I almost slept through the 4:40 call to prayer. Almost. If there is such a thing as aural chaos, it is having three mosques next to each other.
Well we were awake at 7 and the bus leaves at 9. If there are problems getting to the bus terminal, which I doubt, best to get them out of the way early. We put on full packs and head down to the desk. Nobody was at the desk. We knocked on the desk, but nobody came. I left 8,000,000TL on the desk with the key.
A mini-bus comes a way down the street and we run for it and ask “Otogar?” The driver shakes his head yes. Evelyn sits down in back. The driver gestures to me to take off my bags then to sit next to him in the front seat. This is sort of a place of honor. Drivers will frequently have a friend in this seat to talk to. Often the person in this seat will make change. He ask the usual questions. What language I speak. Where I am from. That sort of thing. Mostly we just drive and I see the streets and we listen to Turkish music. He has the money he has collected on a tray next to me. He moves it to the dashboard. Friendship is one thing, responsibility is another. When we get to the Otogar I thank him using the longer form. “Chok teshekul ederim.” I get a big friendly handshake. These are the most friendly people in a country we have visited since China.
We got our ticket and sat down to wait. Our next challenge was getting breakfast. There were three stands in the bus station. All had almost exactly the same selection of baked goods. I went to the one near where Evelyn was sitting. I asked for a corn muffin and a pizza, 100,000TL and 200,000TL respectively. The boy behind the counter was surprised I wanted pizza at this hour. I nodded. Crazy American, I guess. I was told to pay the cashier first. You pay first and bring a receipt. I did. They grilled the pizza. Actually it was like a roll a foot long topped with meat, cheese and onion, though not much of the latter. Hot? Yes. So he folded it in half and grilled it on something like a waffle iron. It was pretty good. I wrote for a little while.
We get on the bus. There is a lot of arguing about something as the bus starts to leave. I suspect they have oversold the bus. They sell seats, not rides. A family of four can ride for the price of two if they keep the kids on the parents’ laps.
We pass by a field where the army is training. The drill instructor sees the bus and waves at it.
Apparently if you total your car in an accident the state gets it and then leaves it at the side of the road as a ghoulish reminder to drive carefully. Usually you see this along rural roads but Konya had one in the center of town with a mannequin impaled on the broken windshield and basted with plenty of fake blood.
The radio playing on the bus has a time tone but time tones vary by as much as two seconds here depending on where you hear them,
The countryside is not really very interesting. These are the Steppes of Turkey. It is pretty flat. You see herds of sheep tended by shepherds.
There was a dead sheep by the road. I figure the shepherd leaves it there as a ghoulish warning to the other sheep to stay out of the road.
We stop at an otogar and the man ahead of me tells me that we will be here for ten minutes. I pass the word back to the English-speaking couple behind me. I bought a “bagel” at the stop and we talked to the people from behind us on the bus, a New Zealand couple who had not been to Anzac Day. They are also going to Goreme. We discussed the food and other pleasantries. They had been to LA, New York, and Israel. We discussed how friendly the Turks were compared to the Israelis. I wrote and napped a little.
At about 12:25 I saw an interesting rock formation in the distance and thought it would be good to get a picture. It looked like a big termite mound. The road took us closer and closer until we were in amongst what looked like a whole colony of termite mounds. The bus steward tapped me on the shoulder saying this was where I get off. Sure enough this was Goreme. By the time we were off the bus our luggage was on the ground. The strange squalling sound I had been hearing turned out to be a chicken who did not want to go into a small box in the luggage section. Frankly I am on the chicken’s side. It would have to be a contortionist to fit in the box and certainly would not want to travel that way. I was rooting for the chicken.
Now I wanted to see where the heck I was. Goreme is a bunch of homes and hotels dug into strange Utah-like rock formations. Yup, this is where we are staying for the next few days. There is a tour and accomodation center. We heard about a place to stay, the Melek. Okay, we set out for it with full pack. It is a climb up a hill to get to it.
There is a local place called the Flintstones Hotel. Except that the rock formations are more pointed and conical and that the place is more hilly than Bedrock that is a pretty good description. You are either living in a cave or a rock building built into a hill.
We climb, having some problem finding the Melek in part because an arrow fell off one of their direction signs. Evelyn finds a souvenir along the way, the part of jawbone of a sheep complete with three or four molars.
We ask to see the room and find it a big climb up, even from the lobby. There is a common area like a porch for four rooms that looks like a piece of a grape orchard. The shade is provided by vines hanging over crossbars.
The rooms are the tiniest yet but the look and feel is amazing. If I wanted to put myself someplace exotic, this is it. Descrbing this place is just not sufficient. This is the kind of place I never expected to get any closer to than pictures. Evelyn says that this is our cheapest international trip yet. If you don’t count airfare India was cheaper, but this was the cheapest all inclusive trip on a per-day basis. And as I look from our patio I cannot believe what it bought us.
Goreme is part of the region of Cappadocia. The Cappadocian Fathers who were the followers of St. Basil came to this region and here carved churches into what were really volcanic chimneys. There are hundreds of volcanic chimneys that are easy to hollow out to create buildings. These days the area has been discovered and there are efforts underway to protect the beauty. Part of the reason we chose the Melek is the owner is supposedly a leader in that preservation.
We probably should have run out right away to get some pictures but Evelyn wanted to wash her hair and I really wanted to get my log entirely up to date. I also want to take it all in. I feel like I have fallen into an issue of the National Geographic.
So we are sitting on our porch looking across at a cliff-dwelling family who seem to raise chickens. Every once in a while one of the chickens or people comes out of the home for one thing or another.
Well we had to make arrangements so we climbed down the hill and walked into town. That takes all of about 10 minutes. Evelyn stopped and talked to a New Zealand couple. They recommended Flintstone Travel to book a tour of the area so we did. That seems to be the most common nationality here. Actually the travel agencies all seem to off the same three tours and seem to designate them exactly the same way. There is the red tour, the yellow, and the blue. I bet they all charge the same for them. So it makes comparison between travel agancies very easy. And pointless.
The woman at Flintstone Travel was also from New Zealand. She was on her first day and we got into about an hour conversation about travel, local food, politics, and a number of other topics. I asked what was happening to New Zealand’s currency. It seems it has been very unstable and headed very much downward.
After that it appeared to be ready to rain hard so we figured that we ought to get out of it. 5pm was early for dinner but we’d had little real food. We went to a restaurant called the Sedef. I had Ayran and a dish that turned out to be chicken, cheese, and tomatoes in a clay pot. Evelyn had chicken and couscous and Raki, an anise flavored liquor. While we ate the sky opened up for our benefit with lightning and thunder, though not enough of either to be exciting. For desert I had Fresh Fruit with Honey and Yogurt. That was fairly good.
After we eat we go to a grocery and get a package of Turkish Delight just to try it.
From there it was back to the room. We were sitting inside our small room when we heard people on the patio talking English with a North American accent. “Ah, someone to talk to,” I think. I take a look outsiede the window and see someone who looks familiar. “Hey! I know him!” “Who is it?” asks Evelyn. I have to think for a moment. “Sammon. Pat Sammon.” Yup, the people we met going from Istanbul to Canakkale, in Canakkale, in Sardis and again in Selcuk. They had gone their own way and had ended up at the same hotel in Goreme. I just caught a flash of him receding around a corner. I go to the manager’s office. There is Pat registering. We are in room 20, he in 21.
We get caught up with them on what had happened since. They had gone to some more restful sites. I think Pat and I have both had digestive problems. They are not sure which tour to take. We suggest they join our tour. They agree it is a possibility and ask how to find our tour office. I suggest we walk them. So we head back into town and take them to Flintstone Travel. The woman is surprised to see us again. Not as surprised as we are to be here. One of the chimneys supposedly contains a pre-Christian church. We go to see it and it is in a restaurant. We look at the doorway in and it looks like a storage room for cleaning materials. The owner of the restaurant says that we should walk in. So we do only to discover he is decorating the inside like one would a van. It will be a music club. At least until the loud music damages the chimney.
After that the plan is to try to find a high place that we can see over the entire town. We do some climbing but do not manage to find any place easy to go. We are at 1000 meters or about 3300 feet. That makes breathing something of an effort. Though it is one effort we are anxious to make, at least considering the alternatives.
We find a relatively high place that gives a view. As we are admiring it a woman comes out of a house just to be friendly and talk to the foreign strangers who have come up her road.
We do a little more exploring and then go back to the hotel. We sit in the lounge, drink apple tea, and talk to the small, soft-spoken Nico Leyssen, the owner. He is Dutch with a close-cropped moustache and beard. He always seems have sunglasses and to wear jeans, a cream-colored turtleneck and a black vest. He is trying very hard to save this region from developers who would do things like put music clubs in the chimneys and who want to put of concrete buildings all over. He has political enemies and has been thrown out of Turkey twice and has had to sneak back in. Part of the reason he can get back in is that the “y” in his last name is a “j” in his own country and there is no “j” in Turkish. That causes confusion when he is looked up in the database. He has to leave but we continue to talk. I say the the big developers really should be stopped, but there are local people who are just trying to make a living here and they will be a problem. You really hate to tell them they have to lose their jobs to protect the feel of the area.
The conversation drifted and then settled on the Y2K problem. We told the Sammons some reasonable precautions to take.
Back at the room we opened a package of Turkish Delight and I had my first sample.
There is a classical radio station that we can just barely get. I listen to that until they switch over to jazz. Why do classical station have this tendency to play jazz, even here? Jazz stations don’t feel compelled to play classical music. A lot of jazz seems to me formless and unmelodic. I wake up at 11pm and realize I had fallen asleep writing. I turn off the light and go to sleep in earnest. This involves going over to the door since that is the only switch that controls the light over the bed. That gets dust on my feet since like desert areas the dust seems to just blow in and cover things. By the time I am in bed I am fully awakened and it takes a good half hour to fall asleep. But I don’t wan to turn the light back on and awake Evelyn.
