ceases to amaze us with the skill required to produce the end result.

The rug that Kevin really liked still has 5 months of work to do on it. We then went to the display room so they could.show us different types of carpets (aka the hard sell). Drinks were offered, Kevin opted for wine and the group followed his lead.
Oops we spent some money.

Lunch was in a restaurant behind a petrol station. As Australians we’d never plan to eat a meal at a service station, but here in Turkey, the food and service are excellent. This particular restaurant was started by the family next to their petrol station and serving traditional foods, they employ 28 women in the kitchen now and are known for their ‘Manti’, almost a ravioli, served with yoghurt. It was delicious.

We then went to a local pottery place Ömürlü, a family business of 219yrs. Some of the pieces were so intricate in their design. The coolest was one where you play some music on your phone, set it in the end, and it amplifies the sound, it looked like a ceramic gramophone speaker. As beautiful as the items were, we did not spend money there.