Churches and chimneys in Cappadocia

Cappadocia’s bizarre landscape formed as a result of volcanic eruptions and millions of years of weathering. The result is a sea of fairy chimneys, mountains, and canyons. While our hot air balloon ride gave us an aerial view of Cappadocia’s rock formations, we also wanted to see them close up. We took a road trip to explore some of the churches that had been built into the rock further afield, as well as spending a day navigating the Rose Valley on foot.


On our first day in Göreme, we set off for a road trip with Mick & Helen through a few of the villages south of the town. First up was a visit to an abandoned church attached to a rocky cliff in the extremely quiet town of Cemil.

I’m not sure what I was expecting to find inside, but I wasn’t expecting this.

The church was an eerie blend of vibrantly colourful columns, vandalised frescos, and modern graffiti. Slightly unsettlingly, the faces had been scratched from many of the frescos that adorned the walls. This place sent chills down my spine.

We continued on to a monastery complex just outside the village of Keşlik, containing two more churches, a wine cellar, a house and a monks’ refectory, carved entirely from caves. We were met by the site’s guardian, who listed the use of each cave in the monastery complex, and repeatedly insisted that a “complete visit is possible.”

Dutifully, we entered the first cave and were met with a dazzling array of colourful 9th-century frescos. In contrast, the 13th century cave-church appeared to have its ceiling painted black. That was until our guardian friend emerged out of the darkness with a torch, and helpfully pointed out Jesus and his disciples depicted in various biblical scenes across a number of faded frescos. These were all but invisible until he highlighted them with the beam of his torch.

As we continued to explore the monastery complex, we came across what looked like a giant millstone standing just inside the entrance to one of the cave rooms. Once again, the guardian popped up to demonstrate that it could be rolled across the room’s doorway sealing it against any intruders, therefore allowing the monks to make their escape down a tiny tunnel at the back of the cave. This level of foresight and preparation gave us a bit of insight into the fear of persecution under which these monks lived.

All this exploration was hungry work, so we drove on to the village of Soğanlı and came across this beautiful family-run restaurant in an apricot orchard. As per usual, we ordered a colossal amount of food (not pictured), and spent most of the mealtime trying to palm off our plates on to each other.

The main reason we’d driven as far as Soğanlı was explore a whole ancient city of cave dwellings. Below you can see Mick welcoming us to his cave church, while I’m demonstrating how the monks used to dine at long (and now very dusty) communal tables carved out of rock.

The return journey to Göreme was largely uneventful, save for a few cows unapologetically flaunting the no overtaking signage.


We spent the best part of our second day in Göreme hiking through the Rose Valley. Sadly, Mick wasn’t feeling well, so we stole him some of the breakfast buffet and left him in the peace and quiet of our hotel, while Helen, Sara and I set off on foot into the Rose Valley. It didn’t take long before the landscape had turned lunar in its appearance.

The destination of this hike (besides experiencing the breathtaking landscape up close) was a trio of churches, this time cut out of the inside of some fairy chimneys.

These multi-storey rock-churches had some of the most impressive and colourful frescos we’d seen so far, although again, the faces had been disturbingly scratched off.

These frescos are more than 1300 years old (and it’s possible to wander in with no entrance fee)!

We’d only hiked 5 or so kilometres by this point but we were already struggling in the afternoon heat and relentless sun. But then, as if by some mirage in the desert, a cafe emerged at the top of a rocky climb just as we arrived at the second church. Exhausted and slightly dehydrated, we flopped into seats in the shade of an umbrella, and gladly accepted the offer of some freshly squeezed orange and pomegranate juice. If I didn’t have a photo to prove its existence, I’m not sure I would have trusted my own memory as this seemed such an unlikely refuge in the otherwise barren valley.

Helen became quite comfortable in the cafe, and was happy to sit tight while Sara and I continued toward the final church. However, we hadn’t gone far before Sara judged the descent too steep and decided to stop. I was determined to continue given how far we’d come, and proceeded to half-abseil, half-scramble down the path to the final church. Anticlimactically, the church was locked shut, and I returned to Sara bathed in sweat and out of breath, but with my need for completeness satisfied.

Sara took the following photo while she was waiting and is very proud of her new game of “Where’s W-Oli” (below). I should say that we think WordPress is compressing our images so this is probably virtually impossible!


Sadly, this concluded our final day in Cappadocia, so we packed up and headed to the bus station. But then, out of the crowds popped Piotr, an old friend of mine from Hive. He and his girlfriend are on a similar journey east, also avoiding flying wherever possible. Our meeting was brief as their bus was due to depart imminently, but I hope our paths cross again for a little longer next time!

No sooner had I waved goodbye and good luck to Piotr, it was also time to say farewell to Mick & Helen. We parted ways for them to return to Istanbul, while we continued our journey east to Sivas, an important trading post along the silk road. It was lovely to travel with them for an action-packed fortnight through Turkey, and waving them them off from the bus window certainly brought a tear to the eye. We hope to see you both again soon!

Flying high above Cappadocia

Cappadocia is a region in central Turkey that is famous for its arid landschape packed full of incredible rock formations, cave churches and underground dwellings. It’s also the subject of 2.7 million tagged photos on Instagram, many of them featuring the hot air balloons that fly almost every day of the year.

I was a little worried that we wouldn’t be able to move for Instagrammers posing for OTT photoshoots, but thankfully it wasn’t like that at all (despite the fact that we really did see a shop in Göreme that had dresses for hire to use in photoshoots – it is obviously big business). But anyway, back to the other big business of the area: taking a flight in a hot air balloon. I had always assumed that it was such a popular activity here just because it gave a great view of the rock formations from the air, but apparently it is much more to do with the fact that the region has near-perfect weather conditions for ballooning.

It’s not a cheap activity but we’ve been underspending on our daily budget in Turkey and, putting this together with some birthday money, decided that this was not an opportunity to be missed. Mum also joined us, but Dad, perhaps sensibly, decided to keep his feet firmly on the ground and thus avoided the 4.45am alarm.

In darkness, we were taken to a rough field just outside Göreme that was to be the take-off zone for the day (it changes each day dependent on weather conditions). We watched as the balloons were prepared, and I had a surprise when three small hills right next to where we were standing suddenly started to grow and I realised that they were, in fact, more hot air balloons (to be fair, I was quite sleep-deprived). Each balloon is inflated on the ground while the basket lies on its side, and then the burners are used to bring the balloon above the basket and lift the basket upright.

At this point, we hopped in and were given a demonstration of the braced ‘landing position’, which thankfully we didn’t have to use. Then it was time for take-off! We dipped down again briefly without landing as the pilot decided he fancied some coffee so the ground crew reached up and passed him a cup – this was probably showboating, but I could sympathise with his need for caffeine!

We climbed up to a maximum height of 800m, but at other points we were only metres from the ground as we flew around the valleys, over view points and watched as the sun peeped over the horizon, all the while surrounded by countless other colourful balloons. It was pretty stunning, although I did get wobbly knees when I realised quite how high we were at times.

All too soon, it was time to land. We grazed several trees on the way down, but the pilot didn’t seem overly concerned! We landed directly on the basket trailer, which was very impressive, but then had a slightly surreal few minutes where we were towed along on the trailer with all the passengers still in the basket and the balloon still above our heads. I assume this is because the area where we landed didn’t have sufficient space to pack up the balloon (there were the aforementioned trees, after all).

Being towed along while still inside the basket, very surreal!

Finally, it was time for the landing ceremony, where the crew opened (and sprayed much of) two bottles of bubbly and then shared the remainder between glasses of fruit juice for each of the 20 passengers on the flight. Mum, in particular, was not impressed with her measly helping of bubbly!

Overall, though, it was a great experience. It was certainly more money than we would have normally spent, but it was a brilliant belated birthday celebration and something we’ll remember for a long time to come.

Later that day, we climbed up to Göreme’s sunset viewpoint to (you guessed it) watch the sunset. This was a nice spot but I think we were probably less impressed because we’d already seen the spectacular sunrise from the balloon that morning. Instead, what really impressed Oli was the opportunity to finally get a close-up view of a solar water heater (sigh).


There are a lot of balloon companies operating in Cappadocia, and with obvious safety (and value for money) considerations, it’s worth putting some thought into which company and which flight type to choose. We did quite a lot of reading beforehand to help us decide, but some things weren’t obvious to us until after our flight, so we thought it would be worth making some notes of what we learnt. We won’t bore you with the details here, but if you’re thinking of visiting, you might find our ramblings helpful.

Walking the Lycian Way

This title might be a little misleading! The Lycian Way is a long-distance walking trail snaking 540km along the Mediterranean coast in south-western Turkey, and it’s been on our bucket list of experiences for about ten years. However, we had so much ground to cover on this leg of our trip to Tashkent that we kept scaling back the time available to walk it. In the end, we had a single day to walk one very small section as a taster. Hopefully, we’ll be back one day to complete the rest!

The base for our walk was an Airbnb up in the mountains, and a 10 minute drive along dirt tracks from the nearest stretch of tarmac. The tranquility was absolute, apart from the chorus of frogs and cicadas that welcomed us to the wilderness.

That evening, just as the sky turned dark, Sara alerted us to an orange glow in the v-shaped gap between two mountains, growing brighter by the minute. We’d read a lot about forest fires in the area and for a worrying few seconds we all thought that one had taken hold across the valley. It took a surprising amount of time for us to identify it as a moonrise, which I think was a first for us all. Only afterwards did we realise how lucky we were to be sat in the right spot to see the combination of a full moon, rising in the evening, on a clear night, perfectly framed by the mountains. We couldn’t have planned it any better if we’d tried.

Moonrise (with Jupiter shining brightly just above the moon)

We managed to tear ourselves away from our beautiful (if slightly bizarre) villa for a day’s walking. Our 9.6 km route involved scaling Mount Chimaera, passing a handful of eternally burning fires, and ending on a beach in the village of Çıralı.

Our hike started in the village of Ulupınar, where we followed a dirt track down the mountain through forest and crossed a dry riverbed.

Following the trail was straightforward at this point, and we quickly picked up the Lycian Way’s distinct red and white way-markers.

The path then got a lot wilder as it climbed steeply towards the summit of Mount Chimaera, with the terrain growing rockier and the distance between way-markers increasing. Serious kudos to anyone who can spot the way-marker the following photo.

When we reached the top of the mountain and the first set of flames, I mentioned to Sara that I’d had Eternal Flame stuck in my head all morning. It turns out that you can’t make a comment like that without infecting everyone around you (you’re welcome!), and understandably Sara was not best pleased. In retaliation, she made up a song about venomous vipers (about whom we’d been warned) and sang it all afternoon. Well, she sang it until we actually saw a snake slithering extremely quickly across the mountainside, at which point it didn’t seem very funny anymore.

So far, we’d met a grand total of 3 human beings on the trail. The first two were a couple of hikers, and the third was a man herding his goats across the mountain. It felt pretty remote at times, but at least we had the wildlife to keep us company.

The second set of flames were even more impressive. We learned that the fires are fuelled by methane and other gasses which are being emitted from the rock, and apparently have been burning for over 2,500 years!

The descent from the lower flames was much more straightforward, with clearly marked steps leading us to the base of the mountain. The path then met a near-deserted paved road, which lead us back into Çıralı village.

We reunited with Helen & Mick for a victory drink, before swimming in the gorgeously warm sea surrounded by dramatic mountains in almost every direction.

Even the walk back to the car was spectacular. After a short plod along the beach, we joined a boardwalk that followed the Göksu river through the ruins of Olympos just as the sun was setting, casting a stunning golden glow over the meandering river and the ancient city.

The following day it was once again time to move on. This time, our destination was Cappadocia – home to around 100 daily hot air balloon flights and an endless sea of fairy chimneys.


Special thanks to George & Erin for restaurant and cat recommendations, and to Helen & Mick for driving the support vehicle!