Nature's Gift

I have to laugh this morning as I walk out of my dorm room into a flurry of snow. The temperature has dropped further and the land is veiled with snow once more. I meet Gerry over breakfast, and make a spontaneous decision to join him on one of the organised tours- not much sense in stumbling about in a blizzard on one's own. There are several tours you can take here, which take in differing parts of the area, and differing attractions. We finish our food and hop on the "Green tour" bus. We drive slowly through the already snow covered roads of out of Goreme in an attempt to witness what this magical place has to offer. Our first stop happens to be a panoramic view of the crisp landscape, just above the town itself.

A leaflet I picked up earlier ably describes Cappadocia as..." an extraordinary meeting of nature's artistic splendour and humankind's resourcefulness. Cappadocia is one of those rare places that must be experienced at least once in a lifetime. With soaring rock formations and rippled landscapes, splendid walking trails, mysterious underground cities and rock-cut churches, Cappadaocia is the must see destination in Turkey."

To elaborate, the region is famous for it's lunar like rock landscape of gorges, pinnacles, pillars and minarets fashioned by wind and rain over thousands of years to form all kinds of large scale and intimate shapes and formations. Sensing an opportunity to fashion the terrain themselves, local people from across the centuries chiseled out rooms, windows and doors to create houses from the conducive soft rock. They also created storage rooms, and even churches. Essentially, the people became troglodytes, a way of living that continues (to a much smaller extent) even to this very day.

Staring from our view point now, we observe a wonderful collection of stacks and gorges that are increasingly becoming covered in snow that has started falling even more heavily. We drive on to the underground city of Derinkuyu, as weather conditions continue to deteriorate. It's nice to take a break from the elements and escape below. We descend the stairs to the murky depths of a citadel that once held hundreds of people. Whenever invasion threatened, people retreated to this lair and from it could defend and sustain themselves for weeks and weeks at a time. It had everything required- food stores, a water supply, clever air vents, and even the important stuff like a confessional box and a winery. We get to freely walk around all these places now, trying to recapture what it must have felt like to be couped up here all those years ago. It's completely absorbing. Just make sure you don't get lost.

Back up in white out conditions once more, our bus struggles on at more of a crawl than a cruise. We realise that we are not going to get to see the more remote views we had hoped for, so we request, and are granted, a ticket for the same tour tomorrow in the hope that conditions will be better. The final straw today came when we were rapidly conveyor belted along an Onyx factory. It was one of those occasions where you felt like you were no longer a human, more a walking euro note.

Safely back at the hostel, we take advantage of a short break in the weather to climb the nearby hills at the back of town, taking some photos of modern day Goreme itself. A number of cave dwellings continue to be used, bridging the gap betwixt now and then. We walk through the virgin snow of our wintry scene. All that's missing now is a horde of demonic shoppers and "Now that's what I call Xmas 37", played on continuous loop.

When darkness returns, there is no better place to be than back at the hostel's lounge room in front of a hot stove with a couple of beers and some crisps, chatting about the experiences of the day. Gerry and I meet an Argentine couple on a three week holiday from Buenos Aires. We enjoy some friendly banter. I tell the girl that I've just won an Argentine passport in my packet of Doritos, and no, they can't get The Malvinas back.