Gorreme, Cappadocia and Nemrut Dagi

The following entry was written at the time of the activities listed, however a ban on our blogging website by the Iranian government has prevented us from posting them until now:

The next 3 days of our adventures saw us travel to the area of Gorreme and Cappadocia famous for it’s buildings and caves created out of sedimentary and metamorphic rock formations.

On the day that we travelled to the campsite, we stopped for a couple of hour long trek through the Ilhara Valley, which is a river side walk littered with a number of caves in the rock face that we converted into churches. By now of course all of the churches are no longer used, other than as a way of extracting 15 Lira (or around £4.50) from tourists wallets! A lot of the details painted inside the churches are still visible however, and so it is worth dusting off your head torch to go and have an explore.

Painted caves in Ilhara Valley

We then carried on to the main town of Gorreme, where we stopped to take a look at the popular “underground city”. Unfortunately the site was lacking in a lot of historical details to read about, but what we were able to gather was that the city was excavated underground to be used in the event of an invasion with the main city being captured. The structure consists of 8 levels of rooms from a church to food storage facilities, and employs features such as round stone doors with weapon holes to holes in the floor / ceiling to pour boiling oil on any potential foes.

The afternoon then saw a very unfortunate development. After we stopped off to buy the food for our dinner that evening, we reboarded the truck only for it to refuse to start! Around 90 minutes later a team of specialist Scania engineers were called and a faulty starter motor was diagnosed. So whilst repairs were taking place, the amusing sight of 19 people and all their bags attempting to fit into a minibus was witnessed by several astonished looking locals.

On the second day Vicky and I spent the morning scrambling around some of the rock formations opposite the open air museum (we were too tight to pay to go in as the free stuff on the other side of the road was actually more fun and with far less people!).

In the afternoon we went to a carpet shop that was owned by the same guy that owned the campsite we were staying at. The highlight of the afternoon was the free lunch that we got for going to listen to their talk about carpets (it might actually also be the reason why several of us actually went at all!), and as Derek bought 2 carpets we didn’t have to feel guilty about just going for the food!

Crazy rock pillar formations in Gorreme

The highlight of our stay in the region though was taking our very first hot air balloon ride, soaring above the amazing landscape and drifting with the wind for an hour. The pilot was able almost effortlessly to guide the balloon up and down between the valleys, often with only a metre to spare between the basket and the cliff edge. It certainly was a rewarding experience and something that I would like to do again in the future. During the flight we made use of the 2 cartons of wine that Mat and Saskia placed in a “secret box” that we were forbidden to open before we crossed the border into Asia, and they went down very nicely considering it was only 6am!

Thanks to Mat and Sas for the in flight drinks!

The next morning we made our way to Nemrut Dagi national park, which is the home of the fallen headed statues on top of the mountain there. We climbed the final stretch of the mountain at both sunset and sunrise the following morning, but unfortunately it was so cloudy that the views were not spectacular at all. The statues were discovered on top of the mountain during the mid 19^th Century by a German transport official who was looking for new transport routes, but what he was doing on a mountain in Turkey is anybody’s guess! The heads of the statues are all on the ground in front of the bodies, and this is thought to have resulted from a number of earthquakes, as the parts of Eastern Turkey that we are now in are prone to quakes. Since the middle of the 20^th Century work was completed to make the statues into a tourist attraction, with entrance to the national park costing 8 Turkish Lira (or around £3.50).

Headless statues at the top of Nemrut Dagi National Park

From here we make our way out of Turkey and into Iran for 2 weeks, before we make a break from the main group to head to India for some independent travel, while the remainder of the group travel through Pakistan.