Turkey Part 9: Cappadocia’s highlights

After our "long detour" through the less visited sights of Cappadocia, we finally reach Göreme, the touristic center of the region. In a normal year we would have probably chosen a quieter village and not exactly, the most touristy place, but in a pandemic year and after several days in the pampas, everything is a little different and we enjoy the comfort of restaurants with menus and the opportunity to have a glass of wine with dinner. Although the lockdown still lasts a bit, the restaurants are open for tourists and right after May 17th  the famous hot-air balloon rides are offered again, so our plan worked out perfectly.

We are surprised by the unique location of the small village Göreme. Between the various cave hotels you see fairy chimneys everywhere and we just can't get enough of the view. In addition, there is also the Göreme Open-Air Museum with a large number of rock-cut churches, chapels and monasteries with colorful frescoes. And since we are already used to slow travel, we take this a step further now and stay for a full 10 days in Göreme. We have known before the start of the trip that we would like to spend a little more time here and stay in a cave hotel and planned an extra budget for these moments. The cave hotels are very comfortably equipped with a lot of unnecessary luxury items such as a freestanding bathtub, but it still looks nice.

Well, what can we say - we are absolutely thrilled also by this more touristic part of Cappadocia and somehow can't get enough of the fairytale scenery with remarkable rock formations in all colors and the various hiking possibilities. We initially only wanted to show you a few (okay, more than a few) pictures of the area around Göreme, but then decided to present you our personal highlights instead and so this blog might resemble more a travel guide than your usual cycling post, but who knows, maybe you'll be visiting Cappadocia one day and we can give you some ideas. We are usually not really in favor of using adjectives like "fantastic", "wonderful", "astonishing" with every second word, but in Cappadocia they really apply. So, let’s get started.

Three recommendations for your trip to Cappadocia

1.) Plan enough time for Cappadocia, the area is huge and it takes at least one week to explore the area. The easiest way to get around is with a rental car, but there are also many day tours offered, which include a visit to the main sights. Although we think this is not enough time to really appreciate these places, as the magic usually only unfolds when the tour groups are leaving.

2.) Forget about sleeping late on your vacation in Cappadocia. The days in Göreme start early, incredibly early and even more so in the summer months. Just before sunrise the atmosphere is absolutely magical when you look over the different fairy chimneys and when the balloons are in the air, you’ll quickly forget about the comfort of your bed and coffee, our promise.

3.) Take a hike. You might not even think about it, but Cappadocia is a wonderful hiking area and from Göreme you can do quite a lot on foot and combine the different ancient valleys to shorter or longer day hikes. And we were quite surprised how few people we met on the hikes and often you have the beautiful landscapes all to yourself. Most tourists seem to go by car to a viewpoint, get dressed up and take selfies and then it's quickly back to the roof terrace of the hotel. You can discover so many beautiful areas a little off the main routes.

The highlights of Cappadocia

And now they follow in an absolutely arbitrary order - our absolute highlights of Göreme and its surroundings. Let’s start with the most obvious:

1.) More than hot air – the thing with the balloons 

It is definitely worth getting up early in Göreme when the balloons are in the air. Just before five o'clock in the morning we open the window and listen, if we hear this special hissing of the balloons and if they’re up in the sky, we quickly put on something warm, ignore the wrinkles of our faces and the lack of caffeine and rush out to a viewpoint or a rooftop terrace and are just amazed. Words can’t describe what it looks like when hundreds of balloons seem to be in the air over Göreme, so we’ll let the pictures speak for themselves.

Equally interesting as looking at the balloons is watching the other tourists. It's always the same procedure happening at five o'clock in the morning when it’s still cold outside - the women are wearing make-up and beautiful flattering silk dresses and give the men instructions for an hour on the right angles for photographs and how to drape their dresses elegantly. Then the posing begins on a popular roof terrace for their Insta accounts. The most famous terrace is at the Sultan Hotel, which offers a great view and they even put up a table with a fake breakfast, which the birds enjoy after the photo session.

Despite all the irony, we have to admit that the photos turn out fantastic for sure and so we also participated (who recognizes a pattern on a cyclist's feet?):

You can take a hot-air balloon ride throughout the year, depending on the weather conditions, and it lasts about an hour and is a pretty luxurious experience including a breakfast with champagne after landing and a participation certificate.

The whole fun costs between EUR 70.- to more EUR 200.- per person for one hour, depending on the company and size of the baskets. You can rent a balloon just for yourself or take off into the air with 20 others in the same basket, either way the experience is truly fantastic. First you are picked up at your accommodation, then there is coffee/tea and snacks (at 04.00h in the morning) and then you are taken to the launching point somewhere around Göreme. All the excitement slowly subsides as you watch the other balloons take off and then finally enter the basket yourself, which feels amazingly stable and before you know it you are already rising into the air, floating away very gently, completely detached from the earth.

The view from above over the different valleys with their color shades from white to pink and the bizarre rock formations is absolutely incredible and definitely worth the money. We landed above the Love Valley, which is supposed to have a heart shape form, although we think the name rather derives from the formations of the rocks.

Exactly at this moment, the young man behind us in the basket got on his knees (basket-permitting) and proposed to his girlfriend. She accepted of course as this is as romantic and maybe cheesy as it can get and we all watched. It was a very special moment and the champagne after landing came at just the right time for the newly engaged couple. We can highly recommend the hot-air balloon ride and if it were cheaper, we would have taken off more than once.

2.) Hike to Uchisar Castle via Pigeon Valley and Love Valley

This is a wonderful day trip. Starting directly from our accommodation in Göreme we walk into the Pigeon Valley, which offers beautiful white rock formations, earth pillars and cave dwellings. The path goes constantly uphill and is relatively well marked for Turkey. The valley gets its name from the various dovecotes, which the Byzantine monks have carved into the rocks and sometimes decorated with paintings and ornaments. We have never seen a place where the pigeons had such a high value. They were used for message delivery, but even more important was their poop as fertilizer and mortar. The dovecotes are still frequented by the pigeons and their gentle cooing accompanied our walks every day.

You can see the Uchisar castle from far away as it strategically located on top of a hill overlooking the rock valleys. One of Cappadocia’s most prominent landmarks is riddled with tunnels and was used by villagers as a place of refuge. There isn’t much to explore, but the panorama is great and it must be a sublime sunset point.

On our way back to Göreme we hike through the famous Love Valley. The path descents into a valley with stunning rock formations that get more and more impressive towards the end of the trail until you stand in front of the most well-known formations. We are always impressed by the everchanging landscapes of the different valleys. Sometimes you have soft organic shapes, then these fairy chimneys with cave dwellings and then you suddenly stand in front of these huge phallic rock formations in the Love Valley and can only marvel at nature’s work. There is also a small rustic café here and we chat a bit with a local guide and enjoy the view. We decide to come back to this fantastic valley for a photo shooting with our bicycles.

3.) Meskindir Valley, Red Valley & Rose Valley Hike

This is perhaps our favorite hiking day as those three valleys are incredibly varied. We start with the rather unknown Meskindir Valley, which is surprisingly green and we pass through multiple tunnels and numerous cave dwellings. It’s quite a shady trail and there’s a nice café for a stop. Next is the Red Valley, with its remarkable red sandstones below the blue sky.

Even though it is famous for its red rocks, there are some yellow rock formations only visible here. We take a hiking route with a good view over the Red Valley and then descend into the Rose Valley, which offers unique rock formations with different colors and shapes and the minerals in the sandstone have a pink tinge, that is especially evident at the golden hour before sunset. Above the Red Valley is a popular sunset point. Unfortunately, we somehow managed to miss all the great sunsets in Göreme and when we came here one evening it started to rain. Nevertheless, the view was worth it and there were fewer people than usual.

4.) Devrent Valley & Zelve Open-Air Museum & Paşabağ Valley

Normally you visit these three places with a tour bus or a taxi, but of course we had to do things differently once again and decided to hike. This is not recommended, because there is no hiking trail connecting these sights and we had to walk along the main road. The Devrent Valley is also known as Imaginary valley as the rock formations resemble animals. We have to admit, we only recognized the most famous rock that looks like a camel. And we realized that we’re not very good at taking the typical pictures where it looks like you’re holding the camel with your fingertips. Guess, we’ll just have to leave those photos to others in the future.

The Zelve Open-Air Museum is something very special and we like it so much that Lisa wants to come here a second time. The area is quite large and for once you have to pay an entrance fee, but everything is well marked and explained, which is not often the case in Turkey. We spent the last few days marveling at nature, but here we can see a testimony of the past. Zelve was a monastic retreat from the 9^th to the 13^th century and villagers lived here until 1953, but endangered by earthquakes and erosions the villagers had to resettle to Aktepe and the area is now an Open-Air Museum. An excellent walking trail loops through three valleys whose walls are covered with cave dwellings. Churches, a large monastery complex, storage rooms, stables and a mosque were carved into the soft tuff stone. Sometimes we wonder how the inhabitants entered their dwellings as the stairs on the exterior are very steep or access only possible with handles cut into the vertical walls.

The Paşabağ Valley is a disappointment at first, as the whole area is fenced and you have to pass several souvenir shops before entering the path leading to the rock formations. There you will find large groups of tourists who all seem to take the same photos. But as soon as you walk a bit further, it becomes clear why this valley is so popular as you can find some of Cappadocia’s best examples of mushroom-shaped fairy chimneys here. It's best to come here early in the morning, then the atmosphere is certainly more impressive when it’s less crowded.

5.) Hike through Sword Valley to Çavuşin

On our last day in Göreme, we would have loved to do any of our hikes a second time, but we opt for an area we haven’t visited yet. The Sword Valley trail starts right at the village of Göreme, but we somehow miss the official entry point and end up climbing around in the middle of nowhere, which we quite enjoy. Later we do find the entrance to the narrow canyon, where you can walk from ladder to ladder. We walk past dovecotes, cave dwellings and rock-cut churches and even though we’ve seen many remarkable rock formations in the last days, we are still impressed by the unique landscape.

We hike to the small village of Çavuşin that is dominated by cliff where a cluster of abandoned houses spills down the slope. There is also an old church build into the steep cliff face than you can reach by climbing through different rooms, which is quite adventurous.

From up here we enjoy the view once more and look forward to our last evening in Göreme, which holds another surprise in store for us, because we meet a Swiss family: Sibylle, Martin, Noemi and Aline. They live quite close to us in Switzerland and Sibylle and Martin have cycled all the way to China and definitely kept their enthusiasm for cycling as they’re now traveling together with their daughters with some special tandems through Turkey for three months. They contacted us as they happen to be in Göreme at the same time and they also know Sophie, Martl, Korbinian and Ronja, the German family we met at the Aladağlar National Park. And it gets even better – on our last evening in Göreme we all meet up for dinner.

We couldn't have wished for a nicer farewell from Cappadocia. After 10 days in Göreme, however, we are looking forward to cycling and our onward journey. At five o'clock in the morning we look outside again, it is cloudy and the balloons aren’t flying today, so it’s a good moment to continue. Cappadocia will certainly remain one of our absolute highlights of the trip, but we are looking forward just as much to all the lesser-known places and in our next stage there are some white spots on the map to explore as we move further and further into eastern Anatolia.