Cappadocia dreamin'

Something that’s become quite evident during our travels in Turkey has been the level of pride the Turks have in their country. This pride is most overtly recognisable through the multitude of Turkish flags waving proudly in all manner of locations across the country, although surprisingly they’re yet to embrace the superman cape look for some reason.

More subtly this pride is demonstrated through popular culture.  While enjoying a cup of cay (the ever present black Turkish tea) in a Pamukkale café the Turkey current top 20 were playing on a nearby TV.  As we watched it became apparent that all the songs were by Turkish artists, which generally involved the warbling of a swarthy chap and there wasn’t the slightest hint of western infiltration.

Within this context we’ve been constantly amused by how this song has infiltrated Turkey and the unusual places it’s cropped up, such as watching the sunset at an outdoors bar in Antalya, only for the background hum of the city to be broken by a group of guys walking by with a small radio blasting it out, or more recently as we biked along a narrow track through the Rose Valley on the outskirts of Goreme in Cappadocia, only to have to take evasive action and move smartly off the path as an ancient white Renault packed with barely teenage boys came racing along and, like an agitated octopus, their arms pumped the air to the tune out of the car windows as they passed by in a cloud of dust.

Goreme and the wider Cappadocia area perhaps goes someway to explaining the source of the Turkish pride.  As with Pamukkale it’s unique, being famous for the alien landscape of pendulous outcrops and wavy ice-cream shaped rocks cascading down hillsides into valley floors. The formations are a result of hardened volcanic flows that have remained as the surrounding earth has eroded overtime to reveal the rock underneath.  During the Byzantine period the local communities started to construct dwellings, stores and churches in the rocks and below ground to protect against marauding raids from the Persians.  These days the main use of the houses in the rocky outcrops (beside hotels) is as pigeon coups, that we were informed assists in providing much need soil fertiliser for the surrounding farms.

We’d somewhat upgraded our accommodation in Goreme following Kizkalesi and opted to stay in the Kelebek ‘special’ (special in that all the hotels have the word cave in them so there’s a need to differentiate) cave hotel.  It was a lovely place to stay nestled into a rocky outcrop overlooking the town of Goreme.  Each morning from our cave room you could hear the faint sound of the firing of the balloons outside the window and peering out the window watch them slowly rise to join with the 70 or so other balloon rides that occur each morning.

Morning over Goreme

'Love' Valley

On checking in we’d been given a sketchy map of the surrounding valleys, outline of the walks and approximate time to spend in each one, including the modestly named ‘Love Valley’ (30 minutes apparently)….and Rose and Red Valleys.  After a day spent walking around the valleys we decided it’d be easier the next day to head back with bikes.  Many people drive quads around the valleys, but from what I observed it becomes more about racing over sand dunes than taking the fascinating homes amongst the landscape.

The sketchy maps provided by the hotel seemed to be the same available throughout the town and we set off on our bikes to the Rose and Red Valleys trying to relate the squiggles on the paper to our surrounds.  To confuse matters there regularly appeared red spray painted arrows to the valleys that work for a while, but then start to contradict each other.

The tops of the valleys are sparsely vegetated, but lower down the vegetation increases and winds with the valley floor.  Being late autumn the leaves had turned a golden yellow and in the weak sunshine it was great fun to ride along the path.  At some stage however we must have missed that the path turned off the trail we were on as I never actually imagined that the trail came out of the valley floor we were in and went over the top of the valley as I learned later on.  Consequently we blindly rode on as our path became increasingly narrow and came across the first location where we had to pick the bikes up and haul them over rocks. 

As we continued on this became a common occurrence, with the path only wide enough for the bike handles and the walls of the valley looming over us.  Eventually we reached a point where the path split in two, one way the path disappeared completely and the other the path was blocked by a boulder larger than I.  At this point we came to the startling conclusion that we’d somehow taken a wrong turn and retreated back the way we’d come.  We spent the rest of the day riding around other valleys, stopping to dismount and climb up to explore the insides of the long abandoned houses before pedalling our exhausted bodies back before the setting sun.

We end up staying in Goreme for five nights, doing a day tour of surrounding ruins and an underground city that spread to a depth of eight floors beneath the ground, but felt that we’d only just scratched the surface in terms of exploring the unique Cappadocia region.