Turkey

Last week, I took Belky to Turkey for 9 days -- without the kids -- to celebrate 12 years of marriage.

Yeah, we're irresponsible parents.  Actually, she didn't want to go for so long and I had to sort of kidnap her.  The girls stayed with our amazing friends the Jenkins and had a wonderful time.  This week it is payback and I am stuck in a house with 9 women, but that's another story...

We had some mishaps just getting to Turkey on the first day, but after that everything was wonderful.  Here she is enjoying a bit of rain the first morning in Istanbul:

From there we flew to the south Aegean coast and spent 3 days in and around Oludeniz:

We did some crazy stuff there about which you may have heard if you follow Belky on Instagram or Facebook.  I'll leave that for a separate post.  We also hiked down into the Butterfly valley, a tiny area by the sea between two tall sheer cliffs.  The hike was right on the boundary of what we felt safe doing without actual climbing gear.

The hike is a tiny part of the Lycian Way, an ancient route that goes for about 500km and that you can still hike today if you have a couple of months to spare.  There are a lot of old Greek cities in the area, including some with tombs that saved us from getting drenched in the rain:

We survived a small earthquake (magnitude 2.2).  We were 5 km from the epicenter but somehow Belky didn't even notice it.  You'll have to ask her why...

After Oludeniz, we flew to Kapadokya (Cappadocia), in central Turkey.

Cappadocia reminded me a lot of southern Utah and some parts of New Mexico.  The ground there is mostly made of tuff, a very soft rock formed from volcanic ash (the same as what's in Bandelier).  The way the rock has eroded makes for some really beautiful scenery:

To explain our adventures there, I should back up and mention that I planned this trip.  And I use the term "planned" in the loosest possible sense.  At one point, I realized we were driving to an airport and we didn't even know which flight we were going to take -- and I wasn't worried (domestic flights within Turkey are really cheap).  Anyway, we were on the flight to Cappadocia and debating whether to get a shuttle to the hotel or rent a car at the airport.  The man in the seat next to me must have overheard, because sometime later he introduced himself (Haqan) and mentioned that he'd be more than happy to take us to our hotel, which was just a few minutes out of his way (actually it probably took him an extra half hour or so).

To make a long story short, we got to know Haqan, his horses, and many of his friends  -- a term which seems to include all of the several thousand people who live in Cappadocia!  He took us to dinner the next night at an unassuming place that just happens to be run by a quasi-retired world class chef.  Mmmmmm.

Haqan also gave us some great advice: don't rent a car to see Cappadocia.  He suggested bicycles or a scooter.  Since we were planning to do a lot of hiking and didn't want to wear ourselves out, we opted for the scooter.  Actually, it was Belky who made that decision.  Little did she know that I -- who had hardly driven anything motorized with two wheels in my life -- would spend the next few days blissfully cruising around the surrounding countryside, long after she decided she had had enough.

We did rent a car for one day in Cappadocia, in order to visit the underground city of Derinkuyu.  It goes 10 stories underground and housed several thousand people!  There's even a tunnel (now largely collapsed) that connected it to another underground city 9 km away.

They used that stone to block the passageway in case of attack.

Cappadocia is also famous for the hundreds (maybe thousands?) of small churches that are carved into the rocks.  Here is one of the larger ones, in which all the frescoes had unfortunately been destroyed:

Cappadocia was a magical place where we subjected our feet to some serious stress (we hiked about 25 miles in 3 days, much of it over pretty rough terrain), enjoyed beautiful sunsets, and rode in a hot air balloon for the first time.  I rediscovered my love for photography.