The rocks in Cappadocia are weird. Some tour guides say that Cappadocia looks like the surface of the moon, but frankly, if that's the surface of the moon, NASA kinda missed something. A lot of somethings. You remember the podrace scene in The Phantom Menace? - Okay, the movie was - not good - I don't want to talk about it - but Cappadocia looks a lot like Tatooine, except for the part where Cappadocia is (thankfully) neither badly computer-generated nor inhabited by Jake Lloyd.
Seriously. Star Wars. Dude, there are anti-gravity rocks! Give me Liam Neeson, give me Ewan McGregor, give me this landscape, and we're all set to film.
Actually, you can just give me either of those two in any landscape and I wouldn't argue... Anywho, this would be Yours Truly in front of an aforementioned anti-gravity rock.
Jimmer as Atlas. No, he didn't shrug.
Maeghan, notably less hardcore.
These are called fairy chimneys. From over here, I'd say that they don't look particularly like chimneys, nor especially fairylike, but hey, I didn't name them.
Having departed the anti-gravity rocks and fairy chimineys, we triptrapped over to Kaymaklı, which is a bloody massive cave complex where a thousand or so understandable twitchy Christians hid out dozen or so centuries back. Give or take a millennium. Look, the long-suffering guide was kind of sketchy on basic info.
But, quite conveniently, there is a coffee place and approximately a few thousand gift shops outside.
And Daza, chilling outside the gates. He'll be a great bouncer someday.
Inside! I am not entirely sure who had my camera at this point, but feel free to blame Maeghan. I always do.
Apparently, I was in a stable. Or what used to be a stable. A really long time ago.
The thing about Kaymaklı is that it's kind of like a massive block of Swiss cheese, but more like a massive block of Swiss cheese that was, several thousand years ago, turned into a housing complex. Before it petrified. So here would be Garet, demonstrating. The arrows taped to the walls indicate approximate directions. Because this piece of Swiss cheese is also kind of like a maze.
Also, in a rough sort of mill. Or what used to be a rough sort of mill.
I found a chapel!
Jimena, being awesome. As usual.
See? Swiss cheese. Told you. The parts covered with grating are really, really deep. Don't slip.
Also, Juliana with Ghostly Camera.
Following purusal of the gift shops, Valerio acquired a hat.
Seriously! Cappadocia is amazing! Does this look like anything on Earth to you?
Also, we found a camel. Turks are a little sensitive on the camel issue - namely, that people tend to assume that they coexist in the same geographical area. Generally speaking, they don't. However, tourists tend to like attractions involving animals, particularly funky-looking animals like camels.
Anyway, some enterprising fellow had parked a camel near a popular scenic vista. Can the Chaperone was very concerned that we should understand that camels are NOT native to Turkey. But, because we were kind of tourists, we still had to get pictures. Hence, I give you Valerio.
Again with the snazzy landscape:
Having decamped from scenic vista #4315, we headed to Göreme. The name describes both the park (Göreme National Park) and Göreme Village (contained within the aforementioned national park). Also a hiding place for early Christians, who did some extensive remodeling on the preexisting caves. The rock in Cappadocia is naturally super-soft - you can kind of scrape at it with a spoon and eventually build a rabbit warren, if you're patient and not particularly concerned with the welfare of the spoon. As I understand it, the Turkish government, in its infinite wisdom, chose to establish a high-security prison in the region. A few inmates have allegedly tunneled their way out with their sporks.
But I digress. Anyway! Göreme Village!
The thing about caves is that they're good for preserving things - Dead Sea Scrolls, Lascaux cave paintings, and - hey presto - Byzantine-era churches. And I apologize from the bottom of my heart for the quality of the images, but we were kind of forbidden from using flashes. Sad panda.
First church!
Aaaaand the notably less ornate but no less intriguing second church! It's from a different era, as I understand it (or as the guide apparently didn't understand it), but the odd little doodles on the walls are apparently highly symbolic. The turtles represent the disciples, and allegedly the peacock represents the Virgin Mary. That thing that looks like a dinosaur in the top picture is reportedly a peacock. Which equals the Mother of God.
Yeah, I don't know, either.
And in yet another cave/church, we have magnificent frescoes depciting a lady whose name I've forgotten who, sick of being harassed by the local color, prayed to God for deliverance. God responded by giving her a beard. The stratigically-positioned fig leaf hides any definitive evidence regarding the extent of any other changes...
A somewhat less controversial horse:
And then we walked from there into - I kid you not - a thousand year-old oven. Which wasn't nearly as exciting as it could have been, but, well...
More vistas:
And then we ran into the president of Portugal.
No, really. He's...somewhere in this crowd. I think he's the guy in gray. And his rather rakish security guards were very concerned that no pictures should be taken at all, so consider yourself lucky that I got this at all.
And then we stopped in another town! Which had cool backyards and really shaky bridges. Just sayin'.
And then we did that thing where we stopped and split up for lunch. Garet, Maeghan, Juliana, and I hit a tiny little eatery for knock-your-socks-off peynirli pide (cheesy bread, but so much more than cheesy bread).
Also, the eatery had cool artwork.
Juliana agrees.
Waiting at the meetup spot (which turned out, as usual, to have been moved without warning, but hey).
Having eventually tracked down the meetup point, which had quietly up and moved about five blocks north, we hit a pottery gallery. Cappadocia's got pottery, too. Intricately painted, and really, really expensive if you break it. Not that I would know. :)
And we got to see the whole production process, which was very cool.
Also, they coerced Jael into giving throwing pots a go. Turns out it's harder than it looks. Messier, too; fortunately, they'd provided Jael with a pair of coveralls, because that clay spattered.
And then, suitably impressed by the workmanship of the pottery, we were escourted into the gallery, given apple tea, and strongly urged to make a purchase (or two or three). Which seemed like a great idea until we got a look at the price tag. Anyway, the stuff was pretty.
Oh, and the exterior was quite cool.
And then we jumped to a lovely jewelery shop - again, we were walked through the process before being shown the finished product and being urged to buy, buy, buy.
And again...the product was quite beautiful. If with a bit of a painful price tag.
Following that: a valley. It was introduced to us as the Phallic Valley - aptly named, if you've any imagination - but the touristy websites call it Love Valley. I suppose some confusion can be excused, but it still strikes me as pretty funny. Now, this will take some 'splaining, so bear with me, but the Whatever-You-Want-to-Call-It Valley is shaped like a U. We entered on the left branch of the U, on the slope above the valley floor. With me so far? Good. You know when, at the beach, you squish wet sand in your hands and make those cool little piles? Yeah, the left side of the U is like that, but hard and bloody huge. So we tooled around there for a while and took lots of pictures. The landscape was fantastic.
And this...this is where Maeghan, Blase, and I staged a small rebellion. You see, we decided that after two weeks of arriving at meetup points at the appointed time only to discover that a) the point had been moved, and b) the time had been pushed back an hour. So...rather than do the sensible thing and proceed to the valley floor and the dwellings thereabouts, we instead elected to explore the rest of the U. I mean, there was a path and everything...
Mind you, it turned out that U was...not so much of a U, but rather more of a severely elongated V. Perhaps if you took hold of the bottom of the V and pulled really, really hard and then snarled it up a bit so it was more of a...chasm, I suppose.
In any case, the views were spectacular.
Maeghan's Vogue shot:
We tried to do an Epic Running Shot (tm). Exactly how successful we were, I don't know, but you'll note that Blase appears to only have one leg.
Almost out of the valley...
We eventually came out on the right end of the U, except that given the way the valley was shaped, we wound up about a quarter mile down the road from the valley's entrance and had to hike it back along the road.
At this point, we had been gone for upwards of two hours and figured that we'd probably pretty well annoyed everyone else, who we presumed had been waiting for us for quite a while. To add insult to injury, we bought ice cream cones from the gift shop on our way back to the bus. We strolled casually into the parking lot, slurping happily...and found the bus deserted.
Huh.
We wandered around a bit, still slurping our ice creams, and finally found the long-suffering guide, who informed us that everyone else was still happily occupied on the left end of the U, where we'd left them two hours ago. They hadn't even made it to the valley floor yet. Maeghan, Blase, and I were strongly encouraged to poke around the valley whilst waiting for everyone else to be herded back to the bus by the long-suffering guide.
Anyway, the valley floor was cool!
Once the long-suffering guide had chased everyone back on the bus, chastising them shrilly for dallying so long without actually seeing anything (Maeghan, Blase, and I exchanged amused glances), we set off for the Camel Valley, named for a rock formation that looks remarkably like a camel. So much for no native camels in Turkey, eh?
I honestly can't say what I thought we were doing here, but we ran into some other tourists and they were happy to get a picture of all us together...so we jumped.
Blase found a friend!
There was the most amazing rock! Blase and I posed accordingly.
As always, there was a gift shop.
And finally, one last group picture.
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