Cappadocia! Balloons!

We have arrived in Istanbul, for the last part of our trip where just the two of us are traveling. Alison and I traveled around Europe when we were undergrads and we took our honeymoon, eleven years ago, in Vienna and London. I thought that we would continue going back to Europe and traveling around, the two of us. But it just didn't happen. For years now, we've talked about spending the summer in Germany, or taking some trip -- and now it is finally happening. Touring around Europe for a month is a kind of crazy-long -- but it is great to be traveling again. I love it. And Cappadocia was the most incredible part of the whole thing.


[Local cave dwellings in Ugrup, where we stayed. Most of them are abandoned. Some are being turned into hotels or fancy residences.]

The last couple of days in Cappadocia were great. The first day we took what was supposed to be an hour-long hike through a valley -- and ended up being more than four hours, after I took a wrong turn. It was also raining, which meant it was cooler but the colors weren't as vibrant. So that was a bit unfortunate, but it was a beautiful hike. We passed through hundreds and hundreds of old pigeon coves, which the locals kept for fertilizer, and also as messengers. We also passed a few abandoned cave homes and went to a few cave churches.
[Pigeon coves]



About three hours in, we had some idea where we were but weren't entirely confident. We came upon a cafe, with a very nice owner. We hadn't had any lunch and he offered to sell us some of his own. At the end of it all, he wanted to charge me $1.20 for the lunch that filled Alison and me.

[Cafe]

In a way, the landscape can look like the American Southwest, but there is much more agriculture here: we passed many functioning vineyards and fields, as well as some abandoned ones.



Our second hotel room really was spectacular -- the honeymoon suite. Whole rooms carved right into the hill, with beautiful colorbands in the rock. Really, just a magical experience. Unfortunately, not many of the pictures turned out.



The second morning we woke up at 4 AM to take our balloon ride: the other major splurge for our anniversary. It was incredible. When we first took off, there was mist in the valleys -- beautiful, and evidently quite rare. It was somewhat cloudy for the trip, which meant the stone didn't stand out as well, but it meant we could go above the skyline and sometimes it provided a beautiful, beautiful backdrop.

[Rock hewn castle of Uchisar in the distance.]


I am normally afraid of heights, and this didn't scare me at all. He said that normally if you aren't connected to the earth, you aren't afraid of falling. Certainly, the basket walls were quite high. It has a wonderfully peaceful sense of floating effortlessly.

We varied our location a lot: floating right along the trees and over fields, above the clouds, back down into valleys. The scenery was always changing.
[Volcano above the clouds -- one that created Cappadocia's bizarre landscape.]






After the balloon ride, we took a nap, and then went off to one of the nice places to wander around the fairy chimneys -- as the tall rock formations are called.


Former free-standing cave house.

Our last stop in Cappodicia was at the Goreme open air museum, which has some lovely Byzantine churches from the 10th-12th centuries. They are carved right into the hills, complete with domes, apses, etc -- everything but windows. In fact, the less light there was, the better preserved the frescos -- and a few of the churches had absolutely beautiful ones. No pictures were allowed inside most of the churches.

[Rectory, where the monks ate]




PS: I tried last post to increase the size of the pictures. Unfortunately, Blogger won't increase the resolution if you do that, so they end up looking granulated. So I suggest you click on any pictures you want blown up.