I'm pretty sure it's going to be the complete inverse of my jaunt to Cappadocia. Which means I should probably say something about that episode before I move on.
Despite my very hard feelings about some aspects of (my) life there, Turkey is a bitchin place. Like, really. It's awesome. People are wonderful, food is fantastic, the cost of living is very low by most standards, the architecture is off the hook, and most importantly if you're a Latin nerd like I am, Turkey is wildly ancient. That whole Trojan War thing? Troy's in Turkey, yo. Bad ass Amazon ladies? Ancient Turks, probably. There are ruins everywhere you look and interesting historical facts to be had all around. When I decided that I would be departing in June instead of September, I also decided that I wanted to visit another part of the country before leaving it. The choice of destination should have been a lot harder than it was, because while you may have only heard of Istanbul, Turkey actually has MANY places to tour - as any proud/living/breathing Turk will tell you upon making your acquaintance.
This list comes to mind:
-Izmir on the west coast (closest big city to Ephesus, which is an important ancient Greek site.)
-Gallipoli (WWI Australian war memorial) and Troy in the NW
-Fethiye + Antalya in the SW, where people go to party with Russian girls (?) and take the ferry to the Greek Islands
-Konya in the middle-ish where Rumi (Sufi mystic and founder of the Whirling Dervishes) hung out and danced
-Paumukkale in the SW middle-ish, where they have super crazy beautiful hot springs and more Roman ruins
-Ankara, in a different middle-ish, the boring capital
-Samsun and Trabzon on the Black Sea, known for their fish and nuts. Though I've never been, I have a soft spot in my heart for the latter thanks to a particular dense 19 year old student I had. We... didn't get along. (I may or may not have made him cry on one occasion) and he said "You don't eat meat, you don't like football, you don't want to go to Trabzon..." and then he shook his head at me in disbelief. He was from there.
And then we come to...
-Cappadocia! The Land of the Beautiful Horses. My memory is fuzzy, but I'm pretty sure Ali from the Bachelorette went here on the Istanbul episode partially responsible for the last year of my life. My friend Julia from the bookstore also told me it was a must, and I trust her travel advice implicitly. For those unfamiliar, Cappadocia is synonymous with crazy cave houses and hot air balloons. Kind of a lunar landscape that also produces wine. It's hot and dry and basically very arid farmland - and a region, not a city. Hot and dry aren't really my bag, to be honest, but the very thought of riding in a hot air balloons make my heart thump in excitement, so I knew I'd have to go. And seeing as how my roommates were working and my friends/coworkers were too, I knew it would be a solo trip.
Traveling alone as a woman in Turkey doesn't scare me as much as it might scare others. We westerners are sold a strange and vague image of Turkey that's mostly conflated with its Middle Eastern neighbors. I think a lot of girls would fear for their safety. Turkish people, on the other hand, are convinced that women can't/shouldn't really be by themselves in strange places. Whether this is because it's "unsafe" physically or *morally* isn't too clear, but to give you an idea of how deep this conviction goes, I had to choose a FEMALE seat on the bus that took me to Cappadocia. Yes. You read that correctly. Females traveling alone can only sit next to other females traveling alone on the major buses that go between cities. Part of me is grateful for this, given that bizarre incident on the bus one Saturday when a filthy lecherous old man tried to sneak his hand onto my ladybits. But the rest of me thinks this is 500% absurd bullshit, and I'm going to go with that.
I booked a cave room in a hostel and packed my backpack. The overnight bus ride was confusing and slightly hellish at a total running time of 13 or 14 hours. The bus stopped three times for bathroom breaks at massive, price-gouging restaurant complexes. The toilets were clean... and Turkish. I noticed at the first one that now that we'd left Istanbul, almost all of the women were covered and quite a few of them were wearing straight-up harem pants. The old women didn't pay me much mind, but the girls my age and younger shot me a bit of the stink eye. As to be expected, I suppose. Fortunately, the bus broke down only once, and it was maybe half an hour away from the final stop.
When I arrived in Göreme, the center of Cappadocia and town where I was staying, I discovered that one of the girls on my bus would also be staying at my hostel, and in fact, my room. She was wearing a fanny pack but somehow didn't look like a soccer dad because of it. (Why? Because she was French and thus has magically hip DNA.) We actually became somewhat fast friends and I discovered that her name was Marcie and she was exploring Turkey while taking a break from her masters in International Finance. The hostel guys picked us up from the tourist information booth and invited us to munch on breakfast while they cleaned our room and settled us in. As usual, there was a slight problem: they needed to replace the lock, because one of the girls in the room, a Brazilian, had not returned the night before and had taken her key with her. Rather inappropriately, hostel dude rolled his eyes and said "she met some guys." Also in our room was a very chatty though pleasant Australian girl backpacking through Europe for four months, and she and I had a bizarre heart to heart about relationships and skype. The Brazilian girl was moved to a different room, and in her stead came a Japanese woman, Hiroko, who had quit her job in Tokyo and was traveling around the world for ONE YEAR. How fucking cool is that! We got to know each other very well, and I can honestly say - she's one of the most interesting and kind people I've ever met. After our time together in Cappadocia, she caught a bus to Trabzon (see above) so she could get a visa for IRAN. WHAAAT.
This might be news to some of you, but I'm kind of a loner. (Ha.) So for the first two days, I spent a lot of time walking, hiking, sitting, and eating soup by my lonesome. And it was exactly what I needed. Here's what it looked like:
During my first walk around town:
I had a vague idea where Göreme's main attraction, the Open Air Museum, was so I just started walking. (Met two French dudes along the way...)
This might look like a weird, twisted, fairy mountain to you - and it is - but it's actually a church...?
Red crosses painted during a period of iconoclasm
You might be surprised to hear that I visited about fifteen churches on this trip and absolutely zero mosques. Cappadocia is historically a VERY old Christian region, (we're talking millennia) and up until the forced population exchange of 1923, was made up mostly of Greek Orthodox folks. They got the boot, and seem to be mostly remembered only by tour guides and people profiting from tourists.
A picture of the exterior of the "Dark Church." This was a big deal because it's big, the frescoes are still pretty vibrant, and we had to pay an extra 12 TL to enter since it's being restored. As I approached the ticket booth, the somewhat cute Australian dude in front of me was asking the docent where he could find an ATM (no cards accepted) and the docent politely laughed. I spotted him the money in possibly the nicest random act of kindness I've performed for a human. He and the docent were both very, very surprised.
Another church slightly down the road. Significant because the docent at this one, though at least 45, asked me out on a DATE and instructed me about fifty times to bring my BIKINI because he wanted to take me to a SPA. Oh, Turkey... :
PART TWO COMING SOON!
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