Cappadocia, Turkey

Hi All,

Hope you all had a great weekend. I went to Cappadocia with family last December it was something out of this world. I have never seen a place like this – cave hotels, beautiful rock formations, snow covered landscapes, cave hotels and so much more. I stayed at the amazing Gamirasu Cave Hotel and had so much fun there. You can read about it in my blog-post here.

I had a chance to collaborate with Euphrates Tours while visiting Cappadocia and had the most wonderful time there. They are very professional and took good care of me and my family. Our tour guide was really funny and witty and extremely knowledgeable. I would absolutely recommend booking them if you plan on visiting Cappadocia. We were in the city for a day and they had the whole itinerary planned for us.

Here is what we did:

1) Hot Air Balloon

Unfortunately, due to the weather (because it was supposed to snow later) our hot air balloon trip was cancelled in the morning. If you are there in the summer or when the weather permits during winter, I would totally suggest you to try it out and see a 360 degree view of Cappadocia from high up in the sky. I was pretty bummed we couldn’t do this since you can capture some terrific shots of the landscapes during the golden hour. Anyhow, there is so much more to do there that we were happy in the end :).

2) Devrent Valley

This place is famous for it’s lunar landscapes. They have a lot of different rock formations (called fairy chimneys) as you can see in the pictures above. It’s like a zoo made by nature.

2) Pasabag (Monks Valley)

This place has mushroom shaped fairy chimneys – very unique for Cappadocia as well. It’s due to the erosion’s of the rocks during different time periods. It’s said that the “hermits of Cappadocia” distanced themselves from the world by cutting into fairy chimneys rather than living on top of columns. They hollowed out the chimneys from bottom to top creating rooms at 10-15m high. Pretty fascinating, isn’t it..!!

3) Kaymakli Underground City

This is the part I found the most fascinating amongst everything we saw in the entire tour. There are a number of underground cities in Cappadocia, we went to the biggest one. The city was 8 floors deep and only 4 are open to the public. It was amazing how they had constructed everything from baths, rooms with doors, cellars, food and meat storage, animal storage, ventilators etc underground with the ancient tools and technology.

4) Avanos and Pottery Making Workshop

This is a river side town and is known as the Mecca for pottery with master potters setting up shop on every corner. We actually went to a pottery making workshop and it was very interesting learning about the whole process. I even had the chance to get a free lesson and try it myself. We brought so many of those pieces and I wish I could just bring their entire store home with me 🙂

5) Gerome Open Air Museum

Goreme open air museum is a world heritage UNESCO site. It consists of monasteries placed side-by-side, each with its own fantastic church. Most of the cave churches date back to the 11th century and some of them still have the original Byzantine art.

6) Carpet Making Workshop

This is another fun thing to see while in Cappadocia. We got a demonstration of silk being spun and seeing the women weaving carpets. It was very interesting knowing that these carpets are intricately woven by hand and some of them even take years to be made.

7) Turkish Night

This was a lot of fun. It was held inside a hotel, we had dinner and drinks included and there were a number of performances right from belly dancing to a traditional Turkish wedding ceremony. I even got to try my hands at some dance lessons 🙂

Here are some other pictures I took on the way:

Thank you so much Euphrates tour for the amazing introduction to Cappadocia. Can’t wait to visit again. If any of you plan to visit and have any questions, please let me know and I will try my best to answer them :).

Love,

Ankita

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