Cappadocia: a land where time stood still?

I’m sitting right now on the terrace of our cave hostel trying to soak in the last rays of the setting sun as the temperature slowly begins to drop. Every time the wind blows a shiver runs down my arms and spine. As hot as it is during the day, the air remains crisp and as soon as the sun sets, you know you need to layer up.

Goreme stretches out below me; a lady in the fairy chimney across from us has just finished hanging up the laundry. The kids are playing soccer with a Japanese tourist on the bit of street in front of our hostel trying to teach him some Turkish. A grandma sits on some steps on the opposite corner deep in contemplation. Behind her, on the room of her cave like house are a couple satellite dishes and solar panels. Further down the street the local construction crew is wrapping up their day’s work after having spent most of it forming perfectly straight bricks, about 2 feet by 1 foot. They accomplish this by scraping with shovel-like tools the soft rock from all sides. Every now and then a blow or scrap goes awry and the brick cracks into pieces or too much of it is shaved off.

Goreme is a town filled with tourists. There are easily in excess of a hundred hostels, pensions and hotels catering to every form of traveler. You can have a simple cave like dwelling or a honeymoon suite with private jacuzzi and a swimming pool. The hostels and hotels all have wireless internet connections and satellite TV. And yet as I sit here on the patio the only sounds surrounding me are the twittering birds, the tapping of horse hooves coming down a street, the yells and laughter of the kids playing down below me and an occasional scolding yell from one of their relatives.

It is difficult to imagine a town of greater contrasts; a town in which the massive influx of tourism has not really changed the way that life is led. For the locals here life continues the same way as it has for centuries. They work in the fields, they live sometimes in stone built homes, but often still in the fairy chimney caves. This traditional life is at times augmented by the benefits of civilization, such as the solar panels on the roofs, but for the large part it remains unchanged. Down near the main street of the town, a grandma sits day in and day out, weaving a complex carpet by hand. Over the last two days maybe a couple inches of this carpet have been created. On one of our walks through the valleys today we passed many families toiling in the fields, laundry hanging outside little holes in the walls as an elder Turk poked his head out one of holes, brushing his teeth and checking why his dog was barking up a storm, only to nod to us as we passed by.

It is an idyllic place; truly a land of fairies and all that is needed to discover it is to wander away from all the busloads of tourists.

Those wanderings today took us on some interesting adventures. Goreme lies in the center of this Cappadocia region with various valleys of hoodoos like formation, chimneys and pinnacles stretching in all directions. The catch is when you are on the plateau it all looks flat. Only if you look from up above or as you approach a rim of such a valley do you realize its extent. This, along with incredibly poor signage of all the trails, proved to be our downfall today.

We started out in the morning with the intensions of hiking through the Zemi Valley, the Iceri Dere Valley and the Pigeon Valley. However, we quickly realized that if we continued along the Zemi Valley we would be led in the opposite direction to the one we wanted. As such we managed to track down the trail to the Iceri Dere Valley and were hoping to continue along it’s length and eventually cross in the Pigeon Valley.

Unfortunately, shortly after we started out, the valley in which we were hiking seemed to come to an end and the path led us up to the plateau. Disoriented and unable to pinpoint our locations on the incredibly poorly designed maps, we decided that the best course of action was to proceed into the valley to our right. Across this valley (or so it seemed to us) we could see the lookout points that we had past the day before while coming back by road to Goreme. As such, we felt fairly certain that if we could only manage to get down into the valley, we would be on the right path.

And so the scramble began. To put it into perspective, the valley into which we decided to scramble was about 40m deep. Its edges are primarily comprised of tuff (condensed volcanic ash) that is incredibly crumbly and unstable. Quite often the edges include little caps or rims and what looks like a gentle slope might all of a sudden have this bulging rim and then drop vertically down. Walking along the edge of this valley we managed to spot a section which seemed to have significant amount of grass growing along its sides and slightly more gentle slopes. As far as we could tell, there were also no unexpected bulges.

And so we began the scramble. The first 20 or so meters were relatively easy but then we got to this 5 meter slanted section which was pure tuff. There was nothing to hold on and no way to get a firm foot hold since the moment you stepped on the slant, everything would begin to crumble all around you. Inching our way down, desperately trying to find little protruding rocks that were more deeply embedded and that would provide at least a bit of grip, we eventually got to a point where we either had to slide down it or attempt to run down it. My dad somehow managed the latter, and like a mountain goat, with is feet quickly looking for new spots, ran/slid down this slope. I, on the other hand, got myself into a bit more precarious position, having secured footholds to a certain point along the wall, but then being too afraid to stand up and simply make a run/scramble for it. In the end, the footholds gave way and I began to slide, on my feet, butt and hands. Overall it wasn’t too bad. The only problem is that this tuff rock is quite sharp and having worn thin linen pants, the sliding on my butt resulted in a nice ventilation hole stretching across the entire left butt cheak as the pants were torn to shreds (as was my left palm). Thankfully I had a long enough shirt on that I was able to cover my backside.

Thinking that the worst was over, we proceeded along the valley floor down what seemed to be a trail. This quickly turned out to be the dry stream bed that would on numerous occasions simply drop vertically several meters at a time and at other times would be blocked by gigantic boulders. All this meant more scrambling down sheer walls and up steep sandy embankments while desperately trying to maintain some kind of footholds and avoid a serious tumble.
Eventually we emerged amongst little fields were we managed to help a grandpa break a tree which he had been trying to swing of off in a futile attempt to accomplish this task. From these little fields we somehow emerged back in the center of Goreme.

Slightly disheartened, but with sufficient energy left in us to give the valleys another attempt, we managed to find the entrance to the Pigeon Valley and continued along the winding path through its fantastic formation all the way to the nearby town of Uchisar.

Uchisar is built around a steep hill or castle that rises high above the town and the surrounding plateau. An ascent to the peak of this castle provided us with stunning views of the Cappadocia region and the distant snow clad Erciyes Volcano (3917m) which was one of the primary contributors to the formation of this region’s geography.

A hitched ride with some locals brought us back to Goreme were we got to relax a bit and in the evening will head out for a Whirling Dervishes performance.