Side: a Turkish Playa del Carmen

Before heading to the coast let me wrap up a few Cappadocia matters. Firstly, the Whirling Dervishes, well, they whirled, and whirled, and whirled, and whirled. Nearly 45 minutes of non-stop turning. I don’t know whether I can say that it was a fascinating experience, but it was definitely a dizzying one. My head was spinning from just watching them and I don’t know how they were able to maintain their balance.

Other than the Dervishes we did a lot more walking, some more hitchhiking, and a bit more relaxing. However, the highlight was an early morning wake-up to see the balloons. We had imagined that there might be 5 or 10 of these balloons and when we got up shortly after sunrise to find 49 of them in the sky, our jaws dropped open in amazement. There was simply nothing that could have prepared us for the scale of it.

We hiked up a little mountain right behind our hostel and beheld all the valleys which we had been climbing through over the last few days filled with hot air balloons.
Now, as I’ve noted on some of the photos, if you ever were considering a change of professions, hot air ballooning in Cappadocia might be the thing for you. The season lasts from April to December but there are also balloon trips in the winter. Every balloon holds between 10 to 30 people, although we have heard of balloons being stuffed with upwards of 36 people so that there is barely enough room for you to raise your elbows so as to take a picture. Now, the cheapest that we heard being charged for one of these balloon trips was 110 Euro. However, that was not a usual price and considering some of the stories we heard about people driving down to Russia and completing their balloon liscencing in less than a week, I’m not too sure I would trust a 110 Euro flight. Additionally, such a flight would generally consist of the balloon going up, maybe traveling a bit to the sides, but coming down in the exact same spot where it started and would most definitely be filled with at least 30 people. If you wanted something a bit more fancier and more “worth your money”, you could invest 240 Euro in a balloon trip that would be twice as long as everyone else, there would only be 15 – 20 of you in the balloon, and you would be treated to champagne at the end of the trip. Plus your balloon would travel through these valleys and would get picked up by a specially designed truck at a location different from the one you started at.

So now let’s see this business proposition: 50 balloons in the air per day; 20 people per balloon (let’s be conservative); 160 Euros per person. 50 x 20 x 160 = 160,000 Euros per day flying up above you. These figures might differ a bit since there might not always be business for all 50 balloons (although most companies are booked solid throughout the high season), there may also be more or less people in the balloon and the prices do vary. However, let’s even call it 150,000 Euros per day for even 6 months of the year (as opposed to the usual 10), you still get a grand total of approximately 27 million Euros per year (conservatively speaking) – and that’s just for these flights which start around 5am and wrap up around 8am. So the rest of the day is yours to do with as you please. Not bad, eh? The only thing that we didn’t get a chance to find out is what the insurance costs are on such operations, if there are any at all.

But moving on; we left Goreme by night bus to Side and managed to show up here at an ungodly hour when everything was still completely closed. To make the matter more interesting, we had reservations in a pension in town that no one knew. We had an address, but none of the streets had names and even when someone finally pointed me towards the correct street, none of the buildings had numbers. To make it even more mysterious, the pension was no longer called by the name used in the guide book nor by the name used on the internet site which I had made my reservations through. In fact, the pension no longer did business with that internet site, had no information of my reservations, nor of the deposit I had paid or of the prices that were advertised. Thankfully they were nice enough to honor the reservation (probably not a hard thing to do given that they only had 2 other guests in their entire hotel). But it definitely made for an interesting morning.

With the hostel tracked down it was high time to relax so we headed to the beach for some well deserved tanning and swimming followed by some roaming, relaxing, eating and resting. Overall, it was a very exhausting day.

That being said, Side is an adorable little town with virtually no vehicle traffic (access is controlled). It’s located on a jutting protrusion of land into the Mediterranean Sea and as such is surrounded by water on three sides. Interspersed throughout the city are Roman ruins including an ampitheater, Roman baths and walls, and the gorgeous remains of the Temple of Appolo overlooking the sea.

The downside to Side is that it is filled to the brim with tourists, with 90% of them being Germans. More than half of these tourists are your usual package holidayers who are staying at nearby all-inclusive hotels. The telltale colored bracelets on their wrists make them easy to spot. As a result of this mass of tourists, the town is filled with souvenir stores, “brand-name” stores, jewelry stores etc. You can buy the identical polo shirt with your choice of logos, whether it would by Tommy Hilfiger, Ralph Loren, D&G or Armani. Apparently they all design absolutely identical clothing. Side is essentially the equivalent of Playa del Carmen. It is a quaint little town filled with hotels, restaurants, bars and stores; some tourists decide to stay there, but most tend to come from nearby town (such as Cancun, Mayan Riviera etc) for a day trip to stroll the beach, see the ruins, and do some overpriced shopping of tacky souvenirs or rip off name brand goods.

Despite its touristiness, Side has been quite nice to relax in and a perfect place to see one’s traveling partner off, and to kill some time before welcoming the new entourage.

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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.

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Cappadocia: the land of fairies

One of the first things that came to our mind after we crossed the border into Turkey was the wish that all places were the size of most Middle Eastern countries. In Lebanon we managed to travel through nearly half the country in one morning. Unfortunately the same is not true in Turkey.

Our journey started in Aleppo at 4:30am. From there it was off to the Syrian border where after some pocket money to the border guards (paid by the bus driver to speed things up) and another expensive border tax, we managed to successfully leave Syria. The next step was to enter Turkey while swapping passports to avoid the $60US visa required of Canadian citizens (Polish citizens only had to pay $20US for a visa). The problems began when the Turkish border guard could not find the Syrian exit stamps in our Polish passports. Eventually, after showing them our Canadian passports as well, they let us in.

We arrived in Antakya, the first main Turkish town across the border, at 8:45am. Our bus for Cappadocia was leaving at 9am giving us just enough time to withdraw some money, purchase the bus tickets and grab a quick sandwich. Then it was an 8 ½ hour bus journey from the south of Turkey into central Turkey. Temperatures dropped to about 12 degrees and we had the first rain in the course of the last 3.5 weeks. Rain, however, might be a bit of an understatement. Although we were riding in a bus, we felt like we were inside an aquarium. The water just poured down in drapes down both sides of the bus. I had not seen a rain storm like that in a long time. The depressing part was that the black clouds seemed to cover all of Turkey with no prospect of the rain easing up.

Fortunately, once we arrived in Kayseri at 5:15pm the rain had stopped. We again had 15 minutes before our next bus and at 5:30pm settled down for another 1.5 hour journey. We finally arrived in Goreme (Cappadocia) at around 7pm after around 14 hours in transit.
Cappadocia has proved to be absolutely amazing. Just outside the bus station was a tourist information office offering pictures of the hundreds of little cave hotels and hostels in the town. The guy working there refused to offer recommendations saying that he had to stay impartial. He could tell us the prices of any that we chose and would call to inquire as to availability. We finally picked one of them, were picked up and driven a short distance up the mountain and dropped off in front of a little fairy chimney hotel where we secured a cave room and settled down to our first meal since the prior day.

Over dinner we met some fantastic Polish travelers: two who had spent 4 days in Cappadocia and were about to leave, and later another Polish girl who had just arrived.
We spent a fantastic evening chatting and relaxing.

The relaxation ended on the following day. Together with Judyta we started early in the morning into the local valleys and in a matter of the day probably did well in excess of 20km of up and down trails amongst fantastic hooodos like formations, fairy chimneys and picturesque countryside. True heaven!

It has been an absolute constant everywhere we’ve travelled: in all these tourist destinations there are endless busloads of pre-packaged tourists. Stay to the main road, main view points and main trails and you will have a hard time avoiding the hoards. Walk off the main path for 5 minutes and you will not have a soul in sight. This was true in Petra, in Palmyra and the same thing here in Cappadocia.

Enjoying this fairyland we have now decided to spend another couple days here. Photos to follow soon.

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