November 19, 2019. Trip Oversight
Lady Rosamind: “There’s nothing like an English summer, is there?”
Lady Mary Crawley: “Except an English winter.”
-Downton Abbey
Top 12 Trip Picks
• Pyramids of Giza
• Parthenon – Athens, Greece
• Meteora, Greece (Kalabaka)
• Plitvice Lakes National Park, Croatia
• West Cork, Ireland
• Banks of the Seine, Paris, France
• London along the Thames
• Luxor, Egypt
• Dublin, Ireland
• Peloponnese, Greece
• Dubrovnik/Trogir/Zadar, Croatia
• Cappadocia, Turkey
Lesson Learned: After spending most of 2019 on the road visiting far away, and often exotic places, the thought of wintering at home seems like such a dreary idea. Though I’m a great fan of Alexandria, and we’ve no plans to move, I’m not a fan of the short, dark, cold days of winter anyway, I lived too many years in the warmer climes of Texas, so Christmas in Virginia holds little charm. Who needs snowmen and sledding down neighborhood hills?
Southeast Asia and Australia sound like very good ideas.
Lord, let me live until I die
Seven months on the road and countless sites seen, cities lived in (temporarily), countries visited, and cultures experienced leave you with countless memories. The experiences fill you with fresh opinions, unexpected thrills, new friendships, and real-life exposure to images and places we’ve dreamed about our entire lives, and twice as many more that we never expected. It also leaves you with a yearning to see more. Ellen and I were on the road for 213 days, eight countries (not counting Iceland, or Bosnia-Herzegovina), we slept in 51 different beds, visited 22 UNESCO World Heritage sites, and explored who knows how many towns and cities.
But we’ve also got a list of the things we’ve seen, and places we really enjoyed. Friends continually ask what we enjoyed the most on our journey. That’s tough to decide, or rank from first to last. That’s like asking “What’s your favorite food.” or “Who is your favorite child?”, give me a break. Our trip experience was cumulative, and difficult to separate the experience into discrete events. Much of what we did or saw built upon the events of the previous day or week, and blended over our travels to paint our memories. Here are a few of our favorite memories from our travels in 2019. You may have heard of these places before, but here’s a list of experiences we’d do again. Today I’ll review, Cappadocia, Turkey.
Let the Balloons Fly
When to go: Shoulder seasons in Turkey are March thru May and September & October. The weather is warm and dry so you won’t have to battle rain or cold for the most part. For that matter, Turkey is very arid, so rain isn’t a big issue any time of the year.
How long should you stay: Two days to a week will give you time enough to see all you want. Just be sure you save enough time to spend 2 or 4 days in Istanbul to begin or end your visit as well.
Where to stay: There are lots of interesting hotels in Göreme so you have lots to choose from. Keep in mind that the roads are steep, narrow and parking is a challenge. We found the Design Cave Suites Hotel to have comfortable rooms, A/C, parking, proximity to tons of places to eat and drink, and finally an unobstructed view of the balloon launch in the morning for reasonably priced accommodations.
What to see/do:
• Open Air Museum
• Avanos Pottery Studios
• Hot Air Balloons
• Derinkuyu
• Rent an ATV
• Ride a camel
• Find an off-the-main-drag bar and just chill
History as an Open Air Museum – Göreme
The Göreme Open-Air Museum in many ways is like Old Cairo. It’s a vast ancient monastic complex composed of scores of refectory monasteries placed side-by-side, each with its own fantastic church in the middle of a Muslim country. Experts say it should be the first sight to be visited by any traveler in Cappadocia, so, of course, we put it off until the second day. The town of Göreme is small and easily walkable, but the historic sites to be visited in the area is vast, so it’s best to have a car or driver to visit this area. The Open-Air Museum is easy to locate, just walk down the main drag, up a slight incline (slight if you hike mountains frequently) at the top of the hill standing in the center of the region with easy access from all directions.
It is only 15-minute walk (1.5km, 1 mile) from Göreme village center, so of course we drove. It contains an amazing collection of the rock-cut churches, with beautiful frescoes (which they won’t let you photograph) whose colors still retain all their original freshness, but unfortunately most have been defaced during the centuries after their creation. It also presents unique examples of rock-hewn architecture that’s incredible given that these structures were all excavated by hand, without aid of power equipment or even blasting powder. The Göreme Open Air Museum has been a member of UNESCO World Heritage List since 1984, and was one of the first two UNESCO sites in Turkey. We are always interested in adding another UNESCO site to our “Been There, Done That” list.
Be sure to start your visit to the museum early, because the tour busses begin arriving shortly after 8 AM. On the morning of our arrival there were 12 tour busses and at least 100 sedans crowded into the parking lot. Even the lounging camels had this “Shit, look how crowded it is today!” look on their faces.
The Göreme Open Air museum contains some of the earliest churches in history. This area was one of the first hotbeds of Christianity and when they crawled outside their holes in the rocks the Cappadocians get a lot of credit or blame for spreading the Word throughout the rest of the world.
This whole area, according to UNESCO is “a spectacular landscape, entirely sculpted by erosion, the Göreme valley and its surroundings contain rock-hewn sanctuaries that provide unique evidence of Byzantine art in the post-Iconoclastic period. Dwellings, troglodyte villages and underground towns – the remains of a traditional human habitat dating back to the 4th century – can also be seen there.” The museum forms an early-man geographical repository reflecting the historical progression and community interaction of the faith in a harsh environment. There are eleven refectories within the Museum, with rock-cut churches tables, benches, and stairs…..there are lots of stairs, so be sure you are ready to hike up and down these steep, narrow pathways. Most of the churches in Göreme are from the 10th, 11th and 12th centuries. Much like Meteora in Greece.
Avanos Pottery Village
We originally only planned on spending one night in Cappodocia, but there’s far too much to see and do in the area for a one day visit, so we moved over to the Design Cave Suites Hotel for an extra night (https://www.designcappadocia.com/explore ) which is in a great location, with spacious and comfortable rooms, a good breakfast, and a unobstructed roof-top garden to view the balloon launch
Ellen and I’ve been doing ceramics back home in Alexandria for years, so when we found out the community of Avanos is noted for its fine pottery and many, many artist studios we knew how we’d spend the afternoon. Avanos is well known for the red clay products made by local artists. Hundreds of the village men (we found no women potters, which I found strange) are skilled in making pots, plates, wine holders, ashtrays (I did this in the second grade) and chess sets. They are pottery masters and their skills have mostly been handed down from generation to generation. The roots of their profession lie in the nearby red river that flows through the town. The artists have complete vertical production control from digging out the raw clay, processing it, constituting the clay, throwing or hand building the objects, glazing, firing, and finally selling their ware.
The Kizilirmak (Red River) is named after the red clay that lies on its banks. Avanos craftsmen have been taking the clay from the river beds since the Hittite period to make household products. Skilled potters, using foot-driven wheels make pottery from scratch. The potters will throw beautiful pieces for you within minutes on request. Of course you’ll have to come back to pick it up after its been glazed and fired. We’ve seen a lot of pottery and potters over the years, and these men are true craftsmen.
True to what the guide books say, the potters give a demonstration, and then it’s your turn. I wasn’t going to do it, but Ellen jumped right in and did a pretty good job, in spite of not sitting at a wheel for over 8 months. Well, pretty good until her apron got caught in the wheel and totally destroyed her bowl. It was good fun, anyway, and we bought a few nice pieces to bring home.
Balloons of Cappadocia
The origin of hot air balloons is very old. There are a lot of examples of ballooning, from China, to Leonardo Da Vinci, to 18th century France. Today, colorful hot air balloons are found around the world, especially around certain desert tourist locations like Luxor, Egypt; Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA; and, of course Cappadocia, Turkey. This adventure, which started with the Montgolfier brothers (France), continues today all over the world.
Cappadocia is considered the center of hot air balloon in Turkey. Cappadocia hosts thousands of local and foreign thrill-seeking tourists on short hops high into the sky at the break of dawn on mornings when the wind doesn’t threaten to whisk them off to Africa. Evidently, Cappadocia is the number one spot in the world with for touro-ballooning (I just made that word up) with 450 thousand tourists ballooning to date. And every, weather permitting, this number continues to grow.
Investments in the ballooning industry and marketing were made years ago to develop Cappadocia as the Asian leader in hot air ballooning. They set up ballooning flight schools, attracted active and more qualified personnel with the hopes of economic gain, and the Cappadocia Vocational School opened the Balloon Pilot Associate Degree Program in 2011-2012. Hey, let’s go flying and make some dough at the same time. Blah, blah, blah, blah…important stuff, but boring. The important thing is they are taking care of the basics so you don’t go down in flames from 500 feel like a kamakazi pilot with a roman candle stuck up his ass.
On our last day, we got up at 5 AM, as you should if you want to see the balloons launch. Again, we were disappointed. It was like washing your car and buying a new shirt for a first date just to have her cancel an hour before the appointed hour. Bummer.
Given that it appeared to be another scratch, we went back to bed. It wasn’t until 6:30, when Mary was woken by the sound of blasting gas furnaces above her head that she realized that the balloons were in fact, flying. We were all roused out of bed, unceremoniously, to see the hundreds of balloons launching directly in front of the sun like a bunch of Messerschmidts diving down on a squadron of B-17s. Still, much like our experience in Luxor, it was fantastic. There is something eerily majestic about dozens of balloons silently gliding directly above your head. Only the occasional laugh of a passenger or the blast of gas flames makes any noise. I highly recommend it, we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.
Derinkuyu: Underground City of Cappadocia
We wanted to visit one of the underground cities in the area. Mary and I, sans hard hats and miner lights decided to duck below and check the city out. Derinkuyu underground city is more than just a deep hole in the ground, it’s an ancient multi-level underground city in the Derinkuyu district in Nevşehir Province, Turkey.
Only a small doorway structure behind the visitor center exists on the surface, but the low, narrow tunnel rapidly descends down to a depth of 60 meters (200 ft). Authorities estimate that the city is large enough to have housed up to 20,000 people together with their livestock and food stores. I’ve been there, and walked through these tiny, narrow, low tunnels, so the thought of 20,000 people, goats, sheep, chickens, and cows is really a disgusting thought.
Derinkuyu is the largest excavated underground city in Turkey and is one of several underground complexes found across Cappadocia. This is really surprising, since the entrance to the complex is just one tiny door into the city through a structure which looks more like an outhouse (without a half moon on the door) than it does the entrance into a huge underground labyrinth.
The same experts as referred to above, think the caves might have been built by the Phrygians, an Indo-European people, in the 8th–7th centuries BCE. Later on, the inhabitants, now Christian, expanded their underground caverns to deep multiple-level structures adding the chapels and Greek inscriptions in the first or second century.
Derinkuyu was fully formed in the Byzantine era, when it was heavily used as protection from Muslim Arabs during the Arab–Byzantine wars (780–1180 CE). The city was connected with other underground cities through many kilometers (miles) of tunnels.
These cities continued to be used by the Christian natives as protection from the Mongolian incursions of Timur in the 14th century. After the region fell to the Ottomans, the cities were used as refuges by the natives from the Turkish Muslim rulers, which makes me wonder if it might have just been easier to move.
The tunnels beneathcould be closed from the inside with large stone doors (which are like gates to the city for above-ground fortresses). Each floor could be closed off separately, though we only passed through two entrances with stone doors as most of the city was roped off. The city had amenities such as wine and oil presses, stables, cellars, storage rooms, refectories, and chapels, not to mention all those goats and sheep providing a rich, aromatic aroma to the entire place.
In 1923, the Christian inhabitants of the region were expelled from Turkey and moved to Greece in the population exchange between Greece and Turkey, whereupon the tunnels were abandoned. Abandoned, and maybe forgotten until in 1963, the tunnels were rediscovered after a resident found a mysterious room behind a wall in his home. Further digging revealed access to the tunnel network. In 1969, the site was opened to visitors, with about half of the underground city currently accessible. From what we saw, not nearly half of the city is open, perhaps 10%. On the other hand, looking down the rabbit holes, I’m really not sure how much of the city I really want to explore.