Geology rocks...

Wednesday here, we're settled into our hostel in Goreme, which is stunning!

Monday we did basically nothing until 3.30 when we saw the Temple of Artemis in Selcuk and the local museum. The temple used to be one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, but now it's barely even a pile of rocks. You do get a sense of scale from it but it also shows just how impressive it is when something survives 2500 years because so much doesn't survive. Museum was small but well put together. Saw a 2000 year old backgammon table and a lot of busts. Someone "christianised" a bunch of them by scraping crosses in their foreheads sometime in the last 1000 years. Classy.

Tuesday we got the bus to Pamukkale and we didn't really know what to expect but had heard good things. Those good things were so underplayed! Pamukkale was amazing - it's a stark white ridge line with water cascading down it into small terraced pools and across rock slopes. You walk up barefoot and can go into some of the pools. It was beautiful, a lot of the photos look like glaciers. If you put someone up there in ski gear it would look right, but they would probably die of heat stroke. I would love to go back one day and spend the entire day there, from sunrise onwards.

Night bus from there to Goreme, in Cappadocia. Cappadocia is famous for its "fairy chimneys" - huge rock towers across the region. It's all blah blah erosion/geology/magic but the end result is phenomenal. Goreme is built in amongst these outcrops with houses, including our hostel, built into the rock. Today we're going to do a walk of the area. Peggy didn't sleep well on the bus so she's napping in preparation for the snappy pace I'll set ;) Tomorrow we're doing a tour of some of the further away sites including an underground city and a valley where early Christians hid from... the bad guys. Whoever the bad guys were at the time.

All caught up here and in my journal and still on budget - one week in and I'm still passing for a grown up.