Modern cavemen (and women)

Goreme. Small village in the Cappidocia (Kapidokya) region of Turkey, south of the capital city of Ankara. I took the train overnight from Istanbul to Ankara, and a bus from Ankara to Goreme yesterday. All in all, about 12 hours of some of the most comfortable travel yet. The train was probably the nicest I've been on with the exception of the high speed train in France, and very reasonably priced ($12 to get halfway across the country), and the bus came complete with complimentary tea/coffee service en route. I took tea the first time around and was reminded that tea from a bag can't compare to the wonderful double boil system that is traditional for Turkish cay. So the second time the drinks were offered I figured I'd try the up and coming new Turkish national drink... Nescafe. Seriously. And to make things simple, they provide your "coffee" in 3in1 pack that contains a powder mixture of coffee, sugar, and cream which is actually 67% sugar.

The bus actually took me to Nevsheir, a few kilometers away from Goreme, and I was instructed to switch buses. The second bus took me to Urgup, a few kilometers on the other side of Goreme, and after discovering i was in the wrong town and hour later, a third local bus finally took me into Goreme. I wandered around the town and quickly discovered why they didn't bother giving directions for the hostel. The village is laid out in a bunch of small paths, barely big enough for a vehicle, winding up the hills around the valley and there are no real street names and while buildings have number, this is only for appearences. Even with my pack, the hour or so I wandered was interesting and comfortable. Many of the buildings were either closed off with bricks or falling apart, or under construction, but there were hostels and hotels around every corner and house made of carved stone or built into the spires and cliff sides. The hostels and hotels are not even recognizable, in a western sense, as hostels. They often are small simple dwellings with only signs outside to signify their purpose, and the signs hold an antique look about them as do the sun-faded advertisements; the reminants of a past tourist boom.

The history of the region is unclear the but references to the people who lived here date back at to least 400 BC. They also had many underground cities which I'm going to look into visiting, some of which housed upwards of 50,000 people for months at a time and were used by early Christians while hiding from persecution and raids.

My room in the hostel hosts ten beds in a cave cut into the rock, and while the ceilings are lower than a normal western room, its comfortably roomy. I picked a bed in the back corner and slept comfortably last night with an extra blanket stolen from an unused bed. Its definately autumn here, chilly, but not quite cold enough to warrant my winter coat I bought in Amsterdam. I ventured out this morning wearing my underarmor shirt and a light jacket and leggings under my pants. A couple hours later I was grateful for the choice in clothing as I found myself hiking through the caves and cliffs outside town. At first I just climbed around easily in the abandoned cave homes, and eventually found myself without a footpath to follow. So I jumped/slid down from upper level area I'd been taking panoramic shots from, and wandered through a couple tomato plots farmed by the locals with horse and plow (and occasionally small old tractors). Eventually I found a simple dirt road and started walking back towards town, vaguely. Then the road became a path, and then a trail, and next thing I knew I was walking through a dry riverbed between cave walls reaching about 20m over my head, following an almost invisible trail and a few footprints in the dust. Some areas got a little narrow, and I had to squeeze past a boulder at one point, and some areas where the water would have fallen in small waterfalls required climbing up. These had small hand/footholes carved into the stone around them, so it was no feat, but still facinating. I had no way to know if the handholds were a year old or a thousand, and the view if autumn treeds with falling orange leaves drifting around me was breathtaking.

When I made it back to the stone road into town, I was probably about 2 miles away, and stopped to eat at a tourist place en route. After a simple and cheap meal (bout $2.50) of Turkish ravioli with a light tomato sauce and yogurt on the side, I headed back to town and sat on a hill above town reading in the sunshine, watching children play in the street below me. After a simply beautiful sunset I wandered back to the hostel and along the way was greeted by a small boy, maybe three years old, who ran up to me grinning and hugged me, arms thrown around my knees. I smiled, said hi, and he ran away only to come back and do it again. I took a picture of him, playfully throwing a rock at me a few minutes later, but this computer is not so conducive to uploading pictures and an impatient Spanish speaking woman is waiting to use the computer. I'll post some pictures when I get internet on my own computer, tomorrow maybe. I'm not sure where to go from here, still got some time to kill. Looking at couchsurfing in Adana, near the Syrian border, or maybe another hostel there. At least it will be warmer, only bout 50F here, should be about 75F in Adana all week.