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:
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| The hotel |
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| The view from our front door |
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| Our bathroom |
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| Our room |
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| Our outdoor seating area |
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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.
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| 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).
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| A wish tree |
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| 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.
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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 10th
and 11th 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.
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| the monastery |
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| Pictures of the paintings they've found |
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| The outside of a chapel |
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| A winery |
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| A table |
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| Another table |
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| A church |
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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.
