Adventures in the Offseason

After a bustling few days in Istanbul, Amanda and I made our way to Cappadocia via Ankara.

A couple of quick hits on the capital:

Turkey is currently working on completing the high speed rail link between Ankara and Istanbul. For now, the train runs a normal-speed train from Istanbul to Eskişehir, and from there the high speed line takes passengers on to Ankara. The high speed line really felt like the future of travel; it whisked us along comfortably at about 250 km/hr. I'm hoping the US can one day get its act together and get some good train travel.

On our way out of Ankara, we met a friendly young Istanbuler named Tichoten* who was heading home from Ankara after his mandatory military service. He helped us buy a ticket at the metro, we had a nice conversation with him on the metro, and he insisted on walking us to the right ticket counter at the bus station and even ordered our tickets for us.

*or Tichome or some other sort of common Turkish name that we didn't quite understand and we felt foolish about not remembering.

Cappadocia

On to Göreme, which was our base for exploration of Cappadocia. I hadn't heard of Cappadocia until after we had booked our tickets to Turkey so I didn't really have a lot of expectations about what we were going to see there. We've seen our share of fascinating natural formations and ancient ruins on this trip. Cappadocia more than held its own; it was a delightful time and we enjoyed being there and trekking around the various sites.

It is firmly off-season now; the town is rather empty, there's a lot of half-done road work, some restaurants are closed, and those that are open seem to have more staff than customers. Our experience in Göreme was certainly not typical of what to expect during a summer visit. Low season does have the benefit of lower stress - there aren't many lines at interesting sites, no long waits for food, no needing to make reservations weeks in advance to stay in a nice place, and places to stay are less expensive. The weather left a little to be desired, but so it goes with off season travel.

We took a nice hike up Pigeon Valley to the nearby town of Uçhisar.

Uçhisar (we learned later from a friend that the schlep up to the castle at the top was not particularly rewarding that day)

From Uçhisar, we hiked back to Göreme through Love Valley. Didn't quite figure out the name.

Earlier in the day we met Nils, a German student studying in Turkey through the Erasmus program. We met up later at the one authentic-ish Turkish meyhane in town. There we tried some rakı and watched as the patrons danced. As they got more drunk, they were a little more insistent that we join them in dancing, and finally at the end of the evening everyone was up dancing. Amanda and I pulled out some horribly rusty moves, but I think we were still better dancers than the British couple.

We had an amusing tour the next day, seeing some sites of southern Cappadocia. The weather was even worse than the previous day, but things were made much brighter by the cheery Korean and Japanese students who were on the tour with us.

We toured what appeared to be a well-established loop, but with it being cool, foggy, and occasionally rainy, we had many sites to ourselves. We also ended up seeing panoramas like this:

But then again sometimes the fog would cooperate and give us a cool perspective like this:

The Selime Cathedral

All in all, travel in Cappadocia in the off season has been pretty worthwhile.