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Published: August 25th 2011
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Walking on the road to the Goreme Open Air Museum What an amazing day! Today, after a leisurely breakfast (I wasn't feeling very well so Ev let me sleep in and brought me breakfast in bed) we decided to explore Goreme on foot, and try to find our first geocache (www.geocaching.com for those who don't know what we're talking about). Armed with our GPS, a tourist map, and some donairs, we set off at 12:30 heading towards the Goreme Open Air Museum, which is basically a heritage site full of carved out fairy chimneys (these rock towers that look a little like icicles, but upside down. Many of them have had several levels of caves carved into them, complete with windows and stair cases. They're pretty awesome). We managed to find the first geocache we had set our sights on, though it was a steep ad very dusty scramble up a slope to get to it. We reveled in our victory, enjoyed the view, and made our way a little further up the hill for a victory dondurma (ice cream).
We decided to keep our winning streak going, so we told the GPS to find the next closest geocache and headed that way. Alas, we couldn't find it. The area
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I'm not sure if 'nice' is the right word... looked fairly trashed, lots of broken beer bottles and old chip bags, so we think that kids might have found it and destroyed it. Oh well. Instead, we climbed to the top of a nearby hill, also carved into several rooms, and exchanged a few words with a fairly drunken Turk who made it clear that since Ev and I didn't have kids yet he would be happy to step in and try to knock me up. We left quickly.
We decided to try for one more cache, this one was further away in Rose Valley (Gulludere), so named because the sandstone is a beautiful light pink. There were two valleys that we could see between us and Rose Valley, but if we followed the bottom of the first one it should lead us around the end of the second, and to the entrance of Rose. We asked for directions from a gas station attendant who told us we could either backtrack to town and follow the road north to the standard tourist entrance to the valley, or we could take a small trail near a campsite on the road we had followed in the first place. We decided
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Finding our first cache to offroad it, found the service road that lead to the trail, and headed straight down hill into the valley. For anyone who would like to follow our route, the service road leaves the main road at N38-38.192 E 034-51.319. Follow the righthand path instead of the road wn the road splits (the lefthand side is larger and goes past a small building), and go straight down hill into the valley.
The landscape around here is so amazing because it is all made of sandstone which is being slowly eroded by wind and water, so all the valleys and mountains look like an ice sculpture which is melting. Evon described this place as the most exaggerated landscape he has ever seen, and I agree with him. Everything is rounded, off-white, and it beautifully offsets the lush greenery at the valley bottoms. We got to the bottom (which was a short way but a bit of a scramble, since sandstone tends to crumble a bit so the path was sandy and shifting) turned left, and found ourselves on a path surrounded by fruit trees, birds, flowery, bits of vegetable garden, with caves and pigeon holes studding the valley walls. The
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Victory Ice Cream!!! Sweet, sweet victory. path occasionally went through huge tunnels which look lke they were carved out by rivers, some with root structures poking through the ceilings from the trees above. It was absolutely breathtakingly spectacular.
We saw very few other people on our hike; one French tour group, a dozen or so people kitted out in full hiking gear with walking poles, and a couple of other couples, a pair of motorcycles parked under an overhang (we had seen motorbike tracks earlier - it must be amazing to ride in that valley)and a small cafe selling water, juice, and tea, but otherwise we had the valley to ourselves. We spent about 3 hours meandering, taking pictures, eating the donairs we had brought, picking fruit off trees, and feeling pretty smug about having stumbled into this place. At one point we found a ladder leaned up against the cliff leading to a small cave. We climbed up and found a bunch of notes left by other travellers from aroud the globe. We added a note of our own to the collection.
Eventually we found the entrance to Rose Valley. The going was steeper here, and quite a few small trails crisscrossed along
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Rose Valley is the red layer at the back, and our next cache was going to be on the far right. However, our path to get there would start at the bottom left of the picture, then follow the first valley all the way to the left before looping around. Good luck! the valley. These trails were harder to follow; lots of ups and downs along small footpaths which had been worn straight down into the rock in some places, winding through old churches and storage caves, around giant columns of pink rock, over ridges with spectacular views. It seemed to take us ages to make any progress towards the cache. Eventually, we realized that the cache was at the top of the cliff at the end of the valley, and that there was no way we would be able to reach it. Although sunset is officially at about 7:30, it was by now 5:30, we would lose the sun much earlier because of all the hills around Goreme, and we were still a few km from home. We decided to call it quits, but we couldn't bring ourselves to feel bad about not making our goal. The trek was so beautiful that the cache didn't matter.
We backtracked to a junction, followed the signs to another small cafe in a cave on a small plateau, had an orange juice with a couple of other travellers, and asked the owner the fastest way to get to the road. He pointed out
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Dropping down into the valley. a track behind the cafe which had been worn so deeply into the hills that it looked more like a bobsledding course than a trail. where a guy on a dirt bike bombing along towards us and figured that that was how the cafe got its supplies, and it was also likely the reason that the trail was cut so deep. The sun was just starting to set, and the view behind us as we headed out of the valley was perfect.
20 minutes (and several photo ops) later, we found ourselves on a dirt road. 20 minutes (and a trek across some farmer's squash patch) after that, we had made our way to a main road. 20 seconds after we got to the road a car pulled over for us and dropped us 2km down the road in Goreme. We had a quick shower, grabbed a bottle of wine, and made our way to our favorite little home food restaurant for moussaka and rice and baklava and tea. The whole trip took a total of 6 1/2 hours, and we walked 16km (altitude not included, and there was a lot of up and down) and drove 2km. We
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PIgeons and pigeon holes. PIgeons were an important part of life here because the locals used their droppings for fertilizer. The high nitrate concentration made it very effective and valuable. They also used the pigeons to send messages from one place to the next. are tired but extremely content, and we agree that this is one of the most pleasant and beautiful walks we've ever had, as well as one of the best days of our lives. Hooray for Goreme!
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