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.