Of Huge Penises, Amazing Underground City, Horse-riding in the valleys and My first hammam experience
The Normad Cave Hotel is housed in one of the traditional “pigeon-holes”, stone formations formed by the volcanic ashes. It was low season and Cappadocia was relatively tranquil and quiet. The room was comfortable, but the only problem was that there was no heater in the room and no hot water in the toilet.
Cappadocia is reputedly one of the best places in the world to take the hot-air balloon, but a 45-minute ride costs 125 Euro pounds, which is equivalent to 400 Singapore dollars. We decided to skip the experience and opt for horse-riding in the valleys instead.
Horse-riding through the valleysThe one-hour horse-riding session through the Rose Valley and some other valleys cost about 20 Turkish dollars and was an interesting experience. My first horse-riding experience was in Australia about 7 years ago and this experience was completely different. In the short one-hour ride, we learnt many things about these horses.
My horse, Anika was a very lazy one, who always looking for green pastures and grass to graze. She didn’t mind being the last in the group, as long as she got her greens. Flowers were equally acceptable to her too. Don’t bother pulling the leather straps when she was enjoying her grass as she would not budge at all.
Wei Chean’s horse was very obedient to the master of the stallion and would follow him wherever he went. But he sometimes would go berserk and do a 45-degree up-slope gallop when he felt like it. That was scary, even just looking at the horse perform his stunts. Arlina’s “bat-man” horse was quite hard to manage at first, but Arlina soon found a special way to “communicate” with “bat-man” with her (ah-ah) meaning yes, and (osh-osh), meaning no. She managed to cruise through the valley with ease, though constant ah-ahs and osh-oshs and her usual song-rattling and that amused our guide so much that when we returned to return the horses, he praised Arlina for “singing very good.”
North Tour
Goreme Open-Air Museum, Causin Old Village, Fairy Chimneys, Cappadocia Wine Factory, Penispolis Valley
“I’m going to bring you girls to see the largest penises in the world”, said Max, our guide. It was our first day tour in Cappadocia and we were brought the UNESCO-known sight, Goreme, We also tasted some of the wines that were made in Cappadocia in the wine factory as part of the tour. Open-Air Museum and the Fairy Chimneys and other sights. Our guide, Max, decided to give us a steal for our money and brought us to Penispolis, where the sandstone formations looked very much like huge penises. It was a slow stroll but the view from Penispolis was quite awesome.
South-tour
Rose Valley Hiking, Underground City, Pigeon Valleys
The one and a half hour trek at the Rose Valley was a very pleasant one. We had lunch at the same venue, near the Goreme, a wonderful spread of salad, tomato soup with macaroni and pottery beef stew. The Underground City was my personal favourite. It was amazing to see how advanced the people were in the old days, how the tunnels are linked to other tunnels. There were special partitions for stables, cooking, praying, storage of water and air ventilation. There were others like the “rolling” doors made of 400 kilograms rock doors that can be closed to block the invasion of the intruders and at one point, there were as many as 7000 people living in the Underground City.
Considering that the Underground City was constructed more than 4000 years ago, the engineering that went behind the creation of the Underground City was simply amazing. These tunnels were only discovered by farmers in 1995 and excavated by archaeologists shortly after. It must have been a really exciting excavation for the archaelogists to discover this complete underground city. It was also during these two tours, South and North tour that we befriended 32-year-old Seiko, from Kyoto who was travelling in Turkey on her own. She was a small, petite lady, but a feisty and adventurous one. Though petite and so typically-Japanese, in her big sunshade hat, she has been travelling on her own to the United States and even India on her own last year.