Cappadocia is on the itinerary of every visitor to Turkey, and photographs of its “fairy chimney dwellings” are some of the most recognizable images of Turkey. Most visitors to Cappadocia stay in a village called Göreme, right at the heart of the national park, and so did we. If Göreme ever was an authentic Turkish village, all that’s left of that now is a small teahouse in the center where the elders spend their day drinking tea and playing cards and backgammon. These days it looks like a sanctuary, almost like a small zoo lost between English-signed cafes, restaurants, carpet shops and tour agencies.

There’s the accomodation too, of course; the places are uniformly named “cave pensions”. We stayed in Star Cave Pension. “Cave” because the rooms are usually made to look like they were carved inside the mountain, as were Cappadocia’s original dwellings. This is actually not so far from the truth, since even now the stones used for building are often carved and polished manually right at the point of construction.

Cappadocia was home to many early Christian communities, and along with their residences, they also carved their churches in the mountain, complete with arches, cupolas and columns. The churches were richly decorated on the inside with drawings and writings in Greek. Some of it survived, some was restored; most of the faces on the drawings have been scratched off. The Göreme Open Air Museum, located just outside the city, is where many of these churches are located, however it’s completely overrun by international tour groups, shepherded along the walking paths by loud guides, each trying to out-shout the other, so we escaped quickly and went for a walk in the valleys that surround Göreme.

The exceptional rock formations that we are witnessing now are actually layers upon layers of volcanic ash deposited in ancient times, and sculpted by erosion. The early settlers of Cappadocia used the fact that the soft rock allowed them to burrow their way into the cliffs and make their homes inside them, instead of building their houses on top of them. Many of these dwellings are now partly eroded, and many others remain intact; in fact quite a few are still being used, and some even have glass windows and steel doors installed in them. The region is very much alive, and the fertile ground in the valleys is used for growing grapes, which are then made into quite decent wine.

One of the most unique ways to experience Cappadocia is to see it from above, by taking a flight in a hot-air balloon. We had never done this before so we figured this would be one of the best places to try. This is an industry that has literally taken off in recent years, and together with us there were about 60-70 other balloons flying that morning. All the flights depart together around 6:30 AM, due to unfavorable wind conditions later in the day, and it’s quite a sight to behold. Our pilot was Milto, a very friendly Greek who had retired after 24 years flying planes for Air Olympia and now spends the summer season in Turkey flying hot-air balloons. He likes it much more, quite understandably — instead of spending hours isolated in the cockpit, he now gets to meet and talk to new people every morning, and he has exactly the type of personality to make the most of that.

Milto was training a junior pilot during our flight, and together they flew us up and down and around the valleys of Cappadocia. Here’s something I didn’t know about hot-air balloon flying: it’s much more fun flying low than high. Milto took us into the valleys with the balloon, and at times it seemed that we could just crawl out of the gondola and walk right next to it. It takes a lot of expertise to do that; he claims that flying balloons is harder than flying planes, because the flight is unpowered, and the pilot must feel the weight of the gondola, the winds, the temperature and the rate of heat loss in order to control the balloon and drive the flight.

Making a soft landing is the most difficult part of the flight — the rate of descent must be controlled very finely, and usually the pilot asks the passengers to sit on the gondola floor and hold the handles during the landing because it is rarely completely smooth. Milto warned us about that before take-off, but went on to land the balloon with us barely noticing the bump. He was less careful with the champagne at the end but we will forgive him that.

From Göreme we took a night bus eastwards, towards the Kaçkar mountains; we’re now nearing the end of the Turkish part of our trip.

May 4, 2011