Fresh trout, underground cities, fairy chimneys and whirling dervishes

We arrived in the region of Cappadocia on Tuesday and spent the morning exporing the Ilhara Gorge (like a very mini Grand Canyon). What a change from the deserts of Egypt, Syria and Jordan. It was wonderfully green, and we saw frogs and turtles lazing about at the water's edge. For lunch, we stopped at a restaurant located right on the river--in fact, they had piers that led out to covered platforms sitting in the middle of the river on which we sat to eat our lunch. We indulged in the local delicacy, trout caught directly from the river. The trout was cooked in its entirety and presented to us whole, aka with the head still on. Once I got over having my food staring back at me, it was delicious.

We spent the rest of the day with a local guide who took us through the underground cities of Cappadocia. The cities were built starting in 1500bc, directly in the ground down to six stories, and were used as a safe space for townspeople in case they were attacked. We spent an hour and a half exploring and apparently only saw about 10% of the city--our guide told us that the largest city could hold up to 10,000 people if needed. Whoa.

Yesterday, we hiked the areas around the city of Goreme, where we stayed for two nights, still in the Cappadocia region. The landscape was amazing, beautiful, like nothing I'd ever seen. They call the rock formations that exist there "fairy chimneys", for reasons which no one, not even the local guide, could give any definitive answer on. We also spent some time in a nearby village and took a tour of a turkish carpet co-op that sold carpets for over 400 weavers (all women) in the town.

Last night, we went to our first real tourist trap, a dinner and show of Turkish cultural dances. It actually ended up being way more fun than we had anticipated, which was probably influenced considerably by the all-you-can-eat-and-drink (emphasis on the drink part) meal we had, and the good company (about 7 of our group members made the trip). At some point, I'll upload some video of it, but internet is slow here and, in any case, You Tube is censored by the Turkish government. Who knew. The image here is of the famous "whirling dervishes", guys that spin around and around and around in long white gowns. At this dinner, they did a "dance" (aka spun around) for about 2 minutes or so under blacklights. Apparently, a couple group members went to a whirling dervishes show in Cairo and they spun around more or less non-stop for over an hour. That's a little too much spinning for me--I'll take the short version, thank you very much.

Today we lazed about before our trip to Ankara to board an overnight train to Istanbul. Our trip is technically over tomorrow at noon, although a few people will be staying on in Istanbul and we'll see the sights with them. Then we're off the following evening for Athens in order to board our CRUISE! Yay!!!