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Cappadocia, Turkey
Friday, September 28
After two weeks in Adana, it is becoming clear that no "retaliation" from the United States will be coming in the near future. So NBC pulled the plug on Joe's correspondent gig, with the understanding that they may call on him again if anything does happen. It's time to move on. After total immersion in the news around the attacks, we have been able to get past the initial crippling shock and indecision that left us unable to continue our long-planned travels, much less enjoy them. With the rest of America, we are slowly, guiltily, and with relief, making steps to get on with our lives.

Our driver, Mustafa, has already arranged our bus tickets to Cappadocia and drives us one last time, this time to the bus station. Now we're on our own again. We are travelers once more, left to our own devices, and with a normal budget. The 5-hour bus ride takes us to the otherworldly Goreme, Cappadocia…a surprisingly chilly and strong wind greets us, and we are fired up to be here!

 Although we had made reservations at a local pension, the proprietor gave our room away. But it's easy to find another room - it's low season, there are fewer tourists, and there are pensions aplenty in this small town! Our packs are lighter (in Adana, we mailed back quite a bit of weight we had been carrying in our packs - souvenirs and gifts) but we are still unused to carrying them around, so we hope to find a suitable place quickly.

Thankfully the Anatolya Pension is just around the corner, and they have the coolest cave rooms in the fairy chimneys! (Fairy chimneys are the conical structures with dwellings caved into them.) It's a bit low-ceilinged inside - Joe can't stand up straight - but so worth it! And the temperature inside is always uncannily perfect. We drop our packs and head up to the top of a cliff to watch the sunset. It is glorious and we are thankful to finally be here. How life can get any better than this?! We take pictures, strike up a conversation with a couple from Israel, then walk back down to a dinner of lentil soup and pides. Pides are the local version of pizza. It's a bread crust with toppings, baked up in a fireplace. We both had ground beef with cheese…Joe's had a fried egg topping. And we splurged with a bottle of Cappadocia wine.

Later at an Internet café, we strike up a conversation with a woman who immediately has become a treasured friend. Simone, an Australian, is headed East to Iran, Syria and Egypt. She is traveling alone and is fearless. She lends us a new travelism: "We're not escaping…we're exploring!" We talk for hours at the café and then at Flintstones's Bar. Simone is intelligent, charismatic, soothing, beautiful and has a tremendous ability to lift people up. She makes us realize that we still emotionally tender from the last three weeks' events… We cry as we trade stories about the terrorist attacks. And we both are deeply affected by her story about how an elderly lady made her feel comfortable in a mosque. If fine conversation is like fine wine, this was several bottles of champagne! We wind up our visit at 3:00 AM, slightly drunk on beer, Raki, travel and life, and promise to be best friends back in our real lives. Simone is traveling on in just a few hours, but we hope to cross paths again someday.

Saturday, September 29
It's a fine, crisp morning. Breakfast at the pension is boiled eggs, goat cheese, cucumbers, tomatoes, a sort of fried cheese pastry, and of course, the omnipresent tea, or cay. Charged up and ready to go sightseeing, we stroll determinedly down the country road that will lead us to the funky valley of the phallic structures known as Love Valley…but we don't get very far before a family on a horse and cart slows down to ask us in very limited English if we want to see their house. With their cute little children as lures, they hook us into spending an entire day of picking grapes! (See the Cappadocia Journal). Late in the evening, we go to their home for a dinner of pasta with yogurt sauce and ground beef. We get home to our cave around 9:00 PM, completely exhausted, and crash.

Sunday, September 30
The night didn't go so well for either of us - maybe it's our aching backs and legs, or maybe it's the 40 flies who slept with us - but we get up starving!  We scarf breakfast of omelettes, goat cheese, breads and watermelon, and strike up an hours-long conversation with an inspiring couple from Bath, England. They have quit their jobs as a doctor and nurse, and are driving across Europe in a Range Rover made conducive to camping. Ali and Bott have traveled places we've not yet seen - through Greece and Italy - and they had plans to travel further east to India and Iran. But now, because of the terrorist attacks, they have to scrap those plans. Their new plan is to travel where we have been - through Eastern Europe. We trade stories, discuss life-changing decisions, and why we decide to do the things we do. We'll meet up again for dinner.

It's mid-afternoon now and we make a beeline for the "rock castle" in the nearby town of Uchisar. The panoramic view at the top is absolutely breathtaking. On the way back down, we take a different route that leads us through what used to be homes of villagers whose families lived in these rocks for hundreds of years. We meet a boy and his sister who invite us inside their ancestral home-turned-pension-and-tea-house and learn that his father was born here. And his father's father was born here…and so on, and so on. They tell us the home is 1000 years old and has possibly been inhabited by their families for that entire period of time. They treat us to tea and songs on the traditional guitar called the suz. It's after sunset by now, and we're faced with a three-kilometer walk home along a highway with no shoulder. But we're told hitching rides is easy here, and it is. A couple picks us up for the short ride to Goreme.

Mary's back! Remember our Canadian friend in Istanbul? During her travels, she met a Turkish man here in Cappadocia, so she's decided to make an unplanned return trip to come back and see him. Mary and Dogan (pronounced DOH-ahn) join us for dinner along with Ali and Bott and we sit for hours enjoying a lovely traditional Turkish dinner. Joe's dinner is cooked inside a clay pot that they actually have to crack open to get the food out - beef with gravy over rice. Jenni has Adana Kebap, and everyone shares a few bottles of Cappadocia wine. Some men start playing the guitar and singing (the singing was great, but the guitar was terribly out of tune.) Jenni learns how to play backgammon and Joe smokes apple tobacco out of a tobacco water pipe. At 1 AM, we shiver our way home through the chilly night air and promise to meet tomorrow again to go to the Turkish bath.

Monday, October 1, 2001
We get a late start and head to an outdoor museum about 1 kilometer away from our cave hostel. It's a collection of cave churches used by the Christians in the first and second centuries AD when this area acted as a shelter from religious persecution. There are convents and monasteries and churches galore, most are caves with beautiful paintings and frescoes still inside. Joe doesn't really feel like going, but Jenni convinces him…barely. It is beautiful to see, and easy to imagine a civilization living here, walking along the steep paths and ducking into low doorways. Most of the paintings' faces are scratched away (like the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus picture on the left), probably by early Muslims whose faith prohibits the display of people or animals.

We have plans to go with Mary and Dogan to Ergup and visit the Turkish Bath there. Hard to believe, but we have not yet been to a real Turkish Bath in Turkey yet. This should be fun, and it is - see the Journal for the whole story. Afterwards, we all pile back into Dogan's car and stop by a liquor store on the way to Sunset Point for the requisite romantic bottle of wine. It's breathtakingly beautiful, watching the sun sink below these crazy-looking rock formations…and it gets breathtakingly cold as soon as it's over. We pile back into the car, and Dogan drops us off in town as goes to nurse a killer headache. Later we meet for dinner, drinks and lots of talk.

Tuesday, October 2
Cappadocia is no small place, and many of the things to see are widely spread out from small town to small town. Today we want to see one of the underground cities, where entire communities of Hittites and later, Christians, would hide from invaders for months at a time. It's expensive to hire a taxi, so we opt instead to rent a car! This is a big moment for us…neither if us has driven for almost three months! It's comfortable to slide right back into the old routine, roll the windows down, fiddle with the radio…and since old habits die hard, we get into a slight argument as Jenni plays passenger-seat driver. It's a short drive to the underground city, along dusty two-lane little roads that are straight as an arrow. The tour of the underground city of Kaymakli is fascinating. Hittites lived in the caves in the 4th century BC and used the caves for storage and ambushes. Much later, early Christians lived here (from the 5th and 10th centuries AD) and were constantly under siege from one group or another. That's why they had to take shelter in these caves for six months at a time as they fought off overwhelming numbers of attackers. As many as 6 thousand people could live in the underground cities, some of which were 10 or 12 stories below ground! Jenni only suffers a little bit of claustrophobia in the low, low rooms and tight little passageways you have to hunch over and duck-walk through.

A quick lunch in the quiet little town, and we are on our way again, taking a more roundabout way back to Goreme. On the way, we pass through Soganli Valley (pronounced Soh-AN-lee) and stop outside a school just as it was letting out for the day. Almost immediately the car was surrounded by little blue and white uniforms, screaming, "Hello? How are you? Goodbye!" over and over again. The children were yelling the only English they knew. It was almost scary, the way they swarmed over us and the car. They wanted to know if we had any pens and notebooks to give them. Not candy, not money. They wanted school supplies. In Turkey, the families are responsible for providing everything related to school - the books, the transportation, the uniforms, the lunches, the supplies, sometimes even tuition. We had nothing to give them, and desperately wished we did. We eventually tore away from the children in search of supplies. We found a kind man who hopped into the car with us and took us to the store, which we would NEVER have found on our own. The greedy store owner overcharged us for the pencils, pens, and paper, but what could we do? We drove back to the school in search of the kids, but they had all disappeared into their homes nearby, changed clothes and were now doing the family chores or playing outside. We recognized a few kids, gave them what we had, then dropped off the rest of the supplies on the doorstep of the school. When we finally got to Soganli Valley, it was nearing dusk. It's a showstopper. It's so hard to believe that these old churches carved into the caves are virtually unguarded, open to anyone who pays the $2 to get into the park. The frescos painted on the cave walls are exposed to the elements and probably left much they way they were back when they were inhabited, as many as 1800 years ago. Before we leave the canyon we're obliged to buy an evil-looking figurine from a creepy lady who stares at Jenni until she finally caves in and pays her money for her "killer doll." Later, we meet up with Ali and Bott for dinner. This is Mary's last night with Dogan before she has to go to Amsterdam in the morning and begin her missionary training. They spent most of the evening huddled together talking like lovers about to part ways.

Wednesday, October 3
Getting up before sunrise at 5:45 AM is brutal, especially since we stayed out until 1 AM last night. But it's worth it, because we're going up, up, and away in a beautiful balloon! This will be a rare, costly splurge - $165 each - but we've decided it will be worth it in the long run. The hot air balloon ride is gorgeous. We fly low into the canyons and see the rock structures up close. The sun rises quickly, throwing a red glow on the rocks, then casting long shadows that make the view absolutely spectacular. We land around 8 AM and clink champagne glasses, then head back for a few winks before meeting Ali and Bott for breakfast. We spend the day with our British friends, first battling the annoying bees for our food, then checking e-mail.

Jenni goes off to the market and buys two large plastic bins for the family we picked grapes with - some of the grape containers they were using were old and falling apart. When we all go to deliver the new containers, the old lady greets all of us warmly at the door and welcomes us in her house. After Bott buys the requisite headscarf, we eat what the lady puts in front of us - bread and grape syrup and some kind of milky cheese. Afterwards, we eat dinner at her son's restaurant. Again, Joe orders the dish where they break a closed clay pot to get to the food. (You can see in the picture to the right that they break the closed pot open with a hammer and then serve the food that was cooked inside, sometimes with pieces of clay pot still lodged in the food!) Inside this particular dish is beef and chicken with sauce, which they ladle out and serve over rice. Jenni orders the pasta with yogurt and we all share a Turkish pizza. We talk for hours with Ali and Bott, who have become close friends by now, and visit their campground up the hill.

Thursday, October 4
We wake up late, around 9:45, which means we have to check out of our cave in 15 minutes (we end up a few minutes late). We leave our backpacks and groggily walk off to eat breakfast which turns out to be lunch. Hamburgers and fries are the unabashed menu of choice. We buy our bus tickets to Izmir, check our e-mail and buy a healthy supply of used books from a secondhand bookstore. Joe rents a moped but Jenni, fearing imminent death, wants nothing to do with it. He takes off to a canyon to get a closer look at an area that's supposed to have the most unusual fairy chimneys. After an hour, he rides back to get Jenni who is drinking cay and reading one of the new books. After much begging and pleading, he convinces her to go get a helmet from the rental place and ride with him to see the 3-headed chimneys and then take off for the town of Avanos to buy pottery for our friend in Izmir. Mission completed, we return the scooter late in the afternoon and wander around for the next few hours, waiting for our overnight bus to leave at 6:15.