Rock and roll...

Warning: mega-blog. We had a couple quite big days so this is likely to be long.

So yesterday (Wednesday) after Peggy recovered we decided to walk to a place I picked on a map. It could have been quite the let down but instead it was amazing! We should follow all my whims...

Cavusin (with accents missing) is 4km from Goreme and has two famous churches. We walked there in about 40 minute, enjoying the view of coconut ice mountains and top heavy peaks. The colour lines are amazing, you can tell what is the softer rock because there are big red layers on top of very skinny green layers. At the town we got a bit turned around, browsed tacky souvenirs and ate ice cream before asking directions.

We found Cavusin Church, carved out of stone two stories up and painted with frescoes of bible stories. I found this youtube video of pictures: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrCjbQRw5Lk. I didn't listen to the sound, it probably has some tacky music to go with it, but it shows you what we saw. It was really stunning, I wished we had a book of explanations to go with it - even Google hasn't been able to answer all my questions!

There were lots of labyrinthian places to climb and explore, many with great views so we were intrepid and climbed into places chiselled out of the rock by hand about 1500 years ago. One of the views was of the famous fairy chimneys (that's the polite name, there are some rude jokes about them too since they're longer than they are wide.) They were close enough to reach and touch so we got some pretty wicked pictures. I'll post some here, hopefully, and some are already on Facebook.

Today we signed up to an epic eight hour, 300km tour. It was the best way to see everything we wanted to see because the alternative was taking a hundred little buses. So we started at 9.30am with a drive to Derinkuyu, an underground city.

We spent about an hour wandering around up to (down to?) 100 metres underground. The city was started in 700bc and people just kept adding to it, including persecuted Christians in 200ad. It's very extensive, goes down 200 metres and has about 8 layers. The purpose was to hide from weather, animals and enemies so the tunnels were kept quite short, to slow them down. That all added up to some very narrow, very low twisty stairways. Bent in half, trying to see ahead of you and trying not to fall, thereby causing a massive domino down the entire pathway, was something of a challenge. At one point on the long-way-down we had to squish 18 people into a passing bay the size of a large closet to let a group going up past. We saw churches, stables, bedrooms and kitchens, all underground. I wanted to buy a proper map of the place to look at it better but they only sold cartoony ones.

After that we headed to Ihlara Valley for a 4km walk by a river at the bottom of a gorge. It too was a hiding place for early Christians, and later a pilgrimage/hermit site. There are a lot of old churches and paintings in the area and it was really lovely to explore. It was very wet and green, too, which was a big change from the dry Turkey we've been seeing. Lunch was at the end of the walk, but some sloooow people (Americans, pff.) held us up at least 20 minutes - quite a long time if you're waiting for lunch after a one hour walk!

After lunch the Selime Monastery - yet another stunning location. Peggy and I loved exploring the caves and carved out rooms. We were quite intrepid and ended up high up in odd rooms and in a pitch-black area above the school. It was so much fun, we were all meant to only have 20 minutes (thanks to silly slow people) but we took about double that. Plus a million and a half photos. Just wait till I start posting those!

By this time we have climbed up and down countless stairs, hiked 4km and clambored all over a cliffside monastery so we were exhausted. A lot of people slept in the van for the ride back. We stopped briefly to look over Pigeon Valley, where people kept pigeons (surprise!) for messages, fertilizer and their eggs which were used as primer for cave paintings.

We were supposed to go to an onyx demonstration but our guide let us take a vote and we all voted home. It was an amazing day. We've got plans tomorrow for the Goreme Open Air Museum in the morning and a surprise for our viewers at home at sunset so hopefully we'll be looking at three for three.

Cappadocia has by far been my favourite location. I really think we could spend our whole two weeks here and not get bored. We've been spoiled for any less dramatic vistas, too. Show us a mountain and we'll just sneer.