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Published: November 15th 2010
The Underground city
Take me down to an underground city where the grass ain't there and the girls are pretty....We headed out to tour Cappadocia on our bus after returning from out dawn balloon flight.
Our first stop of our tour of Cappadocia was the Underground City (2*+); this was an unexpected stop for me as I hadn't read the itinerary in minute detail but it was quite a highlight. During times of conflict the people in the Cappadocian area had built underground rooms hewn from the soft Tuffa stone. Over years the carved out rooms were linked together with halls and tunnels and eventually expanded to such a degree that new levels where built deeper in the stone to house more people, animals, and produce. The city we visited had up to 18 levels underground!! We toured a couple of levels and saw storage rooms for wine, living rooms and bedrooms, and the linking halls and tunnels between each area. It was very close and claustrophobic and a few people on the tour made an early exit as it was freaking them out, the huge number of tourists packed in there didn't help things either by making it much more cramped and close.
The claustrophobia inducing highlight was the whole group walking through a narrow oval shaft about
4 feet high and only about 1 metre wide, with people blocking the way front and back you literally were stuck in the narrow rock tunnel awaiting people to keep moving ahead; it's amazing people would choose to live this way!
The underground city was certainly an unusual and unique sight but we were all a bit relieved to get out and back into the fresh air.
Next stop was a typical tour 'junk' stop to a Jewelry Store which our guide re-assured us had the highest quality tat around. The views over the road near the jewelry store were down a sweeping valley with the stereotypically Cappadocian stone formations of rock chimneys and small windows and doors where people lived and we spent more quality time looking at this valley than we did in the store.
Our lunch was at a nice outdoor gazebo where we sat on low cushioned benches, we lunched on Turkish pastries which were very light pastry pies filled with tasty ingredients like mince & onion or vegies. We enjoyed our pastries greatly then Alicia shared an apple dessert one with another in the group and we set forth for the Goreme Valley (3*).
GV had very large yellowy rock spires which had a few early Christian chapels carved out. Our guide took us in a few chapels and explained them but we found the chapels quite forgettable with fairly primitive meaningless blue/ red wall painting in small carved out caves, and the highlight of GV was to be had looking outdoors at the vistas and valleys of amazing stone formations. We had a decent goats milk vanilla icecream there too.
We arrived at the aptly named 'Fairy chimneys' (2*) at sunset and a number of us were very pissed off with our guide for having wasted so much of our daylight at the Jewelry shop when the FCs were such a major outdoor highlight we now barely had light for.
We all set off at a run to clamber up to suitable positions on the rocky hills to get the last views before the sunset of the funny chimney shaped stone formations which consist of a stronger cap of stone on top of a chimney of weaker more easily eroded stone; they form remarkable formations, some amusingly phallic. We had some nice sunset photos then some time to wander around and enjoy the
Rock Passageway
A passage cut through the rocks of Cappadocia landscape in the dusk light
We arrived back to our hotel that night with a billion other guests all crowding for the lift, in a hurry to eat dinner and rest before we had to go out that night for a Turkish culture show Alicia demanded we climb the steps to our room. This was a grave error as, already exhausted and grumpy Alicia tripped going up the steps and smashed her left knee cap falling up the stairs- the same knee that had just recovered after smashing it in Paris.. Everyone in the group looked on in horror as she wept in pain and we got her to a chair in the stairwell lobby; I reassured everyone she was always hurting herself and she'd be fine....
With Alicia incapacitated with her bad knee and us both already very tired from a very long day we decided to withdraw from the nights culture show and we carefully hobbled Alicia down to dinner said goodnight to the group and after food got back upstairs to rest and recover.
That was the painful end to our otherwise fabulous and jam packed day in Cappadocia, we couldn't recommend it enough, especially
Pointy Rock houses
See all the doors set into the stone formations the balloon ride.
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Cappadocia sights
We never descended as far as you did down in the Underground City. I felt too enclosed. It was fascinating though . We loved Goreme valley and all the rock formations and fairy chimneys. Its a place in the world not to be missed. Photographers heaven !!