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.

Final instalment in our “Quick! Catch up with the blogging before we move on to Turkey” series… sees us doing a few touristy things around Romania.

After the onslaught of shopping that Humf and I endured – the same onslaught that Elly and Margot revelled in – we were very much ready to leave the city and take in some different sights. On the bus trip up to Transylvania we were surprised and excited to notice the huge differences between Bulgaria and neighbouring Romania – in landscape, in architecture, in the villages, in the people…! I guess noticing all those differences is what travelling is all about.

When Jon and Margot suggested we get a maxi-taxi out to Sighişoara (sig-ee-shwa-rah), a 12th-Century village where Vlad Dracul (yes, Dracula) lived for some time, we jumped at the opportunity.

It was about a hour from Târgu Mureş (ter-goo moor-esh) and we got there in the early arvo. It’s a great time of year to travel (depending on the weather) because it’s well and truly outside of the high season – there were plenty of others wandering around seeing the sights, but much less crowded than in summer (me thinks). The village was typically colourful for Romania:

Up on the hill was the Old Town – the part of the village that dates back to the 12th-Century. I guess we’ve almost become accustomed to the concept of an Old Town now, but really, it just wouldn’t be possible in Australia. Depending on your definition of “old”, of course.

This strange wooden tunnel leads from the centre of the Old Town to the top of the hill where there are some churches and a graveyard.

As if the village itself didn’t have enough charm, we were surrounded at all times by stunning autumn foliage!

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The other sightseeing excursion we made from Târgu Mureş was the Salt Mine at Praid (pron: pride). Apparently it’s been mined since Roman times and, more recently – as the mining has moved further under ground – the locals have opened up some of the disused mining sites to the public. Around the 1950s the salt mine became the site of an alternative therapy called speleotherapy – which espouses the health benefits of breathing in salty air.

Thousands of people every year travel down salt mines, including this one, to breath in the air. There appears to be some science behind it but I didn’t really read the plaques… It’s supposed to be particularly good for sufferers of asthma, and based on that, they’ve built a series of huge playgrounds for kids to stay entertained while they breathe the air! Apparently some of them spend four hours down the mine as often as three times a week.

There’s also a church down there where Catholic and Orthodox (ie. Hungarian and Romanian) services are held.

And when we returned to the surface (allegedly feeling much refreshed, or something), we went and got kürtös kalács which is some seriously tasty Hungarian sweet bread! They put dough on a wooden cylinder and then mount it on a spit. It is cooked over a charcoal fire and then coated in sugar, spices and nuts. You eat it while it’s hot and say “yum”. Not a Hungarian word.

Hungarian, by the way, is considered one of the hardest languages to learn (as a second language – for English-speakers). It’s loosely related to Finnish, but is essentially independent from all other languages (rare for Europe!). It looks like this: “Angolul beszélő magyar megtalálni nagyon nehéz megtanulni”.

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We left Transylvania on Friday morning, and I’m glad to say that we’re nearly caught up with our blogging!

We got another maxi-taxi back to Bucharest and stayed a night at the East Hostel, which is easily the best hostel I’ve stayed in! It was fitted out amazingly well. Incredibly classy bathrooms; it felt like a boutique hotel but instead of a king-sized four-poster bed per room, they have several bunks! A very nice surprise, we thought.

We got the train back to Haskovo the next day and that’s where we are now. Humf will be heading to Turkey tomorrow. Elly and I will probably hang back in Haskovo to nurse our wounded wallets for a few days before joining Humf to see Cappadocia! Looking forward to it!

You can expect some more philosophical reflections on our travels in the next few days!

Cheers,

Stu.

Elly’s back!

(It’s raining today you see, so more shopping is out of the question)

Right, so we were up to last Thursday.

Thursday 22nd: So, I do believe that in one of the two previous posts Stu introduced Boris (our host in Bansko) to you all. It is a pity we didn’t photograph him because he really was a lovely bloke. We ran into him after having dinner on Wed night and he asked us what we wanted to do whilst in Bansko. Humf, or Stu, clapped their hands together and said ‘We want to go up the mountain!’ Boris replied with ‘Yes yes, oh but of course! I’ll find you a driver, would you like me to find you someone who can take you up? They can show you a good restaurant too. Come in my car now, I’ll drive you around and show you the city. Come! Come!’ Humphrey says he’s a lot like the German ranch owner on Malcolm in the Middle if any of you remember that show.

Anyway, onto Thursday. We started the day with yet another wonderful Bulgarian breakfast. I mentioned in my Sofia post way back when that the BG breakfasts were great, and I still hold firm to that opinion! In Bansko we were served banitsa - crispy pastry rolled up and shaped like a log with white cheese in the middle. Next came small bread rolls with white cheese and homemade blueberry jam. Humphrey in particular loved the jam (Stu and I are quite used to it now) and is hoping to find some to take back to Ausland. We drank big cups of black coffee. It was good and exactly what one needs before attempting to climb a 2914m mountain.

Mt Vihren (the aforementioned 2914m mountain)

We were collected by our driver and unceremoniously dumped at a random lodge 1800m up the mountain. Seems Boris’ friend/in-law/second cousin thrice removed didn’t share his friendly nature. The lodge was occupied by a rather grubby man who had already started drinking (at 10:30am) and very begrudgingly found us a map to buy.

Then we started walking. Up. I think this part of the day will be better told in pictures.

It was really very pretty with a bit of a pine forest down the bottom and alpine sort of plants growing around the place. We were very excited when we first reached the snow and threw snowballs around for the next half hour. The thing about snow, I realised, is that it’s cold and wet and you tend to forget that it’s cold and wet until you become cold and wet. Unfortunately I only had jeans to wear and I really am deeply ashamed that I had to wear them in the snow. I put thermals on underneath before they got too wet but I did miss my bushwalking shorts which are probably safely tucked up under Rhiannon’s house somewhere.

At roughly 2400m in altitude we stopped for lunch and scrutinised the extremely high and steep climb ahead of us. A solitary walker came cruising down and we stopped him to ask about how long it will take. Despite language difficulties we managed to learn that we were only halfway, which wasn’t very encouraging.

So we finished eating chunks of salami and cheese (how barbarian of us) and casually climbed 150m. Casually? I mean struggled. The snow was very soft and powdery and every step ended in either losing our leg up to beyond our knee or falling back half a metre. The incline felt like it was 60 degrees, but Humf reckons it would be lucky to be 40. The ridge offered strong winds, an awesome view of how far we’d come and the final ascent of about 300m which we unanimously decided to not bother with. Too late in the day you know, we could have done it easily no worries!

This one is a panorama – click on it to see the whole thing!

Then we went down. This was the painful part. A slope that took us an hour to struggle up was behind us in seconds as we went down the only way possible: on our bottoms, apart from Stu who went penguin style on his stomach. We walked on down the mountain and ended up on the road and after walking on that for an hour we hitch-hiked into town and had a good dinner and slept for 11 hours. Bliss.

Friday 23rd: A rather uneventful day really. Breakfast was awesome again and the banitsa was replaced with deep fried dough balls with white cheese inside and a big bowl of juicy plump grapes and green apples. I guess today really started off the insane amount of travel we had to do in order to reach the Nairns in Târgu Mureş. I suppose we could have flown the distance, but there aren’t any stories in flying. Next post can be the ‘travel’ post and I’ll orchestrate it so that Stu writes it meaning I get to write the ‘shopping in Romania’ post, a topic I’m very fond of.

I’m very much enjoying being on holiday. It’s not so much the fact that we’re in Eastern Europe and we’re taking a holiday and seeing more of Eastern Europe (which is as cool as it sounds) but travel in itself is really fun and I’m feeling very refreshed and feeling much better about being away from home. Of course, it’s wonderful having Humf here, the three of us have grown much closer and there’ll be a thousand memories and in-jokes that we’ll be sharing for the rest of our lives. However, if Humf answers another question with ‘da’ (the Bulgarian and Romanian for yes, but Humf uses it as his generic answer) then I’ll probably thump him. Consider yourself warned Humf

On a side note, daylight savings ended on the weekend so the time difference is now 9 hours

Have a good one!

Elly xx