Month: December 2006

By taking us further than we could have gone on our own, today’s tour was very worthwhile. Starting in Goreme, we visited the eight story underground city of Derinkuyu: hewn from solidified lava and used by Christians to hide from attacking Arab armies. The amount of effort that must have gone into construction must have been immense, with dozens of large rooms per level and hundreds or thousands of tonnes worth of rock to extract to the surface. While both my father and I found some of the passages extremely low – I was hunched over with my small backpack scraping the ceiling – many of the rooms were impressively large.

After a forty-five minute drive through tiny villages and barren countryside, we arrived at the lip of the Ihlara Valley. The small river at the bottom, about as substantial as Mosquito Creek in North Vancouver, is the only running water we have seen so far in Turkey. The canyon was somewhat deeper than Capilano Canyon, and was likewise composed of layers of hardened lava from nearby volcanoes. Walking through it, we had a chance to get to know the other members of the group. I got to talk shop with a fellow photo enthusiast wielding a Leica rangefinder.

After walking down the valley for an hour, we had lunch and headed over to the Selime Monastary. Like the underground city, it was composed of rooms carved from volcanic rock. It was unusual in that it was carved into some of the large conical rock structures that are all over the countryside here. Inside are about fifty rooms, some large cathedric spaces with upper galleries. The whole place was like the ultimate fantasy of any child who has built a fort, and it ranks among the most enjoyable things we have seen in Turkey. Leaving the tour group to explore some galleries and passages with Ivanka – my headlamp and MagLite being put to use – was excellent fun.

Most tours in Turkey seem to involve a ‘demonstration,’ in which the group gets led through the shop of a very expensive merchant and given apple tea. Today’s was a shop dealing in precious and semi-precious stones. To me, all the jewellery, vases, and miscellaneous other things looked just like the stuff that gets trucked out at garage sales and sold at second hand shops. It may be made of Onyx and weigh three times as much but, to my eye, it looks exactly like the cheap plastic knockoff and just as ugly.

To those who find themselves in Goreme, I recommend Andromeda Tours (though agencies and hotels seem to change names often here). Their price was good for a tour that went so far, had such a capable guide, and included a good lunch.

Tomorrow’s plan is fairly amorphous, but will probably centre around walking in the countryside and visiting the open air museum. Tonight, the plan is raki and backgammon, followed by a traditional Turkish dinner being made by the family that owns the place where we are staying.

Best wishes to all, from cold fingers.

Typing with gloves on, it seems appropriate to note that Cappadocia is much colder than Istanbul. As we walked through a valley of odd sedimentary rock formations beside the town of Goreme, there was still a thick layer of frost on the shaded patches of browned grass. The general feel of the place is that of a desert at night: as became apparent as I first glanced out the bus window as the dawn was breaking.

Goreme is definitely a tourist town in an off season. After eight hours here, we know most of the tourists by name. Of the nine hotels we looked into, two were unlocked but entirely unmanned. In the end, we chose to stay at the Panorama Pension, which has some excellent rooms and a very friendly family as owners and operators. The yoghurt and fruit syrup (I will need to look up the name when I have my food book with me) that they served along with breakfast was superb. I am looking forward to the traditional Turkish dinner, modified to be more vegetarian, that we have been promised for one of our three nights. A word of warning to devout vegetarians or vegans travelling in Turkey: almost all cooked meals, from kebobs to rice pilav, apparently involve meat or seafood broth. Apparently, most restaurants do not consider such broths to negate the ‘vegetarian’ status of a dish. I am pragmatic enough to accept consumption of such as the price for not surviving on pretzels for the next seven days.

Tomorrow, we are going on a tour that takes in 200km worth of sights that we would never have been able to reach by our own devices. That said, the 25 Lira (C$20) cost of renting a moped for a day is somewhat tempting. I’ve never ridden such a vehicle, and this might be an unusually good place to try it out – with the minor caveat that hospital facilities are probably far distant. The five seconds or so I once spent riding Astrid’s moped on campus at UBC have made me curious about further exposure.

After fourteen hours on the bus with negligible sleep, I have no doubt that I will sleep well tonight. Likewise, given a shower with a ‘hot’ tap that delivers liquid no warmer than the air, I am sure I will wake up well also.

We managed to stike out a bit more from Istanbul’s standard tourist track today: visiting the university and a more conservative neighbourhood called Fatih. It made for quite a lot of walking, altogether, but it offered more of a glimpse into how city dwellers here generally live. Ivanka’s ability to pick up a smattering of Turkish very quickly has been quite impressive. She is already able to communicate desires and numbers to shopkeepers: something far beyond the capacity of my father or I. Probably, spending the last few months living just across the Black Sea has been useful, for her, in this regard.

Starting in one hour, we have a fourteen hour bus journey to Cappadocia. During the ride, I mean to sleep, write a second battery of twelve or so postcards, and give a more comprehensive look to the language book that Antonia gave me (I have already finished the one on food, and look forward to trying some Raki). We will be staying in a place called Goreme, which supposedly caters a bit more to the backpacking sort than to your standard tourists. We will be spending four days and three nights there and given how it is generally listed along with Ephesis as an essential tourist spot, I am quite sure there will be internet access.

One notable feature of Istanbul are the men (invariably men) who stand in front of every stall, shop, and restaurant and try to convince passers-by that they should enter. They are always fairly energetic about it: sometimes bordering on the aggressive. That made the following exchange that much funnier:

Man outside kebab restaurant encourages us to come in, stressing how fine an eating experience we would have.

My father: “Do you have anything without meat? We’re vegetarians.” [Actually, it’s just me, but it’s kind of him to help.]

Kebab man, incredulously: “Why?,” said as though he has never heard a more mad idea.

Us: generally shrugging shoulders, rather than trying to explain.

Him: “Then, you must go to another restaurant.”

Now, they did have vegetarian items on the menu and, in my experience, not even a restaurant called the Steak and Burgers BBQ will actually tell you not to eat there, if you are vegetarian. My vegetarian friends have frequently been reassured over the phone, to later be presented with only salad and french fry options (the latter being only dubiously unrelated to the killing of animals). It makes for an odd contrast with the people who will follow you for a block, trying to sell you a hat in which you never expressed the slightest interest.

On another note, somebody on the tour that my father and I took today who learned, at lunch, that I was a vegetarian later asked to have his picture taken with me, on account of the fact. Odd experiences, in both cases.