Turkey - Göreme (Cappadocia)

Turkey
Nature
Hike
Author

Oliver Eaton

Published

April 7, 2023

The bus ride from Dinizli to Göreme was a bit stressful. Trav actually booked the wrong date, so when boarding our ticket didn’t scan properly, he then realised the mistake and ran to the ticket office to sort it out. We made the bus with literal seconds to spare. Whilst on the bus, I was woken up by the host who asked me via sign language if I could put my shoes back on. It is bad manners to take shoes off when riding the bus in Turkey, and probably in most public situations too.


The bus snack food was stored directly above us in the overhead compartment. This was convenient because when hungry, in the middle of the night, I would stand, pretend to get something from my stowed jacket and pinch a handful of biscuits & muffins for us to eat. We arrived in Göreme around seven in the morning to snow on the ground 😮 - Shit, it was cold!

Trav’s booking of incorrect dates extended to our accommodation, we walked to our hostel to try and book an immediate extra night. Upon arriving, an employee was sleeping on the couch. We entered but didn’t want to wake him, instead we connected to the internet and booked a night elsewhere. We trudged through the cold to our new hostel and rested on the couch, sipped coffee and waited for our dormitory beds to be ready.

On our travels, everyone we met said we must goto Cappadocia because “it’s amazing”, hence why we detoured from our route to visit. Our main purpose here was to view the sky dotted with hot air balloons and do some hiking. Sadly, during our three days in Cappadocia, the hot air balloons were cancelled each morning due to weather, something out of our control. So we never got to bare witness to what literally everyone described as “incredible”. However, we did some awesome hikes and a day of mountain biking which was fun!

Sunrise

We awoke at six in the morning to watch the sunrise from the viewing platform, an inner city viewing platform where the hot air balloons can be watched. Usually, it costs ₺10TL to enter, but Trav found a free entry point that is an extra 10-minute walk. Afterwards, we went returned to the hostel to sleep.


Red Valley Hike

After napping until 10am, we ventured outside, bought a Turkish coffee and literally wandered into the hills for a hike. Not really knowing where we were headed, the valley we ended up hiking in was called “The Red Valley”, this is due to the reddish hue seen in the rock formations. We didn’t follow a particular route and wound up in some dicey situations. One, in particular, where a steep drop bound us on both sides and we were tiptoeing along an extremely thin ridge of crumbly sandstone. We got out of there quickly and kept to the main path for the rest of the day.


Red Valley Mountain Bike

The next morning we vacated our interim hostel. The only good thing about our first hostel was the shower, it is amazing how certain vibes emanate from hostels. Some you gel with, and some you don’t. The new hostel had a good vibe.

We decided on renting bicycles to mountain bike through the valleys. Picking up two mediocre mountain bikes for ₺200TL for four hours, we set off into Love Valley. Trav’s bike was absolute shite! Chain slip occurred every time there was a gear change, mine was fine. Cycling through Love Valley was okay, but we were after proper mountain biking, so we set off for Red Valley to explore a different section than yesterday.

This was real mountain biking! We were so high up, wheeling along little goat/bike tracks trampled into the side of a hill. The view was incredible. We were moving too fast to make proper photography. The route we took looped the whole city, on one steep section I came off over the handlebars, luckily it was relatively flat and soft ground. Obviously, no helmets were supplied to us upon rental. By the end of the day, we were exhausted, it was only a twenty-kilometre cycle, but the hills really took it out of us.


Love Valley & Pigeon Valley Hike

Two red-headed English girls (sisters) ate breakfast with us on our last day in Göreme, their names were Megan and Bethany. All of us were eager to hike so we planned one together through Love Valley. It was easy, we nearly finished it within an hour, so we extended into Pigeon Valley. In Pigeon Valley we met a solo hiker from Switzerland, his name was Patrick. We formed a group, finishing the day together, eating dinner and, multiple times, purchasing beers from the bottle store and drinking them in inconspicuous public locations. We had to be stealthy about public drinking due to it being Ramazan and generally a Muslim country.

It was a really fun day! Megan project manages a music festival in England called “Smugglers” as her full-time occupation. It plays world and psychedelic music, an event I might check out in September which will probably be my last weekend of the trip.



Wrap Up

The reviews are accurate, Capadoccia is a beautiful place, although we never got to see the hot air balloons! This was a bit disappointing because it is the main reason people visit.

Cappadocia is an expensive place. It was very hard to find a meal (single) for less than ₺200TL, some Asian cuisine even ranged up to ₺800TL, insane! A single beer at a bar cost ₺120TL. To put that into perspective, a beer in Antalya cost ₺65TL, and Trav & I could eat a meal for around ₺150TL in total. It does make sense that Cappadocia is expensive. Riding in hot air balloons is a somewhat glamorous activity, and the rest of the town is accommodating to this facade. The English sisters mentioned Istanbull is similarly priced to Cappadocia 😳.

In the evening we boarded a night bus returning to Antalya to retrieve our backpacks. From Antalya, we bus to Kaş, where we will meet Bara and begin hiking the Lucian Way. Fifteen hours on a bus is never fun…