Greece & Turkey: Cappadocia

Cappadocia was mentioned a few times in the Bible, and that was the initial reason of including this city in our trip planning.

In the late 19th century, somehow the biblical Hittites, an extinct ethnic group, were linked to the newly discovered Indo-European-speaking empire of Anatolia, who also came to be known as Hittites. There are debates about the connection though.

One of the characteristics in Cappadocia is having plenty of underground cities. Another characteristics is that it is common people here live in the cave. My first glance of this city reminded me immediately of my childhood Flinstone cartoon.

Back in 11th Century, christians dwelled in caves, underground cities, and held services in caves, carved within rocks. It was fascinating to visit one of the excavated underground cities, about 85m beneath the ground.

Like Meteora, this region has some unique rock formations. Many of them sure resemble fairy chimneys, especially those rock formations in the Love valley were just hillarious.

Some people there still live in the cave. Cave hotels are part of the norm here. We particularly chose to stay at one of the cave hostels. No windows. When light is off, it is pitched dark. As a result, we actually overslept for our next day prearranged Love valley tour on ATv. Luckily the agent was cool and did not penalize us.

Cappadocia is also famous for its hot air ballons tours. We skipped it though as we chose sleeping over getting up early for the 4:30am hot air ballon experience.

Tips:

To get there: We took night buses there from Pamukkale and flew out of Kayseri airport to Istanbul.

Days needed: We spent 3D/2N there and visited the Open Air musuem, Derinkuyu underground city, rented ATv to visit the Love valley.

Tour packages: One of the main reasons I still prefer staying at a hostel over a hotel is that I often find hotesls offer many economical tour packages available to backpackers. Prior to our arrival, our hostels had already informed us of their tour packages and I knew what were available to us. To play safe as we would not know if our overnight bus would get us to Goreme on time, we finalized our tour package to the underground city with the hostel upon our arrival that early morning. The only prearranged thing is the cave hostel reservation and the flight reservation to Istanbul from Kayseri airport. The rest we went with the flow.

The blog below offers a great insight to the underground city.

http://sometimes-interesting.com/2014/05/09/derinkuyu-the-underground-cities-of-cappadocia/