The Grants' Bulgaria Blog.

Hi guys!

Greetings from awesome Cappadocia!

After a hectic day in Istanbul culminating in us nearly missing our flights (!), we arrived late on Saturday night to the tiny town of Göreme. Although Göreme has only a few thousand permanent residents, it is the centre of Cappadocian tourism because of its setting amidst some spectacular rock formations referred to as “fairy chimneys”.

These ones are outside the town, but you can see how they’ve carved houses into the rock. In Göreme itself, houses (which are now mostly hotels) have been carved into the rocks throughout the valley.

Bible-reading train-spotters (or history buffs) amongst our readership might know that Cappadocia was an important site for the early Christian church. Many of the sites you can see around Göreme are churches and houses that followers of Jesus carved out (literally) – primarily because Cappadocia was as far from their oppressors as they could get!

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Anyway, enough trivia!

We woke up on Sunday morning and (after oohing and aahing at Göreme which we hadn’t been able to appreciate in the dark of the night before) decided to hire scooters. Awesome idea! We blame Humphrey for suggesting it.

The affable Osman showed an uncharacteristic awareness of the phrase “duty of care” in asking us whether we had any riding experience (Humf: a little; Me: none!), but we both did blockies and apparently proved ourselves! Elly agreed to ride on the back with one or the other of us.

For two scooters for six hours, we paid 85 Turkish Lira (AU$62) including petrol. (Petrol in Turkey is abominably expensive! Like AU$2.48 per litre! Eek.)

We stuck to the roads at first, and found the scooters to provide easy access to some very cool sites, including this 6th Century AD church:

After a while we had a bit more confidence in the scooters and we went “off-road”. Actually, they were still roads, but the kind that only 4WDs would really be able to handle. The scooters performed admirably!

Here’s the mandatory panorama – click on it for a larger version:

So that was our Spectacular Sunday.

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Monday we decided to do much the same thing (that is, travel in a random direction safe in the knowledge that we’d come across something incredible – Cappadocia is like that), except that we did so on foot. Much more tiring and much slower, but still quite rewarding.

As for tomorrow – we’re fairly keen to hire the scooters again! And start earlier in the day this time! We’ll keep you posted.

Cheers,

Stu.

Tags: Cappadocia, holidays, mountains, near death experience, photos, Touristy stuff

This entry was posted on Monday, November 9th, 2009 at 7:05 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.