“We will be getting up early tomorrow morning”.  We were just beginning our pre-cruise extension to Cappadocia but already these words struck terror in our hearts.  There wouldn’t be a single “reasonable”, i.e. daylight, rising, before we finished our visit & returned to Istanbul & the safety of our ship.  We never get jet lagged, but bythe time we left Cappadocia we knew what advice we would give others.  Begin each day at 3:30 AM; it so totally confuses the system that jet lag never stands a chance.

The entire three days in Cappadocia was like time transported to another universe.  The landscape is full of weirdly beautiful formations.  There is sandstone everywhere dotted  with caves & everywhere there are doorways, windows, & niches carved (for pigeons, no less). We visited Gorême, an open air museum and Unesco World Heritage Site & saw its monastery, nunnery & chapels with intact frescoes, & even a couple with skeletons. No photographs are allowed inside, but by the time the guard said that within my earshot,  I had already taken a few.  We stopped for lunch at local restaurants & always found Turkish meals interesting.  They invariably start with a selection of five or six small dishes, (most of them unidentifiable). It’s plenty for a meal, but this is meze, an appetizer.  Eat sparingly; lunch, or dinner, is still to come! 

After a day of viewing the “fairy chimneys” & cave structures that Cappadocia is famous for, we were delivered to our hotel… the Yunak Evleri Cappadocia Cave Hotel.  In other words, we were staying in one of those caves! It was very cute & we were fortunate to have a ground floor unit & virtually no stairs while others had several flights.  There was also no A/C & I heard some grumbling from people about being hot.  We had a big floor fan & were perfectly comfortable.  However, there was essentially NO internet!  Although it pretended (operative word) to connect  if you stood by the front door, or sat in the courtyard, there wasn’t enough bandwidth to post anything.

The following morning we arose (at 3 AM this time, for a 4:15 pickup) for a hot air balloon ride.  We had done this – twice – in Africa, & might well have skipped doing it a third time in a year had friends not told us that ballooning in Cappadocia was an absolute must.  They were so right!  We rode up the harrowing winding road, in the dark, with strange rock formations looming on one side or the other often with nothing standing between us and death on the the other.  (Larry commented that we’d get to see the rocks better on the way down until we realized that of course the balloon would be landing below on the flats!) We passed several balloon outfitters before pulling into Butterfly Balloons, where we were checked in & given coffee, muffins & fruit.  Then it was off to our assigned pilot & van.

After a short drive in the dark we reached the staging area & found dozens of balloons sitting in  various stages of inflation.  It resembled a circus before the start of the big show, with people running back & forth & others tending diligently to their tasks.  Mehmet, our pilot, was one of the most diligent.  We roamed about snapping photos & taking video like crazy until the crew called us to attention & started loading the basket.  Some baskets were huge, holding over twenty passengers.  Ours had two sections on either side of the pilot, four people in each section except for one with five teen girls who spent their time taking selfies for their social media.  They were cute & funny.  I imagine they even got some balloons in their photos, if only by accident. It was mostly about angle & how the light was hitting their flawless skin.

It’s hard to describe the scene or the sensation of rising into the sky surrounded by so many other beautiful, massive balloons lighting up as pilots shot flame into them. There are an astonishing one hundred and seventy five to eighty five hot air balloons in Cappadocia & most of them were in the sky that morning.  It was absolutely spectacular!  They were the show, even more than the landscape.  It took your breath away, & it brought tears to my eyes & a lump to my throat to be so fortunate, & to be a part of something so beautiful. It certainly brought a prayer of gratitude to my lips for all the blessings Larry & I have been given.

We were airborne for well over an hour enjoying the views, the company, Mehmet’s descriptions, & the antics of the bevy of screen-shooting beauties.  This was no haphazard operation; they had a computer aboard & the copilot was using it.  But it got better.  We had been instructed in the position to assume for landing & to brace in the event that the basket were to bang around, or even tip over.   Only that did not happen; Mehmet landed the darn thing right on the trailer!  With his crew manning the guy lines, & all of us hanging on & being very still (& not at all aware why, exactly) Mehmet set that huge basket, filled with people, suspended from a gigantic balloon, subject to the whims of the wind, right down smack on the truck, ready to be driven back home!  It was amazing!

Before we were finished, everyone got a chance to pull the lever and ignite the flame inside the balloon & then to go inside the partially deflated balloon to look around & take photos.  This outfit is absolutely devoted to delivering a real, memorable, & customer-pleasing experience!  They wrapped up with champagne (well shaken so everyone who didn’t run got a shower), juice, pastries, an evil eye talisman, & a certificate.  What a morning!  We were delivered back to our hotel in time for breakfast (they never miss an opportunity to feed us!) & to climb on the buses for day two of sightseeing.

There was no rest for the weary. After breakfast… that’s another story…we boarded our buses & were taken to visit a carpet company & then a pottery establishment. Both were fascinating & expensive beyond belief. We were shown how (mostly of wool) Turkish carpets are made by women in homes all over the country & saw how silk worm cocoons become the strongest & longest threads in all of the textile industry.  We were then taken through room after room filled with rolls of carpet.  Eventually we ended in a huge sales showroom where Turkish tea, coffee & Raka (a liquor like Greek ouzo) were served & we were shown rugs of every color, size & price & encouraged to walk barefoot on them.  They were wonderful & there were several I would love to have owned but my favorites were both $42,000; if I had that kind of money lying around I’d spend it on more adventures, not on something to put on my floors, good investment or not.

The pottery establishment was a seven generation family business & they demonstrated how they made a complicated wine bottle on a pottery wheel before going on to how it was hand painted & even textured.  They make plates, bowls, cups, sets of pitchers or wine bottles with matching glasses, figurines & wall hangings.  I spotted a kitty figurine that would have made a perfect gift for our kitty sitters.  It was priced at 8730 Turkish lira. The conversion factor is 18 & I could figure in my head & know immediately it was out of the question; $485 USD was far more than I wanted to spend!  

Although lunches & dinners were frequently in a restaurant chosen for their interesting cuisine, breakfast was always at the hotel & it was beyond “interesting”.  First there was cheese; all apparently the same sorts (mozzarella & feta, maybe?) but in more forms than you thought possible.  Little rolls, curls, balls, slices, squares, triangles, twists, strips, twirls, curds, lumps in whey, etc.  Then came the meats, everything from thin slices of hard sausages to prosciutto to soft bologna to meatballs.  Then there were several bowls of “white stuff”, at least one of which was plain yoghurt. Following this was a display of olives, pickled veggies, salad greens, various toppings from oats to currants, nuts, seeds & grated cheeses.  This was followed by mushrooms, dried  figs, apricots, little squares of jellied candy, nuts, hard boiled eggs, a whole honeycomb to chop away at & finally….. French toast, scrambled eggs, sausages, & a variety of pastries (that looked sweet but weren’t). You had to start over on the other side to get bread & coffee, tea or juice.  Once you’d done it once & figured it out (so you didn’t take salad, olives & dry oats in plain yoghurt for breakfast!) you could be pretty efficient & get a breakfast fairly edible by American standards. 

On the last night we had dinner at a restaurant with a folkloric show. The dancers were very good & the show ended with the women belly dancing in fairly modest costumes before a single very …. I’m torn between calling her suggestive or downright lewd…. belly dancer performed solo. At the end of her performance men from the audience came up & tucked money in her skimpy costume – or sent their wives to do it!

Not surprisingly, our luggage had to be outside our rooms at 5 AM.  That of course meant we had to be done with it, so we were up very early again.  Breakfast was at 5:30 & at 6:30 we were on our way to the airport.  We flew to Istanbul’s gigantic newly enlarged & renovated airport – busiest in the world, they say – & negotiated many trips through security, removing belts, taking everything out of backpacks & so on.  Bathroom breaks were challenging for the women because, in addition to the inevitable lines, in Türkiye, only a few stalls contain sit down toilets.  So the question was always, “Sitter or squatter?!”, with the answer anxiously awaited. (The cure for the hole in the floor toilet is to wear a long skirt instead of slacks: I brought several.).  We followed our “red lollipop Viking guys” through the airport, collected our luggage & went out into the impossibly loud & hectic pickup zone to find our six big Viking buses.  Amazingly our bags were right where they were supposed to be!  We added the Cappadocia bags &  climbed on.  It was after 11 AM, everyone was anxious to be aboard the ship, where we could have eaten lunch (& had a nap!) but we allowed ourselves to be subjected to one more lunch before being driven to the port. 

Viking Sky will overnight in Istanbul & we will have our first shore excursion before leaving for Troy & getting this adventure underway.