Blogs from Göreme, Cappadocia, Central Anatolia, Turkey, Middle East - page 4

After a not very rejuvenating nap, we headed up to thescooter rental shop. It was surprisinglycheap to rent one(35TL-about $22 for 6 hours+gas). Mom decided to drive because my drivingrecord isn’t the best this year, and one more accident would probably be theend of my driving for a while. There is... read more

Wednesday 21st Sept - Scooter Safari Breakfast at the hotel again this morning. I was up at about 8am and managed to see a late traveling hot air balloon floating over Goreme. Such a cool sight! I asked Zak if he wanted to go up in a balloon but he declined saying it was too expensive. It is pretty expensive, but at 120 euros it's actually cheaper than what we paid 6 years ago to do it. I think that is because competition has stepped up, when we went last time there were about 6 balloons all up, now there are 118 that go up daily! Unreal! Not a bad rate of growth over just a few years. Anyway, I think we could have stretched the budget to cover the flight, but perhaps Zak is still ... read more

Sunday 18th Sept - Ankara to Goreme, Cappadocia After breakfast and thanks & farewell to our hosts, we caught a taxi to the nearest metro station and caught a metro that took us to the bus station. Naively, we arrived at the bus station at 5 minutes before 11 thinking we would be able to get tickets on the 11am bus out of Ankara to Cappadocia. It's Sunday morning and as soon as I saw the amount of people crowding the bus terminal I realized that we were pretty stupid thinking we would get a on the bus we wanted without having pre-purchased tickets. There were just 2 different bus companies that were going directly to Goreme, but of course now it was just minutes, even seconds, before 11 and I was not surprised when both ... read more

Wow, what a day! It started early - we had to rise at about 4:40am to be ready for our 5am pick-up. There were many different minivans picking up people from the hotel. Ours were Butterfly Balloons. First, they took us just down the road to their offices, where we had some breakfast and where allocated to our pilots (they have three ballons). We were to fly with Captain Mike, and English man who's been flying balloons in Cappadocia for the last twelve years. We then got onto minibuses - one for each balloon - the sign on ours said Grandpa Mike. We drove out of Goreme to the launch site. Along the way we saw many other balloons being inflated and taking off. Our launch site was a little further away, but Mike had been ... read more

Well after a quick and quiet overnight in Antalya it was back to Cappadocia where we first started our Turkey adventure. This was good as we were not in Cappadocia very long the first time and did not get to enjoy the wonderful sights and experiences it had to offer. As some background, Cappadocia is famed for its underground cities (created by the early christians when escaping Roman persecution), houses carved into rock, fairy chimnies (wierd rock formations created by the elements), and pottery. We were somewhat excited about returning, mainly because we knew we had three nights in one location, which is always welcome, and also because we knew we were staying in a very nice hotel with great food. Also the temperature does drop to the low twenties which was also welcome. Upon arriving ... read more