I had a long chain of travel ahead of me, flying from Kathmandu to Bahrain to Dubai to Istanbul to Ankara, and then five-hour bus ride into Cappadocia. Miraculously, the journey went smoothly, with a few perks along the way. On my last flight, I sat next to a friendly Turkish man in his forties, a mechanical engineer, and he took care of me for my first hours in Turkey, teaching me some things about the country and the culture. He bought my bus ticket from the airport to the bus station, accompanied me there, and helped me buy my ticket to Cappadocia. I had three hours to spare before the bus, so he bought me a subway ticket into Ankara, and accompanied me part way there. We exchanged email addresses and parted ways on the subway.
Ankara was quite a bustling city and a stark contrast to Kathmandu. Men are dashing and dress extremely well, usually in suits, and women mostly wear headscarves, it being a Muslim country. In the 1920s, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk brought Turkey into the modern era. He moved the capital from Istanbul to Ankara, then a nothing city, and made changes to secularize the country (separating religion and government), distinguishing it from the Arab countries and making it more a part of Europe. Ataturk is now the country's revered father figure, with images of him in every household and many business places. It's against the law to say anything bad about him, and people actually get thrown in jail for it.
I wandered around Ankara and came across a huge mosque. I sat for half on hour in the back, watching a service, in awe of the ceremony, singing, and architecture [note there is a video from this mosque in my next blog entry, titled "Istanbul"]. Men stand along the front wall which faces Mecca, while women are confined to small, screened areas in the back of the mosque. Women are often paid half of what men make at the same job, but the president has been a woman, and things seem to be changing.
After the last leg of my epic journey, I was the one person to get off the bus in Göreme, after 9pm. The town was dark, dead, and quite spooky, with a few huge dogs wandering around. I quickly found a place to stay and slept heavily.
My incredibly inhospitable hotel manager drove me to find a different place to stay for the duration of my time in Göreme, and after some wandering around the close to 100 hotels, pensions, and guest houses in town, I settled into the Phoenix hotel, with friendly, young proprietors, good prices, delicious Turkish breakfasts, and a comfortable terrace that overlooked town.
I loved my Turkish breakfasts, which consisted of a hard-boiled egg, a slice of bologna, sliced tomato and cucumber, a slice of special Turkish cheese, olives, packets of honey, chocolate spread, jam or butter, tea, and a huge basket of fresh white bread.
Surprisingly rested on my first full day, I wandered around town past some children jumping rope, taking in the alien landscape that makes Cappadocia famous. The area used to be actively volcanic, and the ash that covered the land has eroded in strange and beautiful ways over time by rain and wind.
For dinner on my first evening, I enjoyed a chicken döner sandwich, shaved from a familiar rotating vertical skewer of meat. After, I had my first of three evenings of incredible baklava at the town patisserie.
My second day, I went on a day-long guided tour of the region's sites. A luxury minivan shuttled a group of eight of us through flat lands surrounded by distant snow-capped mountains to explore an underground city, take in some beautiful vistas, look at frescoes later defaced by Muslims, Byzantine churches dug out of the rock, and go on a nice hike through a ravine opened up by an earthquake. I had dinner and then went to a bar with two Aussies my age from the tour. It was a nice change to have an evening out.
My last day, I went to the famous Göreme open air museum with its Byzantine churches and impressive, well-preserved frescoes. Later, in town, I had some quality internet time where there was an impromptu Anatolian jam session as the proprietor served us free tea.
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