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Thursday, November 14th - Goreme
Wine and beer are not on my list of recommended food combining. I feel like shit this morning. That is dampening my enthusiasm for exploring this town and vicinity. Coen and Vincent (especially Coen) are as bad off as I am, perhaps worse because they are smokers. But it's one thing at a time. We start off slow with breakfast at the hostel with other backpacker guests: Carla from Denmark, Beate from Germany, Ron from Australia and Rudolpho from Brazil. They are a pleasant lot.
This morning we set about exploring the town first, which one can do in a couple hours, depending on how fast he pokes through the shops. Wow, I haven't seen tie-dye clothing since I was in Matala in Crete in 1984. It is still as repulsive as ever. There are some plastic replicas of ‘fairy chimneys’ for purchase too. Fairy chimneys are the name they give hoodoos that one sees in the hills around here. Just what a backpacker needs to carry around. I suppose they could be used to punch holes in grapefruits or something.
In the afternoon, Coen, Vincent and I go our separate ways. The Tom Sawyer in me wants to explore the region in the hills immediately above Goreme, so I climb towards the edges of town and slowly up into the hills. It’s hard to say exactly where the town stops and the countryside begins because the terrain has been built around, not built over. The weathered cones of volcanic ash peek up between the buildings and several buildings are just extensions of what were man-made caves.
The slopes around the sides of the bowl that Goreme lies in are covered with the ragged remnants of what was once a deep layer of ash, perhaps a fifty or a hundred metres thick. The tops of the remaining cones are darker brown while the lower and smaller lumps are a pale ivory colour, as though they have been recently exposed. Trails casually meander through them as though they have no purpose but to help me explore. As chopped up, rugged and uninhabitable as it looks from a distance, it is very accessible when I am up close and walking amongst them.
I crawl into several caves, some of them single rooms and others connected like a family unit. Many of them, but by no means all of them, have lost a walls or have developed other forms of unwanted air conditioning, perhaps by erosion, earthquakes or, as I would imagine in many cases, by getting a bit too aggressive or greedy about the size of the room.
I spend all afternoon alone in these hills, not more than a kilometre or two from Goreme, exploring and experiencing the wonder of it. I can’t say I’d ever enjoy living here in one of these caves but what an interesting community it must have been. This must be where the expression, “What rock did you crawl out from under?” came from.
I come across a small path, still kept barren of grass by passing feet, that leads under a large boulder seven metres high. There is a hole in the bottom of the rock about a metre off the ground and one in the top of the rock to let a little light in. I crawl up inside of it. The whole of the centre of the rock has been hollowed out, painted and made into a small chapel large enough for half a dozen people to pray. The frescoes were simple and worn, but their purpose still clear. This was an early Christian church during the period of Roman persecution, perhaps 1800 years old or so.
My mind is challenged trying to imagine how these people lived as secretly as possible, but what is more amazing is that I can walk around here like this through exploring these treasures of history without paying admission, stanchions, signage or supervision. Perhaps what is even most amazing is that I am the only one doing this in a valley still quite full of tourists. If it's not a packaged and paid for tour, then it can't be worth seeing, right?
As the light becomes low in the west and dinner time approaches, I make my way back through this marvelous playground of cones and caves to Goreme. The few bushes that grow on this ash soil are full of autumn colour. I am in the happiest and most peaceful moods. A discordant thought reminds me that three days ago at this time of day I was almost killed by two mastiff guard dogs. Life is an unpredictable stream.
Vincent and Coen are already back at our hotel. They are about to make a booking for a tour of the largest underground city, Derinkuyu, tomorrow. They have been waiting to see if I want to come along. Of course I do. And then it's off to dinner again to share our stories of what we have done today. Coen has been buying gifts for relatives and his girlfriend and shipping them home to Holland. Vincent has more to buy. He climbed the hill up to Uchisar and toured the castle rock while I was playing in amongst the cones and caves below. There seems to be an endless supply of orifices to pop in and out of around here. The biggest concentration is north of here in the Open Air Museum, a national park in the Zelve Valley. We want to see that too, after our visit to the underground city.
This evening we visit a pub in Goreme, the back half of which is a cave cut deep into the base if a 20 m high ash column. The chisel marks used to make the cave are still showing, left there for effect I am sure. It gives the pub a homey, slightly-troglodyte atmosphere, rather like an Irish pub. We are really into drinking tonight. There is too much smoke in here for my taste and the Dutch boys are still recovering from last night's excesses. Vincent and I begin musing about the stability of the giant stone column directly above us, now that it has been so severely undercut. We manage to spook Coen who wants to leave now, so we all leave together.
It is clear and cold, not far above freezing tonight. There is moonlight too, which makes the distant cones look like hooded strangers and aliens watching over us. I am picking up their frequency. They are asking me to play with them. They tell me miss the times when people slept in their bellies, but I am too tired tonight. I have to get my rest for tomorrow.
PHOTO 1: in the slopes east of Goreme
PHOTO 2: looking out of an "air conditioned" cave
PHOTO 3: inside another former cave dwelling
PHOTO 4: panorama of the area I was exploring
PHOTO 5: more of Goreme;s valley
PHOTO 6: late afternoon, heading back to the B&B
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