Travel writing from my study abroad program in Turkey; the Burch Field Research Seminar through UNC-CH. Five weeks in Istanbul, two weeks traveling Western Turkey. Awesomeness.

Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Cave Dwelling

After a brief lunch stop in Konya on Wednesday after leaving our village, we met back up with the Fez Bus and tour guide Amanda. Thankfully it was Amanda and not Bridgette (who we had once before and was kind of unpleasant.) We loaded up and found some of our old friends, most notably the two Kiwis who crack us up. Clayton can especially do a great impression of them.

We stopped briefly on the road to Cappadocia at an old kervansaray (Caravan Palace), which was intact and restored to great condition. We spent some minutes exploring its massive trading room divided up by columns, and then it was back on the Fez Bus.

We arrived in Cappadocia around 6:00 thrilled to find out our hotel had cave rooms. Okay, I know what you’re thinking, “Cave rooms? What kind of hotel are you staying at?”

It’s hard to describe Cappadocia and thus why we were thrilled to stay in cave rooms; it’s really probably the strangest place I’ve ever been. First of all, Cappadocia is more of a region, not a city or town. The Cappadocia region is situated between tectonic plates and volcanoes dot the area. The ash from hundreds of thousands of years has built up forming a soft rock type surface that’s very irregular. It’s kind of a tan color and is very crumbly. We joked that you could take a spoon to it and probably carve out a room. Because of its composition and irregular formation, it has been used for a few millennia as a place of residence. People over these last few millennia have carved out their homes in the rock. Even today, there are plenty of people who live in the rock whether if its in standalone style almost ice-cream cone buildings or built into a cliff.

It’s all very absurd sounding, and believe me, it’s very absurd looking as well. In our trek over Cappadocian valleys, we would look up and see ancient windows that have been carved into the rock. We explored many out of the way caves to find the walls blackened from centuries of fires. Pigeon holes decorated many of the areas and near them you would often find some sort of arched window or door that opened up into midair.

Cappadocia is greatly known and pushed as a Christian and Hittite settlement. Part of this, as we have discussed among ourselves, I believe is draw in Western tourists with Western money, but in truth, it was a great early Christian center. Thousands of small cave churches can be found; many of them decorated with frescos of the life of Christ; various saints, and of course, the Virgin Mary.

Cappadocia is really more like a moonscape with earth, trees, and rivers splashed in between. Though there are plenty of signs of life from over the years, it’s hard to imagine people actually living in them and using them as part of their daily life. We saw plenty of Cappadocians still living in the soft rock during our stay and it was always gave me a pause when I would look up and find a rock formation with a satellite dish sticking out of a window.

So there was plenty of reason for us to be excited about the possibility of staying in cave rooms. Unfortunately, our little inn only had two cave rooms. Drama ensues.

In the end, the smaller cave housed four people and the larger one housed six. We moved a few mattresses and after a bit of arranging, everybody sort of settled in.

We gathered at 8:00ish for supper served by the people at the inn. It was a tasty affair, but pressed for time, I didn’t quite get to enjoy my baklava desert like I wanted too. David, Edward, Kristina, Kelly, Amanda, and I ran out of the inn to catch our ride to go into Goreme, the town in the valley below where we would watch the Turkey-Germany semi-final EuroCup match. Tour guide Amanda came with the Fez Bus driver to get us and took us to a fun little bar.

We settled in and got great seats. Turkey’s miracle run ended unfortunately with a 3-2 loss. However, after a few down minutes in which both Turks and tourists mingled around the bar in melancholy, a celebration of Turkey’s success in EuroCup got started. This celebration included some great music, some weird music, some drunken Aussies, some sparkler-wielding Turks, some fire and the jandarma (military police), and me asking the Kiwis if they ate kiwis because it seemed a witty way to ask if the kiwi was good for anything.

Their response was, “Do you eat eagles?”

Lots of laugh of course.

The next day was full. Four of our group set off for hot-air ballooning at the early hour of 5:00 a.m.. I would have loved to gone as Cappadocia is suppose to be one of the best places to go hot-air ballooning, but it was a bit more than I wanted to spend. We started at 11:00 for our hike down from Uchisar where we were staying to Goreme. Our inn proprietor led us, exploring through abandoned caves and hilly paths to get an up close and personal at the strange, strange landscape that was Cappadocia.

We crashed down for lunch at Goreme sometime around 3:00 and after grabbing some ice-cream, it was off to the Goreme Open-Air Museum for a tour of a collection of churches and dwellings inside the soft Cappadocian rock. Armed with my trusty Cappadocian guidebook, I took to exploring the area by myself. The frescos inside the churches are a colorful collection and it’s interesting to compare the ones from iconoclasm to iconophile. The number of small churches is an interesting phenomenon too. However, I have to say that the biggest impression these strange dwellings gave me was that these people were small. Or there was some messed up restoration; but most of the caves built into the soft rock, free standing or in a cliff, was found as it was.

Oh, and I can’t forget the game of how many Asian tourists can you fit into a small cramped space at one time? Trust me; it’s more than you think.

After the Open-Air Museum, draining a can of Lipton Ice Tea in the space of sentence as I chatted with William, and catching a ride back up to our inn in Uchisar, it was time for supper. I stayed up with David to watch the Spain-Russia semifinal match before crashing.

We met at 10:00 a.m. the next morning to go to one of the underground cities that Cappadocia boasts. It was a bit underwhelming unfortunately because it does sound awesome. Not much of it has been excavated and apparently it is supposed to be huge. It got a little claustrophobic as the passageways were all one-way and tour group after tour group filed in. The worst was when we made it to the bottom-floor after a long trek down a tiny staircase and couldn’t make it back up because more and more tour groups kept coming down. As typical of Turkish monuments, there were no real safety measures. I stayed mostly calm, but all I could think about was what would happen if the already sketchy lights went out. Of course, I only made things worse for some of the others when I announced that we should immediately jump to the walls to avoid getting trampled by the crowds if the lights did go out.

Luckily no trampling was involved and we tail-gated behind a large tour group to make it back up to a wider section of the excavated underground city. With a bit of exploring near the exit we found a sort of an out of the way monastery that we got mostly to ourselves.

Details on the underground cities (there are at least four, I think) are sketchy whatever you may here. No historian is really sure if people permanently lived in them, just used them to escape invasion, or if they were vacation homes.

Okay, maybe we can cross out that last one. In any case, I can’t imagine living underground for an extended period of time. It’s damp, dark, and small. Again, my biggest impression coming out of the sight was that the people who used the caves were small.

After our adventure underground, we got something to eat, and then got dropped off at one end of a canyon after driving out a ways.

This was a legit canyon. The land around it was flat and bare, and then all the sudden, the earth opens revealing that the ground your standing on is more of the soft volcanic rock. In the canyon, which was probably about half a kilometer to a kilometer wide in most parts, it’s all forest with a river running through the middle of it.

It was quite a hike and I, for one, really enjoyed it. At times we would leave the path by the river, and with a bit of climbing, check out the cave dwellings built into the side of the cliff. We eventually got separated as some of us continued on while others explored the caves more extensively, but we all knew that we were to stay to the left of the river. At one point, I was with Amanda, Clayton, and Kristina in front of the rest of the group and as we climbed down over a few rocks, my arm brushed against this one plant growing alongside the path. It only took a moment for my arm to start burning. I jumped to the river as quickly as possible to splash water on it, but the skin where I had brushed against the plant was already bright red and a thick rash appeared. It hurt pretty badly, especially on the sensitive skin of my underarm, but it was hard to be in too much pain when Prince Clayton was fighting for his meter-wide peninsula kingdom against an army of two frogs armed only with pebbles.

As I had a word or two with the plant that gave me the intense burning rash just for brushing against it, we decided too wait for the others. For the rest of the trek we stayed mostly together, encountering cave churches and dwellings, farming in a national park, a random lonely outside café setup in the middle of our trek, and a donkey that Kristina and Kelly rode across the river to name a few things. There was definitely some singing involved as well and maybe, just maybe, a mystic experience.

Though I kind of got to the point, a long with some of the others, that I would only make the hike away from the river to see a church if, in Amanda’s words, Billy Graham came out of it.

We victoriously made it to end with only a few scrapes and bruises, ready for some refreshments and some swimming. The refreshment need was easily fixed and our driver took us to a nearby lake for swimming. The lake was in a crater of sorts not all that far from the canyon. As a few of us pulled a car change into our swimsuits, the rest headed down to the lake. After wading through a somewhat gross bottom and making fun of everyone as they freaked out, we were all relieved to put our feet up and float. Of course, this wasn’t good enough for our group after a while and before long, a number of us were swimming the rough kilometer in width to the other bank. It was quite exhilarating as I’ve never straight swam such a long distance before, but knowing that I could just float if I needed to rest helped ease any lingering doubts. It still probably wasn’t the smartest thing to do considering that we lacked a boat or any sort of floating device, but hey we did have a trained lifeguard.

After two long days of exploration, followed by a night in which Kristina and mine’s bed broke, we were ready for a restful day on Saturday. I gradually got myself together, had lunch, and discussion with Prof Sarah about our stay in the village and our insights into the type of life there.

Then a number of us headed out with the inn’s proprietor again for one final bout of exploration. This involved a jungle, a burning-hot metal ladder, dank caves, and a random Turk in the middle-of-nowhere with fresh-squeezed orange juice. The highlight of this trek was the large cave church. It was amazingly spacious compared to what we had seen in other places and relatively untouched with the stink of thousands of tourists like the ones we saw at Goreme.

We made it back to Uchisar to gather the others and our luggage and all pile into a van only slightly larger than a normal seven-passenger van. We were pretty impressed by the load as we all squeezed in and began our journey to Ankara.