Day 30: My bags are packed but nowhere to go

Turkey Tour, Day 4

(July 22, 2019)

Yesterday, we scheduled a hot air balloon ride for Joshua and I (Randy’s  done one before) for this morning and we would have left at 3:30 am, but last night they cancelled it due to a forecast of high winds. So instead we slept a little later than that and packed our bags to bring them with as we will go straight from the tour to the airport.  We picked up others along the way to end up with 8 of us (we picked up two more at lunch to end  the day with 10).   First some pictures of our cave hotel:

The hotel

 

The view from our front door

Our bathroom

Our room

Our outdoor seating area

The steps we take upstairs for breakfast.  They are digging
out new rooms up here.

 

After we picked every one up from their various hotels, the first stop was to see another hill town.  We didn’t take a lot of time to go hike and poke around, just a quick stop to see and take some pictures. 

A display

I believe the next stop was Pasha’s Vineyard (it was hard to follow our tour guide’s descriptions).  It has a gift shope and coffee shop with an area outside to take photos.  But the amount of time we spent there was way too long (our guide encouraged us to order some coffee). 

A wish tree

Joshua

Before lunch, we went to a pottery near the Red River and watched a master potter create a pot, then were encouraged to look around the showroom and purchase some pottery.  We looked around at the great stuff they had, but everyone declined to buy anything.

This isn't the pottery we went to, but an example of the phonetic
spellings we often see of English words (Hitit is Hittite and Seramik
is ceramic.  We've also see taksi for taxi).

The next stop was the Devrent Valley to see fairy chimneys.  Fairy chimneys look sort of like mushrooms.  They have a column of rock with a bulbous head on the top.  It is caused by the different levels of rock from different eras in this area.  The level just below the head of the chimney was softer and a combination of rain and wind washed it away.  They were interesting, but we could have spent a lot less time looking at them.

The last stop for us was Göreme, an open-air museum.  It was a site of early Christians from the 10^th and 11^th centuries.  There were 15 chapels.  The living areas were on the bottom floors with the chapels on the top (to be closer to god).  There were dormitories for nuns and monks as well.  Most of the chapels have well-preserved paintings, but we aren’t able to photograph them because of the religious setting. 

the monastery

Pictures of the paintings they've found

The outside of a chapel

A winery

A table

Another table

A church

Not at Görem, but while we were picking up someone else--see
the pitchers and pot used in the wall!

During our tour, we were getting a little worried about catching our flight (as was our guide), so he called and a separate bus was brought for us to go straight to the airport—we left a little before everyone else.  On the way, we stopped and picked up a few other people going to the same destination.  Two of them we had first met when we flew in.  One of them had been used as the Turkish-English translator when they split us up by language to go to our hotels.  (He lived in Turkey until he was 10 and they moved to England so he spoke both languages fluently).  Many of the roads through town were closed, so we were running a little later getting to the airport then we should have been.  However, when we arrived at the airport, our flight was not listed and there was no one at our airline’s counter.  We went to the information desk.  She went and found someone else and it turns out that they had cancelled our flight (without contacting us) an rebooked us on the next flight.  So instead of a 6:45 flight, we now had a 10:10 flight.  I noticed a placard on the airline desk that said that if our flight was cancelled and our next flight was more than 2 hours later to askf for a text that explained our rights.  So, I did, and it took awhile, but they gave it to me in English.  It explained EU law (that must cover Turkey as well) that said that if our flight was delayed by more than two hours they must provide us with beverages and by more than three hours they needed to provide us with a meal and beverages.  We were also able to be compensated for 150 Euros each.  We figured that since we didn’t book the flight, we probably wouldn’t get the financial compensation, but I went up to get the food.  Because the flight was so late, we wouldn’t be getting to our hotel until 1:30 in the morning; too late to get dinner.  The airport was absolutely tiny with only a small coffee shop and a souvenir desk, and no wifi.  I talked to the person at the desk who talked to two other people (evidently this doesn’t happen often) and finally the manager of that airline office took us up to the coffee shop and we were basically able to order anything that we wanted.  We ordered dinner and upgraded our drinks that came with the meals to lemonades.  All paid for by the airline.   We had to contact our hotel and the tour company that was providing the driver to our hotel that we would be late.  Then our plane was late and we took off even later.  When we arrived in Istanbul, there were again too many of us for the transport and they had to split us up.  We got to our hotel around 2:30, absolutely exhausted.