Imported Apple tea and tales of Turkish ruins

After a good night's sleep we spied Miss Bec attempting to snuggle a little more sleep deep under her covers to escape the chill in the Ankara air, then we were up and away heading towards Istanbul. We lunched in Eskişehir and followed our usual routine of finding the specialty food for the town to hunt down. This often involves dedicated effort trying to find the place that sells this specialty food, but today this was easy: we only had to walk a few hundred metres from where our motorhome was parked. We ordered Cibörek, and what a delight it is. This dish was bought to Eskişehir by the Tartars of the Crimea early in the 19th century, who were among the early settlers in this town. It is light as a feather pastry, thicker than filo, but so fragile you barely know it from air. Ours was filled with mince meat, shaped like a half moon, and cooked in vegetable oil. It should be deadly, but it is one of our favourite dishes, to date. Mind you, we say that at least once every ...

We are, sadly, running out of time. We have to get back to Istanbul and we haven’t even explored the territory of the Hittites, the Phrygians, or, even fully explored the Ottomans yet. Nor will we be able to. We needed weeks longer than we planned to do all that we’d hoped. Turkey’s history is simply so dense: it is everywhere. As we were particularly bereft at missing Hattuşaş and the Hittites, which we’d been looking forward to as much as Çatalhöyük, we decided to compensate and head to Ankara, enroute to Istanbul, and visit their much acclaimed Museum of Anatolian Civilization, one of the top museums in the world. Major mistake. To start with, Ankara is the capital of Turkey. It is full of pigeons. Aside, and little known fact: Turkey uses pigeon guano for fertiliser. I think they likely could get most of it from the streets of Ankara. And chaotic traffic of the frightening kind. Drivers oftentimes appear not to be able to distinguish the pedestrian thoroughfa...

We woke early to watch the balloons fly from the top of Rose Valley panorama point. Too early as it turned out. Wind had blown up the previous morning and stopped any flights, so we waited and waited, and were about to head home thinking that would happen again this morning when finally one balloon floated up, then the rest slowly followed. There must have been a hundred when they were all aloft. The morning was icy cold so those brave enough to fly must have had on their heavy duty mitts and ear muffs as it would have been brutally cold higher up. The balloons floated slowly over the valley, hanging before our eyes like a hundred coloured Chinese lanterns. One or two dropped down for a thrill into one of the wider gorges near us, but we don’t think conditions must have been perfect today, as most floated down after just 45 minutes.  Superstition is alive and well in Cappadocia. One of our early morning coffee cafes had a spiky thorny concoction hanging ...

Our campground in the heart of Cappodocia is on top of a mountain overlooking Goreme. The views could not be more fantastical. The area falling away beneath our camp site looks like a million Lilluptian children have taken buckets of soft sand and randomly poured it all over the surface of the land, leaving pyramids, cones, mushroom shapes, and striated raw edged cliffs all touched with the colours of white, rose, cream orange and grey. This whole area is one of the earliest sites in Turkey that was protected as a UNESCO World Heritage site, which also tend to be our favourite sites to visit in any country.  Here are the mushroom shapes at the tail end of Rose Valley.  Perfectly natural tuff is eroding exactly where it has stood for centuries.  The ground is hard to walk on, yet it looks as soft and shifting as sand. So your brain keeps having to make adjustments when you walk: is it soft? isn't it? Quite disconcerting, tho' Bec doesn't seem to mind. One d...

We are still not getting very far, very fast. Today we are back in Güzelyurt visiting Monastery Valley, and as we head down into it we are enchanted by how parts of this place look as though it has stood here for centuries. Monastery Valley is overlooked by a small domed church, now a mosque, reputedly built for St Gregory of Nazianzus in the early 4th cent AD at a time when being a Christian was no longer a crime. He was a theologian and a scholar whose writings were among those that influenced the split to Orthodoxy. During his lifetime, wherever he was stationed, people flocked to hear him preach.  A monastery was set up here to train young novitiates and the near vertical rocks on all sides of this pretty and ancient valley are riddled with cave dwellings, chapels, and churches that have grown up through the ages. Too many to count. Pilgrims trekked from afar to visit. Then, and now. Monastery Valley follows a stream, edged with willows, and there is a tree, pr...