When we arrived in Cappadocia on Monday the concierge at the hotel encouraged us to do a tour of the local area, saying that it had to be done by a guide. This was a lie or a mistranslation. I think what he meant to say was, you’d get more out of it by going with a guide. I don’t think so. Anyway, I’d booked a day tour the evening before, and we were down to meet the bus at 9am on Thursday morning.
We were taken to Nevsehir, one of the bigger towns in the area which is overrun with tourists, and then paid our money (about 60USD each) then waited for others to arrive before getting in a minivan and heading off. The guide spoke good English but in the bus it was impossible to hear him explain what we were doing, other than to hear him say the next stop was about ten minutes away.
First stop was Uchisar Castle, which isn’t so much a castle in the built sense, but rock formations on top of a hill that have had rooms carved into them. We took photos. Next stop was a panorama viewpoint across the valley, seeing more of the fairy chimneys. Also learnt that the rocks are mostly volcanic ash, but with either a basalt or a pumice stone top.
We went to another area (Kedez?) where we could go inside some of the rooms. They were bigger inside than I expected, but also a cool spot to get out of the heat. There were apricot trees dotted around, laden with fruit all too high to reach. There were camels too, along with a baby camel suckling from its mothers. Glen had a corn on the cob from a street seller. I bought a cup of freshly squeezed pomegranate juice, something I’d been wanting ever since my cousin had been to Turkey and told me about it. A cup, as small as it was, was just a bit too much pure pomegranate juice…
We had lunch at a buffet place that churns through the tourist buses. We stopped at wine cellar for some tastings (which I didn’t like very much), also to a pottery…shop, for want of a better word, where we learned about pottery and got the hard sell. Same with the carpet store (though it was interesting to see how they got silk thread from cocoons and how carpets were made).
We stopped by the side of the road to look at Imagination Valley where some rocks could potentially be thought of as looking like other things, e.g. a camel, a penguin, Napoleon. And then finally we went to Göreme Open Air Museum. This is really the only thing I’d wanted to do and when we got there and saw you could have gone in without a guide (something I should have checked beforehand), I was a bit miffed that we’d spent all day on this tour with ‘other people’ when we didn’t have to. Oh the horror of it all.
Goreme is a second century AD monastery so there are a lot of churches built into the rock, as well as living spaces. It was a good mix of things to see, especially as the churches have varying degrees of frescoes still remaining intact. St George was a popular motif (as were Jesus and Mary but duh…). We did the circuit, in and out, and were done in about half an hour. That’s right, a full day tour to cover a half-hour thing…
Next time I feel guilty we’re not ‘doing enough’ can someone please slap me? That way we wouldn’t end up doing these things.
We were the last to be dropped off at our hotel about 5:30. We lounged around in our hotel room for a while, and then went for an earlyish dinner at 7pm. It bucketed down with rain while we were eating, and then continued, drowning us as we raced up the three flights of stairs to our room. Plenty of lightning too. It was awesome.
We packed our stuff and had a reasonably early night as our pick-up for the airport was due at 6am. I think the three full days we stayed in Cappadocia was probably enough for us. We did what we wanted to do and didn’t exhaust ourselves. It’s beautiful country and I’m so glad we snuck in this side trip after Israel. There’s still plenty more to see in Turkey—Ephesus for one—but probably not in a burning hurry to get back to Cappadocia.
Travels with Dan 
What do you say, eh?