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Published: June 26th 2012
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A long, long time ago, in a city far, far away, we woke up. Yes, today we left Istanbul behind us and this meant waking up much too early, already at 5:15 AM. The trip wasn't quite straightforward either, we had to take taxi to Taksim, bus to Sabiha Gökcen airport, fly to Kayseri airport, take taxi to Kayseri bus terminal, long distance bus to Avanos and final a local bus to Göreme. Even though the trip was long and complicaded most things went smoothly. The only thing we could had done better would have been to prebook a shuttlebus transport from Kayseri airport to Göreme, now we had to take an expensive taxi who constantly tried to upsell the short trip to the bus station into a trip going all the way to Göreme, wait for buses in 1,5 h and of course use lots of energy to find out how to get to the next place.
All this traveling was however totally worth it. Cappadocia, and especially Göreme looks like nothing we have seen before. The landscape is filled with cliffs and rock formations rising up like tooths or icecream cones, and into these people have built their
houses. Even our hostel has some cave rooms and we had hoped to get one, but it turned out it was the dormitory and the other big rooms that are in caves, we go a normal room in the second floor of the building. We have however been promised an upgrade to a room with a view over the village for tomorrow, so I guess that's spectacular enough.
After arrival we took a small powernap and then went out get something to eat and to explore our new surroundings. The tourist information wasn't very informative, but after eating manti at the bus station we set out towards the Göreme open air museum following signs we had seen when arriving to the village. This was promised to be Göremes main attraction, and took us deep into the forrest of rock columns.
The Göreme open air museum is an old monistery active between 200 AD and 1400 AD. The monks carved out living space and churches from the rock cones and on the cliff walls, this also makes the museum open air as it wasn't one big building but mainly one room caves without any connection between them. We went
to maybe eight different churches of which 3 stood out as especially well preserved. In these the wall paintings from the 13th century are still almost intact, particulary in the dark church where the colour are still vivid due to the small amount of light that has been let inside. The most spectacular thing about the place was however the landscape.
When we where almost done in the open air museum it started to rain. First only a little, but luckily we still decided to look for shelter in the cafeteria just outside the museum, because the rain quickly increased in intensity. From the inside of the cafeteria we could then follow the downpour, and how all the cafeteria staff were trying to keep the water out of the cafeteria when the drainage outside didn't keep up with the rain. The rain was relatively short, so after an hour we started our return trip back to Göreme. There we found a very nice (and also cheap!) café where we got some lentil soup and gozleme (turkish pancakes), and also some excellent coffee!
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