Cappadocia by Balloon

If Istanbul is like New York City-- crowded, expensive, always busy-- Cappadocia is like Wyoming-- slow, sparse, and quiet, with wide majestic landscapes.  We hopped a quick one hour trip to central Turkey and picked up our rental car.  Urgup, our home here, is about an hour's drive from the airport.  Driving in Turkey is kind of liberating, because everyone drives like an idiot, and everyone expects everyone to drive like an idiot, so no one seems to get uspet.  Whatever you're doing wrong, there's probably someone else doing it wronger right behind you.

We drove fearlessly from the airport to Urgup with two conflicting sets of directions, and after about thirty wrong turns, we spotted our hotel and pulled in.  The hotel is a converted cave dwelling, and turns out to be about the fanciest place in town.

Playing with Edie's zoom.  Now she is far...

...now she is near.

Our hotel at night.

Our hotel by day.

The view from our hotel. 

Inside the room.  All the walls are cave walls.

The thing about Cappadocia is that there's all this volcanic rock mixed with sandstone, which makes it really easy to dig into but fairly sturdy for living in.  The Christians hid in thousands of these little caves around 1000 CE, while they were being pursued by...the Confederacy?  The Ottomans?  The Romans?  I've really lost track of who was sacking whom at various times throughout Turkey's history (at one point, the Crusaders, apparently looking for an unsuspecting target, invaded Constantinople-- a Christian city-- to convert them to, well, who knows.)  Anyway there were lots of Christians in the area, carving fantastic homes into these wonderful geological structures, and now Pagans can drop a load of Lira to stay in one for a few nights.   We're absolutely stunned at the beauty.

Saturday morning we woke up at 4am local time (ugh!) to take our special hot air balloon ride.  We were driven to breakfast where about 6000 other people were waiting for their special balloon rides too, which gave us pause.  But soon we were off with a group of about 14 people headed for our balloon.

It turns out the balloon basket holds up to 20 people, so it was actually quite spacious in there.  We practiced "hard" or "heavy" landing-- no one wanted to use the "c" word-- (thankfully we ended up with a soft landing) had our pictures taken, and soon we were off.

We were a little worried about motion sickness or panicking about the height, but it turns out that hot-air balloon flight is about the gentlest thing in the world.  We seriously couldn't even feel the ascent or descent.  At one point our pilot took us up to about 3000 feet in 4 minutes and we could barely tell.  Nothing "rushes" towards or away from you in a balloon, it just sort of slowly drifts.




Our pilot was an extremely talented balloonist, and spent the first half hour of the trip steering us through beautiful valleys, crazy-close to the canyon walls, but never seeming to panic or actually hit anything.  Flight is so smooth and devoid of a sense of motion that it lulls you into the feeling of watching a giant panoramic movie.  So even when we appeared to be "careening" into a cliff-face, it felt more like the movie was just slowly zooming in. "It looks like we're going to slowly crash into that craggy rock" I thought at one point, "and that's ok."  It's sooooo peaceful.

In the valleys, we got to see some more amazing dwellings from our unique vantage point.  There are hundreds of these things (ask if you want a longer slide show, we'd be happy to bore you more).  On many of them the front face is eroded so you're actually looking at the interior of the dwelling here.  The things that look like pigeonholes turn out to be holes for pigeons.  Pigeon dung was used for fertilizer and their eggs for mixing paints and dyes.  I asked, "Did they also eat the pigeons?" and our guide, looking like I'd stumped her, said, "Yeah, I suppose they probably ate them too."

An exposed dwelling (click to enlarge)

A painted pigeon hole (click to enlarge)

After trolling the valleys and showing off his amazing ballooning skills, the pilot took us up high for some panoramic views.  Another woman in our basket said she counted "at least 59 other balloons" in the sky.  Definitely 59, definitely.  Did I mention our pilot was an excellent driver?

 Finally the ride was over, and we all headed for the giant penis field to make our landing.

Click to enlarge penises

Our pilot located the chase vehicle and we slowly drifted around for a few minutes looking for a suitable spot to land.  Once located, the pilot pulled a couple of ropes to dump hot air, the crew reached up and nudged us to an fro, and they landed the basket exactly on its trailer.  The crew decorated the basket with flowers and poured champagne for a toast to a successful flight.

Our pilot also had amazing mixology skills.

So far this has been the coolest part of the trip, and an ideal way to view the gorgeous landscape of Cappadocia.  If you ever get a chance to go on a hot-air balloon trip, don't pass it up.  Edie even agrees it was worth the 4am wakeup call.