Cappadocia is about 4 hours away from Ankara on the bus, and we took the bus to the town of Goreme at 1.30 am, which meant we arrived at 5.30am in time for the sunrise. The area was busy even at that time of the morning, as there are many hot air balloon companies which take tourists to see sunrise. Unfortunately this was too expensive for us teachers, so we watched the balloons from a nearby vantage point.
It was a fantastic sight, and obviously big business for the companies in Cappadocia. The busy tourist season is April, May and September, October. The summer is too hot for tourists to explore the area. We then walked down to our hotel to see if we could check in, and we were in luck. We checked into our cave room at www.http://cappadociaufukpension.com/ which was clean and comfortable, and went in the search for some breakfast.
We were all starting to run out of steam, as we had travelled overnight straight after work, so a strong coffee was in order, along with menemen (scrambled eggs with tomato and green pepper). After breakfast we went on a search for a tour and found one that was leaving at 9.30am that was visiting Derinkuyu underground city (which is the deepest of the 36 underground cities in Cappadocia), Ihlara Valley and Selime Monastery, along with a couple of other photo opportunity stops. I am not a fan of tours, I prefer to find my own way around and go to places I want to go to, so I found the day very restrictive, but we met some interesting people and got to see some great places.
The evening was spent having a relaxing meal, and drink Cappadocia wine, which was probably the nicest wine I have found so far in Turkey, but the meal will be a separate blog!
After our night in the cave room, we had a typical Turkish breakfast in the hotel, and walked up to the Goreme Open Air Museum.
Soon after it was time to say goodbye to Cappadocia, and I hope to visit again. There is so much to see and do and two days are definitely not enough!
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