Antalya - Cappadocia

Hello again,

As i wr‎te i am in a small town in the amazing mountainous region of Cappadocia in the south of Turkey. Once again i have had a pretty amazing last few days, altho w‎th a minor hiccup or two.

From Dalyan we drove a few hours down the coast to the slef-procla‎med 'Tour‎sm capital of Turkey' - Antalya. This is a rather large-‎sh city with a beautiful harbour and marina, and some pretty cool bazaar/market areas. When i first arrived, it didn't particularly grab me all that much - loads of smog and smoke (altho there had been a large fire which took out four small hotels just inside the old city walls which reduced visibility over the coastal to almost nought).

Our hotel was a disgrace - and we all pretty much kicked up enough of a stink that i'm pretty sure they' ve lost the custom of 'Adventure Bound', the travel company ‎'ve booked w‎th. For a start there was no heating in about 1/2 the rooms, and the hot water 'will be ready in the morning'. It's getting pretty cold in the middle of winter here now, and when we expressed our displeasure, all the manager did was shrug his shoulders in a kind of 'sorry, that's the way it is' _expression. One of the guys in the group (my roomie) was pretty smart and actually checked into another hotel and plans to present the bill to the travel company. I grabbed his blanket that night and got thru the night that way.......and had a cold shower the next morning, as did everyone else, coz the promised hot water never eventuated.

Now ordinarily these things don't phase me - i travel independently, and so i choose my own fate. But here, i have paid big money to do this, and while it is a budget-style trip, we have been staying in 2-3 star hotels so far (waaaaay better than i was expecting!!), which is apparently the norm on these trips. This place had a star rating somewhere in the negative numbers (especially in terms of attitude).

Antalya has an awesome museum. It's mostly archaeological stuff in there, but the amount of ruins from Greek-Roman times and around the era of Chr‎st that exist in Turkey is mind-boggling, and most of the excavated artefacts have ended up here. The absolute near-pristine condition that some of the statues of mythical Gods and sarcophagus' etc is amazing.

That night we departed Antalya for a 10-hour overnight bus ride to Cappadocia, arriving rather travel weary at 7am, to find our hotel didn't have our rooms ready (there's been very few tourists thru here since the off-season kicked in, they knew we were coming - surely they could get 8 rooms prepared). While we waited, we were served breakfast - which they had to go to the local market to get supplies for coz they didn't have this ready either. All we wanted to do was get a few hours decent k‎p before we checked out Cappadocia.

As it turned out, there were heating and hot water drama's here as well. My room was an ice-box, and so after 1/2 an hours frozen sleep, went down to ask my guide about getting some heating, and was moved rooms to one where the radiator actually worked. But then another 1/2 hour later we were all up and out of the hotel. Our guide had finally got fed up of being the brunt of our (legitimate) complaints, and checked us out of the 2nd negative-star hotel we came across in 2 days. Adventure Bound have 2 travel styles - Adventure (us) and Traveller (classy), and our next hotel was normally for the Traveller class - and what a place this was!!!

Cappadocia is a desert-region of Turkey, and is famous for it's bizarre rock formations caused by an ancient volcano spewing out it's lava all over the area thousands of years ago, and then erosion from wind and weather carving into the rocks and mountains. A geological quirk meant that, as far back as the 6th Century, it was also very easy for humans to dig into this earth as well, making enormous caves, and build homes, churches, mosques etc, and labyrinthine tunnels linking them all, out of the caves. Our hotel was one such cave dug into the side of a small hill. Caves fit for a king, I swear to God. And this hotel of some 20-odd rooms on at least 3 levels was decked out w‎th the most amazing Turkish decor, rugs, ornaments and bizzarro knick-knacks, it was like stepping into some kind of Arabian Nights fantasy world!

Before we came here we were told it had been snowing and got as low as minus 5 degrees during the day, and so were looking forward to seeing how the weather would pan out for us - part‎cularly a couple of Queenslanders who had never seen the stuff!!

We went exploring the area the rest of the day, checking out Zelve, an abandoned village of caves nestled in between three narrow valleys, that was lived in until around the 1950's when they were moved into more stable housing (soil erosion was particularly bad there). We then visited an underground city built into a mountainside, Goreme, which had some 7 stories (3 up, 4 down) where people could live for months at a time during times of war. There is evidence of life in these caves as far back as the 6th Century.....the mind boggles at how clever and smart these ancient people were! Another wierd spot was the 'Fairy Chimney' valley - a small area where soft sandy towers around 20-30 metres high were topped of by oddly shaped volcanic rock that looked like strange little hats!

Finally, today we went for a 1/2 day hike in an area called the Rose Valley, so called because of the colour of the rocks (caused by high iron content). When you're standing at the top of a hill, and get these rocks layered w‎th calcium-based white and sulphur-based yellow, set against a piercing clear blue sky, with sweeping desert plains littered with these wierd-ass rock formations, it makes for a pretty awesome spectacle, not to mention fantastic photographs!

Talk soon - Have a great New Year!!

Tony

peace love and happy faces