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Today I had booked a second day tour with Rock Valley Tour group, which I have been very pleased with the service they have for the price. A lot of the tours here are run in big bus groups with one tour guide for 45-50 people! Today's group was a Japanese women traveling the world for the next year, and a family from Alfred, NY! They are the first Americans I have run into in the last week here, and they happen to be from western NY. Our tour started with the Derinkuyu underground city, which is the biggest underground city in this region. It was pretty cool - both temperature wise and site seeing wise. This underground city goes down 85 meters - or approximately 280 feet. The earliest parts of these undergrounds cities were started as early as 4000 years ago, during the occupation of the Hittites. They were used and extended later on mainly by Byzantine Christian settlements during times of invasion to escape Persian and Arabic forces for sometimes months at a time. They would move everything down here, and had air shafts to get oxygen down into the depths of the city (they were disguised as wells on the surface). They had rolling stone doors as a last defense as well if the invaders had made it down to the city. They had rooms for everything, such as stables, wine making, kitchens, bedrooms, schools, churches, baptism pools, and storage rooms. No smoke from fires would go to the surface - as that would give their position away - the soft tuff rock absorbed most of it. It was pretty awesome. There are 30 known underground cities around turkey, but they think they must be more like 100 - though not as big as this one.

We then went to take a photo op of Crater lake (Narli Gol) formed from a volcano, it was very beautiful to see. We had a little bit of a drive to Ihlara Valley, which is 14 kilometers in length. We did a 4 km walk through here, it was very nice out today for this, and an easy walk for me although I was still the slowest one because my leg still hurts. This valley has many rock dwellings from the Byzantine monks that used this valley. There are pigeon houses, storage caves, dwellings, and many churches. One of the nicer churches we went into and saw the frescoes. There are still people who live and farm in the valley today, and use the caves as storage - as they are always cool. At the end of the walk, we had lunch on the Melendiz stream that cuts through the valley. I got a chicken sis (american sis kebab), which was accompanied by lentil soup and light salad.

The other people in my tour were very nice, and we talked a lot on our day tour. The one japanese woman is traveling on her own around the world for 9 months. She has an odd english accent - which is a mix of Australian and Japanese, because her family moved there and she lived there for 4 years. She quit her job and left everything to travel. Sounds pretty nice not to have to worry about working!

We were then carted off to Selime, where there is a monastery in the fairy chimneys here which are conical shaped. There are a few different kinds of fairy chimneys - ones with caps, cones, mushroom tops, columns, and pointed rocks. It all depends on what types of rock are in the layers of them, defining how fast each layer erodes. This area in Selime has the pointed ones, and this is were Episode 1 (I think?) of Star Wars had scenes filmed.

In telling the tour guide that I was going to be working at Catalhoyuk, we got a special stop today off the tour schedule for Asikli Hoyuk - another Neolithic mound though much smaller settlement than Catalhoyuk. They had demo houses similar to Catalhoyuk as well, and many of the features seem to be very the same. It was pretty nice!

Agzikarahan was another stop on our tour, where this was a caravan stop for traders and travels coming and going from Asia - the Silk Road. It had a massive defense wall surrounding it, and unfortunately is due for some work so we could not enter inside.

We also stopped at a jewelry shop, to get their sales pitch after a onyx working demonstration. It was interesting, and I did end up buying some Turkish Turquoise earrings and pendant - as a present to myself for the whole leg thing. They are a different shade of blue than American turquoise, and turkish turquoise changes color to black and blue, and then green with age (like 80 years).

I took a very nice nap after I got back, and had another pottery jug kebab from my hostel cook/owner. yum. this will probably be my last blog entry until next Friday when I will be in Konya for the day, so until then!

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