A search for an Urgup that ends in a bus chase

Cappadocia is a region that was formed more than 10 million years ago when three volcanoes began erupting dropping lava, mud, and ash all over the region.  Over eons the byproducts of Mt. Erciyes, Mt. Hasan, and Mt. Melendiz cooled and compressed to form tufa, a soft porous rock that is easily worn by erosion.  Wind and water shaped the rocks creating the cones and Swiss cheese look.  Harder rock on top resisted the erosion longer and often ended up perfectly balanced on top of tall cones.  The result is a “giant outdoor sculpture garden” full of “fairy chimneys” and other rock formations in various shapes and sizes.

The Christians established communities here because they found the “otherworldly landscape” aesthetically pleasing and served their needs to hide from persecution.  They carved hundreds of churches and towns into the soft rock and used preexisting caves as homes. 

We stayed in the town of Goreme which is where the Goreme Open-Air Museum is.  Our first full day in Cappadocia started with a Turkish breakfast buffet which consisted of bread, tomatoes, cucumbers, hard boiled eggs, spreads of some sort, and tea.  We formulated the plan for the day and decided that the best place to start was the museum.  It was the one thing we all wanted to do and we knew where it was after getting lost the day before.

The museum is a fairy chimney valley that is a prime example of how the community was set up.  There is a little bit of everything, including a very extensive collection of frescoed churches.  This rock was a six story convent which had a kitchen, refectory on lower levels and a chapel on the third. 

More rock formations surround the area showing off pigeon or dove holes.  I’m still a bit confused on what the real purpose of these was.  I know they would attract a dove to the hole and then either use it for religious ceremonies or just having the dove around was considered a religious plus?  I’m not real sure.

This was a super long dining table.  We thought it may have been a latrine at first, but a tour guide informed us that it was a dining room that could seat up to 40 people at a time.

The Elmani Kilise or Church with the Apple had amazing frescoes.  We weren't supposed to take photographs but the guard went for a cigarette break so I was able to take a few snap shots here.  So much time, and lay on your back painting went into this church. 

Dad and I posing for a photo with the museum around us. 

This was something we hadn’t run into yet.  This is a girl’s field hockey team and they came running up to us “Hello!” “Where are you from?” “What is your name?”.  They were very excited to be able to see Americans

and practice their English.  We were swarmed, but it was sort of fun giving them first hand experience.

This rock was on the way out.  I’m sure there was some significance to it, but I never found out what.  There were people still living in some of the rocks in the area which was pretty cool, but this one seemed to be unoccupied. 

After our visit to the museum, Doug and Shanna wanted to go hiking in the vallies.  Dad and I were meeting my Aunt Karen for dinner later that evening and decided we weren’t quite up for a hike after the day before so they said we could drop them off and then have full use of the car as long as we found them later.  Everyone was happy with the arrangement so we dropped them off at the beginning of the Rose Valley hike and continued driving up the high way in search of a rock formation we had seen on a post card labeled “Urgup”.

And we found it!  The post card called it “The Three Sisters”.  We just thought it looked cool and once we knew what city to look in, we just had to look for the tour buses and sure enough there it was!

Dad and I asked a very nice German man to take our photo in front of our Holy Grail.  There was some sort of work visa program or something with Germany awhile back so there are buses full of German speaking people that visit Turkey.  I had no idea.

The rock on top is a harder stone that hasn’t been effected by erosion as much as the soft tufa rock underneath.  It looks like the bottom rock is wearing a hat.

I like this side of the rocks because you can see a little carved ladder leading up to what appears to be a room or hiding spot of some sort in the rock.  If you look really closely you can also see a man down there which puts the size of the rocks into perspective.

Dad and I ventured into town for lunch and stopped at a bar in the middle of town.  The hotels here seemed a little nicer than Goreme, but it was still a tourist centered town.  When we parked the car we saw a guy with a bright yellow vest walking around and putting tickets on windshields.  Clearly looking lost a man at a travel agency asked if we needed help.  When we turned around and saw the slightly large man with the NY Yankees hat on speaking perfect English Dad asked if he was from New York.  The man laughed and had apparently spent a couple of years there.  He informed us that it was a lira to park in Urgup and to just give the parking guy the money.  Easy as that.

Lunch was a hamburger and fries, the only thing we could recognize on the poster of what food could be served where we were, and an Efes.  We sat and watched a man smoke his hookah and then the rain started to come down.  At that point it was time to at least head out of town.  On the way out we passed the Turasan Winery which I remembered reading about in the Fodor’s book so we stopped and went on the tour for 10TL.

Turasan is a label that was started in Cappadocia in 1943 making 3,000LT and by 1972 was making 2,161,000LT.  Dad is posing in front of the crest that was located in the collection room.

This is the collection room.  It was my first tour of a winery but I thought it was pretty cool seeing everything on display like this.

This was our tour guide.  After this photo was taken he made a comment to my Dad about how nice I looked and Dad made the comment back that he would trade me for half of the winery… I wish I could say I knew Dad was joking, but with growth like that I’m not sure he was.

We got to see where the grapes come into the room, are squished and de-seeded (no they don’t use feet anymore) and then where the wine was actually made. 

No wine tour would be complete without a tasting!  We tasted a very nice white and two reds.  The final taste, Seneler, was the best and of course the most expensive.  It was 30TL which still isn’t a lot, especially here, but we didn’t feel like carrying it around all day so we chose to pass.

The altitude and lack of humidity in the air started to get to us and after two days of getting up super early Dad and I decided to head back to the hotel for a nap before our evening out with my Aunt Karen. 

This is a much friendlier way to tell us where the hotel is than the goat heads in Konya.  It was a VW Bus with the top of a VW Bug welded on top.  Since Dad had experience with both of them we decided it warranted a photo.

After our nap we made it a quest to find my Aunt Karen’s hotel so we wouldn’t get super lost later when we had to be there.  Doug and Shanna decided to hike another valley and were in Love Valley when they called and said to take our time and that they would call when they were closer to the high way.  So Dad and I got directions (sort of) and realized Aunt Karen was staying in Nevsehir, which we passed through on the way into Goreme after the underground city. 

(On a side note Fodor’s describes Nevsehir as: “a dreadful little town that you should avoid”.  There is a very small paragraph dedicated to it and that is it.)

We found the town ok, but got terribly lost looking for the hotel.  What should’ve been a 15 minute car ride ended up being about 45 minutes because we plain out got lost.  It took a lot of patience and a few trips around a sculpture of a giant bunch of green grapes to find Aunt Karen’s hotel which was huge and stuck out like a sore thumb once spotted.

Crunched for time we managed to find Hobnob, change, and make it back to her hotel by 5:50pm.  Her tour ran a little late so we waited in the lobby and watched English news from a Chinese broadcast station and was again reminded of the turmoil that is in our current backdoor. 

We had a great visit with Aunt Karen before dinner and then joined her tour group in the hotel for a Turkish buffet.  The food was good and there was a huge selection of things to eat, but the waiters were a bit odd.  I had my first creep out moment when one of the waiters walked by and actually touched my neck and hair.  At that point I declared my dinner over and was saved by the clock when it was time to go to the show.

The tour guide was able to get us tickets to see the Whirling Dervish show that they were going to, but we had to follow behind in our car.  We didn’t mind at all and followed the bus out of the hotel parking lot.  Right as the bus was turning onto the ramp to go down to the highway the car in front of him stopped as another car was making its way UP the ramp.  The car coming up (the wrong way) scarped past the car going down and we all came to a stop as the drivers got out to talk.  Apparently the two people in the car going down were undercover cops… and the driver in the car coming up didn’t have a driver’s license.  There was a lot of discussion and the licenseless driver ended up getting into the car with the cops and they drove away.  This left his wife, mother, and small child in the car.  So the wife had to get behind the wheel and take the car wherever its original destination was.  As it turns out the wife wasn’t able to make a three-point turn to get the car facing the correct direction so Aunt Karen’s tour guide got behind the wheel, made the turn, and the woman got in the driver’s seat at that point.  I’m not sure this was the best call to make, but it happened.

Once we got on the road we realized we weren’t following a cautious bus driver… we were following a bus driver who knew a show was going to start soon and had to get people there.  This was an experience.  We were almost team driving.  Dad was watching his headlights while I was watching the street lights… flash green (which means the yellow is about to turn on)… turn yellow and then red!  That happened at least twice.  The speed limit as we knew it on these highways was 90KPH and he was going at least 120KPH.  We had seen speed traps set up all over so were hesitant to follow him, but we had no idea where the show was and didn’t have much choice.  It was a true adventure that I would compare to the Runaway Train ride at Magic Kingdom. 

The whirling dervish ceremony took place at the Saruhan Carevanserai.  It was one of the places caravans and merchants would stop on the Silk Road.  They were set up every 12 miles or so and would provide a place to rest along the way.

This was the stage that was set up inside for the ceremony to take place.  Because it is technically a religious ceremony, photographs weren’t allowed during the ceremony.

The Sema ceremony represents a mystical journey of man’s spiritual ascent through love, deserts his ego, finds the truth and arrives to the “Perfect” according to the brochure we received.  The dervish wears his head dress (his ego’s tombstone), his white skirt (his ego’s shroud), is spiritually born to the truth by removing his black cloak, and he journeys and advances to spiritual maturity through the stages of the Sema (twirling). 

The ceremony had musical dervishes who did not twirl but played and chanted the parts of the Sema.  There were 5 dervishes who did twirl and one who sort of watched and judged what was going on and then said the final prayers at the end of the ceremony.  It was an amazing thing to watch these men twirl and whirl for about 30 minutes straight with what appeared to be complete concentration.  I really enjoyed the ceremony and think that the setting helped make it special; Dad thought it was a bit slow. 

Aunt Karen and I after the ceremony.  We were able to enjoy a cup of apple cider and then her bus had to be on its way.

It was so amazing that we were able to coordinate meeting up with her.  We had a little help from her tour guide having our cell phone number, but to be in a world where we can just meet up on the other side of the world is pretty awesome.

Dad and I broke away from the bus and were able to make our way back to the hotel without any problems.  Doug and Shanna went to “Turkish Night” which was something the hotel was able to sign them up for.  They got a ride from the hotel, dinner, a preview of what the dervishes looked like, followed by scantily clad belly dancers.  Shanna’s favorite part was watching the table full of Turkish gentlemen next to her more than the actual belly dancers themselves.  Everyone got entertained and had a terrific ending to a jam packed day.