An Early Morning Balloon Ride Over Cappadocia, Turkey

Today was a painfully early start at around 4 am, but it was for a good cause: a hot air balloon ride! The balloon company HQ was only a like a block from our hotel so that was nice. Butterfly Balloons started us off with a nice little breakfast and then we all packed into vans and headed out to the countryside.

They started the baskets off on their sides while filling the balloons with hot air, then tipped them over once filled. The basket was divided into five compartments, one in the middle with Eftal the pilot and the propane tanks, and four filled with 4-5 tourists each. The pilot gave us the two rules: rule one was stay in the basket, and rule two was to get into landing position when ordered. That pretty much involved holding onto the ropes and bracing yourself. He gave the handle attached to our jet engine a few tugs and then we were airborn.

It was a lot less scary than I had imagined it would be. It rises so smoothly that you hardly notice you’re moving. It seemed silly but I was most worried about dropping my phone over the side of the basket. I did my best to not extend my arm over the edge while taking pictures just in case. The swarm of fellow balloons in the air was almost as interesting a sight as the actual landscape.

I asked why the heck this needed to be at 5 am or whatever time it was at this point. First they wanted us to see sunrise which I will admit looked pretty awesome. More importantly though the pilot needed that cool air to better control the balloon. If the air gets too hot then it’s harder to get the balloon to descend when needed.

Our pilot Eftal was super nice to me. He let me pull the jet engine lever a few times and we had a good chat.

I'm not sure why I'm making this doofus face. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

He told us to get into landing position like 1 second before we hit the ground which was surprising. I still don’t really understand but for some reason he was upset with the landing. Something about the ground being wet or something. Anyway it took ground crew a few extra minutes to pick us up. Later we were each given a 10 Euro refund for our trouble. Sounds good to me! I honestly wouldn’t have known the difference if he’d just acted like everything was normal.

Getting the air out of the balloon was fun. That circle of fabric on the very top of the balloon is retractable, so he pulled a rope and it opened up and the balloon immediately started sagging. Once the balloon was laying on its side we all tramped on it to get the rest of the air out.

Once that was taken care of we all had a champagne toast and some strawberries. Many of the other passengers were Muslim and didn’t drink or were just scared so I did a few extra toasts for them.

The field that we landed in had lots of interesting grasses and flowers.

You might think, “wow that was enough adventure for one day, time to go home and rest.” Nope. Time for a day long tour!

We met back up with Angela’s brother Josh and his lady friend. Our first stop was sort of the king of all cave dwellings. I believe they were calling it a fairy castle. We played around there a bit and then continued on the underground dwellings. Some people looked at the folks living in weird caves and thought to themselves “that’s way too normal” so they built underground mazes of rooms that go several stories down. It was like an ant hill. One cool fact was that the cave people had to build air vents that went to the surface so they disguised them as wells so bad guys couldn’t find them.

Best mailbox ever.

There was a church, winery, livestock pens, and all the things you’d need if you ever got angry at the sun for several weeks at a time.

These giant rocks could be rolled into doorways to seal them. The passages were constructed in such a way that you'd only be able to roll the rock if you were on the right side of the passageway. This way they could trap invaders and kill them real good.

I walked with Lydia to get a coffee afterward.

We had lunch at a tourist restaurant that had a fun touristy food: a clay pot full of like chicken stew stuff then sealed up, baked, brought to our table and set on fire then broken open with the dull end of a meat cleaver. It was a very violent lunch.

Josh's lady friend Natalie and the flaming chicken pot.

Lydia got to do the smashing.

Definitely the worst part of our tour was a trip to this tourist trap jewelry place. They did a little demonstration on how they grind onyx in different shapes which was fun, but then we went upstairs to a room full of jewelry sales people and stood through a presentation that was like getting trapped on a Home Shopping Network episode.

It would be an interesting experiment to just buy every single thing anyone ever offered to sell me on this trip. I'd need a dump truck to carry it all.

We ended the tour taking a peek at some more cave dwellings. This time though they were in this really small town with really conservatively dressed people. So far really anyone we asked to take a picture with had said yes but the women here especially were not having that. I think Lydia took a picture of a room with one such lady in it and when she looked at it later the lady was covering her face. Creepy.

Lydia got pretty excited about some of the cave houses. Embarrassingly some of them were bigger than our apartment. 

Cappadocia: Beautiful Land of the Cave People

Our time in Istanbul had come to an end and we took a short flight deeper into the country to Cappadocia. Cappadocia is famous for its rock formations and the dwelings that people have made inside of them. Another reason we were headed to this place in particular was to meet Angela’s brother Josh who is stationed in Turkey with the airforce. Julius Caesar’s famous boast “Veni, vidi, vici” (I came, I saw, I conquered) was referring to his victory near Amasya, not too far from here.

I thought this machine was pretty genius. It was kind of a Coinstar for tourists with leftover Turkish Lira.

I may be mistaken but I think that the Turkish Airlines inflight magazine claimed that Turkish goes to more countries than any other airline.

My first thought after stepping out of the airport was “wow, this place is quiet”. There weren’t any people yelling “you want taxi?!” in our faces or really much else happening at all. It was sunny and I could hear birds chirping somewhere.

Our hotel, in Goreme, was even partially in a cave although our room seemed fairly normal. Zeke and Angela got a room that was much more cavey but it was so dank smelling that they requested a room change.

Istanbul was blanketed with what I assume were political ads from the ruling party. Out in Cappadocia, though, it looked like some other parties had some support.

Our only touristy spot for the day was the Goreme Open Air Museum. My understanding is that the many caves that had been carved into the rock there were constructed by Turkish Christians who needed to hide from aggressors. At some point after the division of the Ottoman Empire, Turkey and Greece forcibly traded segments of their populations in the 1930s. Turkish Christians were all booted to Greece and Greek Muslims were booted to Turkey. As a result all of these cave churches haven’t been in use for some time.

The Turks have some sort of a superstition involving eyes so you’ll notice that many of the eyes/faces of the figures on the church walls have been defaced.

Fresh pressed orange juice was available around every corner in Istanbul and Cappadocia feels the same way. Finally I found one selling pomegranate juice despite it being out of season. It was funny how many fruits it took to make one small glass of juice because in the US pomegranates are so expensive. Here though they are pretty common.

You can see some blue “evil eyes” for sale at this touristy souvenir shop on the right.

We had a nice dinner in a cave restaurant. I had some lamb chops that were fall off the bone tender. We split a bottle of the local wine as well. 

Hurray food!

A Harem and Whirling Dervishes in Istanbul

We woke up and scouted around for a Turkish breakfast which consisted of salad, slices of tomato and cucumbers, a bowl of black olives, some cold cuts, and a couple of cheeses, one of which was beyaz peynir, a "salty white cheese made from ewe's or goat's milk". I had to try a Turkish coffee despite not touching the stuff in the US. Apparently it's mostly a tourist thing. The locals prefer tea. It was really black and thick. I won't be ordering another one but I'm glad that I tried it.

I am trying to help Lydia conquer her fear of olives with mixed results.

While we were eating several groups of police walked down the street, many of them with riot gear on. Ruh roh. After finishing our breakfast we walked down the main street that was packed with people the night before. Some of the side streets were blocked with more police and the occasional armored vehicle. It's a trap! We were a little concerned about what the heck was happening so we popped into a Starbucks and asked around. A nice gentleman with solid English explained that this was the anniversary of some protests in Taksim Square. We felt a little better that nothing was imminently going to explode but the potential for danger was still there.

We continued to Taksim Square because that's where the metro station was. There was an army of police there and the metro station was closed. I counted around 6 of those tank looking vehicles with water cannons.

We decided to take a taxi and that point was the end of our use of public transport. With a group of four it made financial sense to take cabs and was much less hassle as well.

Our destination was the Bosphorus Strait. The Bosporus runs through and divides Istabul's European and Asian components, and it connects the Black Sea with the Sea of Marmara.

Istanbul straddles two continents. Lydia thinks this counts as having been to Asia but the rest of us know the truth.

We were planning on taking a cruise but didn't have anything booked so we just wandered a bit and figured things out. It didn't take long before we were accosted by a cruise pusher with a colorful map. I default to telling people that approach me selling things to get bent but this guy was really helpful and polite so we booked through him.

From the strait Istanbul seems like a much different place. There were several palaces facing the water, as well as fancy mosques and other nice buildings. There were a couple of forts guarding passage through the strait as well.

I bought some chestnuts from one of those street grilling guys and they were pretty darn good. They brought to mind a similar thing in Japan but were prepared a bit differently.

Chestnuts!

This guy was selling leaches.

We popped into a free museum that we stumbled upon that explained the Gallipoli Campaign of World War I, the French and British's thwarted attempt to capture Constantinople and knock the Ottoman Empire out the war. It was fun because I'd never heard of it, but apparently it was a very big deal for the birth of Turkey as well as national consciousness for Australia and New Zealand. It was random and interesting.

We kept seeing these little boys dressed like little sultans and I just had to know what's up. I asked our tour guide from yesterday Ekrem what the deal was and he said that it was a sort of entering manhood day for the boy which includes circumcision. Not only do I wish I could unknow this, but now every time I see one of these kids I am reminded of that fact that I can't unknow this.

Next on our tour was the Topkapi Palace. The palace is kind of hard to explain. It seemed both fancy but kind of understated at the same time. For example the sultan didn't sit on a big golden throne but a pretty simple couch thing.

The most interesting aspect of the compound was the 400 room harem. Administrated and guarded by African eunuchs, the harem housed more than 800 female slaves by the mid-19th century. Apparently there were also white eunuchs at the palace but they had a different function.

Gate of Felicity

I was reading about the Ottoman Empire on Wikipedia and saw this picture and was like, "I've been there!" This is Selim III receiving dignitaries during an audience at the Gate of Felicity, Topkapı Palace.

We had a water break at a cafe and watched feral cats beg for table scraps.

At this point we broke into pairs and Lydia and I continued on to a Whirling Dervish show we'd booked for the night. It was amazing! I won't get into the details but the Dervishes are a mystical sect of Islam that does a spinning dance that's meant to put its participants into a type of trance. The venue was an old domed bathhouse with really cool lighting. They projected scenes from the universe on this dome which made the whirling even more epic. A band playing exotic instruments and chanting rounded out the experience. Also amusing was a girl whose job it was to make sure no one took any photos. She would zap offenders with a large green laser pointer from across the room in an excellent cross between laser tag and whack-a-mole.

The venue was pretty sweet.

This is a giant version of little Dervish dolls they were selling in the lobby. So far I am proud to report that Lydia and I are knick knack free and sober for three days now.

We had a final kebab and headed home. Luckily there hadn't been any riots in our neighborhood once we returned. That would have ruined my lovely night.

Turkish Delight seems to be a general term that covers lots of different sweets. They are awesome but a bit annoying because there are so many types that I would risk some sort of sugar seizure if I tried them all.

A kebab guy. Throughout the day I took every chance to ask the locals what they thought about all of the extra police and the subway interruptions. The guy just rolled his eyes and said something to the effect that it's all nonsense. 

This intrepid youth was running a tea shop out of a shopping cart. Lydia made an insightful comment that I appreciated. She said it seemed like countries other than the US were all similar. For example, people selling things on the street is the norm in the vast majority of countries we've visited while in the US it's not very common.