Your tax dollars -- My summer in Turkey: Cappadocia

We got back from our trip to Cappadocia early last evening, but I was too exhausted to do anything but eat and pass out around 8:30. After sleeping about fourteen hours, I feel sufficiently revived to write a little bit about what we saw.

The entire trip was conducted as a private bus tour, and we were herded around as a group pretty much the whole time. I had a great time with the other kids from the program, but felt very removed from my "life" in Turkey, which has generally included more Turkish than the few words of "hello" and "thank you" that we needed over the past few days. We spent a lot of our time taking pictures, visiting museums, and eating at enormous tourist-trap restaurants that were paid for by the program. On Friday, I think I heard more French, Spanish, and Greek than I did Turkish. None of us were used to such travel, but we all enjoyed swimming in the hotel pool each evening while watching the sun set over the beautiful landscape and cave houses of Cappadocia.

We left Ankara on Thursday, stopping briefly at the second largest lake of Turkey, the Salt Lake, before arriving in Cappadocia. Due to the unseasonal rain we've been experiencing lately, the lake was full of water, and the evaporation off of its surface created a beautiful pinkish-blue color. It's only about 2 meters deep at the center, and the salt content is over 30%.

We continued on to Cappadocia, where we saw the "fairy chimneys" and other geological wonders for the first time. The beautiful and bizarre rock formations of Cappadocia are the result of volcanic activity (there are three volcanoes forming a triangle around the region) and slow erosion of the ash over time. On our first day, it was very difficult for me to stop taking pictures.

On Friday, we visited the open-air museum, which consists of a number of old Christian monestaries built into the rocks of a valley. These caves are famous for the the frescoes in their churches, most of them painted during the Byzantine era. As you can see in this picture, a lot of the faces depicted in the frescoes have been destroyed (or at least damaged) by various locals since the departure of the Christians.

After eating lunch, we drove to a hillside of cave houses - old mansions built into the stone of the cliff. A lot of these houses in the region have had to be abandoned due to earthquakes and erosion over the years. The newer settlements can be found on the flatter surfaces next to the hills.

Of course, a lot of our time consisted of photo-ops as we drove along the edge of various canyons and valleys in the region. Towards the end, we cared less about the pictures and more about taking a break and getting some fresh air outside of the bus.

On Saturday, on our way out to Konya, where we visited the tomb of Rumi (the Persian poet and mystic), we stopped to explore the region's largest Karavanserai. Karavanserais were important fixtures of the old silk road, providing a resting point and trading place for merchants and travelers. They were funded by the government, and travelers were allowed to stay for free for their first three nights. After that, they were required to pay. The layout of the Karavanserai was generally rectangular, with an open space on the inside functioning as the summer marketplace and the outer rim functioning as a winter marketplace, bathrooms, kitchen, stables, etc. This Karavanserai also had a mosque in the center, which you can see in this picture.