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Around Göreme |
Fortunately we were awake as the bus
approached Göreme as the place is something out of a fairy tale with rock cut windows and doors dotting the rock peaks that stand like mushrooms all over the town as well as the entire place being covered in a fresh dusting of snow, it was simply magical.
It was 6.45am when we arrived and the conductor kindly informed us that the
air temp outside was -17°C, which meant we would go from our over-warmed bus to instant frozen-ness! We walked very briskly to our
hostel, the Rock Valley, and discovered it was twice the cost of what we’d
thought (that what happens when a place gets in the Lonely Planet….) but since
everything else in town was that price or more and would require us hiking through the snow we had no option but to take a room there, luckily it was a nice
place.
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Inside a chapel |
After an extra hot shower and breaky we
ventured back outside to visit the Open Air Museum which is a collection of rock cut
chapels that you can go inside. The
interiors have many frescoes depicting Biblical New Testament stories, some
extremely well preserved and others looking a bit like a two-year old child had a go at cave painting….
We recharged and defrosted with a hot salep at the museum because our next plan was to walk to the Rose and Red Valleys and onto the next town. We were unsure as to where the path actually
started as the fields were covered in at least a foot of snow so no path was visible, but fortunately when we asked the friendly museum guy for directions he said that he had to head that direction and gave us a lift to the starting point!
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Fairy chimneys in the snow |
It was a good thing he did as we would’ve never found it, and even with his
directions we still felt like we were just trudging through a snow field in a
random direction... but after we were 20 minutes in we finally saw a sign pointing us to where we wanted to go. We trekked past many old dug out chapels and houses
in the rocks that nowadays are used by local farmers to store the hay for their
cows and horses. It was a bit strange to see these beautiful chapels
with ancient paintings filled to the roof with straw!!
The Rose and Red Valleys are so named for
the colour of their rock formations and they are very pretty to see, although the
deep snow made exploring them an impossibility so we had to just appreciate
them from a distance. About 2 hours later
we arrived at the small town of Çavuşin
which has a cliff towering over it that literally looks like
Swiss cheese (the variety with a lot of
holes in it!). We hiked up to the top since there
is a fantastic church carved deep into the rock. It was a real engineering feat and extremely impressive to
see the ancient pick marks in the stone walls.
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Çavuşin Swiss cheese |
There
was no food in town so we continued onto our next destination – Love
Valley, where the rock formations are quite phallic in nature, hence the
valley’s nickname. Unfortunately, since
the snow covered all the paths we cut across the snowy field too late, had to
backtrack along the highway 20 minutes and by then the sun was setting which meant the temperature would plummet below our already below zero temperatures, and with the added strain of
hiking through snow in our normal walking shoes,
it was all taking it’s toll, so we gave up on seeing phallic rocks and turned around and walked the 40 minutes back
into town (only to later discover we were one corner in road away from the valley - typical).
One
of the first restaurants we saw had a pot-belly stove burning which was enough
to entice us inside no matter what was on the menu! And actually we were so
hungry that anything
would’ve tasted good! At this point, we do
have to apologise to our Greek friends as we ordered a Turkish Moussaka and it was really good…. but that might've been because we hadn't eaten lunch and been hiking in the snow all day...
The freezing temps, lack of sleep on our previous overnight bus and our alarm being set for 6am so we could go hot air ballooning the next day meant that we were in bed by 8pm and dead asleep not long afterwards.
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