Landscape Beauty
Turkey’s Capadocia region is truly spectacular.
Our view from the Esbelli Evi hotel was amazing. Mar and I started our morning (well, late morning) with breakfast on the terrace. (Love that view!)
Then Ken joined us as we headed off to do some exploring.
Underground City
The Kaymakli Undergound city was one of several in the region. It’s a labrynth of hand-carved rooms created thousands of years ago by those who were persecuted at the time, mainly Christians of the day. Of course there are no windows — which meant back then it was also very dark to live in the caves, and as you can see, quite clostrophobic, too.
Our guide Mustafa (he called himself ‘Mustafa The Small And The Fast’) led us through the cave maze.
He’s a local from the region who tells us he used to play in this caves when he was a kid (imagine playing hide-and-seek in here!) and he realy loved to run through the tunnels. He ran circles around us to show us the disadvantage of enemies who found their way inside but weren’t familiar with the underground maze.
Uchisar Kalesi
I’d say the most spectacular portion of the day came next, when we explored the castle of the region, Uchisar Kalesi.
It’s this giant crazy-looking mountain from which you can see the entire Dr. Suess-like world of strange formations below.
The views were simply wild, and we spent a lot of time there climbing around the rocks, exploring, and taking lots and lots of photos of each other.
Goreme
Our last stop of the day was the Goreme open-air museum. You can walk around this area and look inside the hand-carved rooms in this area. Turns out, they’re all churches!
Then there’s the big special church of this community:
It was strange to see motorcycle parking on the premises!
By the end of the day, I was exhausted.
…But not too exhausted tojump out of the car and take one final photo when our driver took us to this lookout point!
