Part 9: Despite Disneyfication, Cappadocia is still worth it

Cappadocia is still the fairyland of rock formations you remember it to be, but close up… again, I hate to say it, mass tourism has taken over. Göreme, back then some sleepy little burg like the rest of them, has today been transformed into Backpacker Central, with all manner of hostels, restaurants, bars, travel agencies, trinket and carpet shops.

And although the nearby caves have been restored and designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, by the time we got around to having the time to actually visit them, we decided not to.

I don’t think we missed that much. Streams and streams of tour buses packed into an enormous parking lot, paying an entrance fee and walking around cobblestone paths and, because so many people are crammed onto the site at once, actually having to line up outside each church to get a look inside? I was five years old last time I was at Disneyland. No thanks.

Of course I’d seen the frescoes with you many years ago, and I wanted K. and the little red-haired girl to have a look, but they were as turned off at the idea as I was, so we didn’t bother. Quite frankly I’m beginning to think they should abolish this UNESCO designation altogether if the fame it brings simply makes it one more stopping point on the tour bus trail.

But what we missed in the caves we more than made up for on three of the most memorable hikes we’ve ever been on as a family. Slipping down the slope from our pension after breakfast we reached the floor of the Pigeon Valley for a four-km walk to Göreme. In warm sunshine we walked through autumn slashes of birch and poplar against an ever-changing backdrop of waving rock formations and impossibly placed stairways, passages, doors and windows. At one point the path actually led through a tunnel in the cliffs.

We stopped for tea around half way and enjoyed the view to ourselves.

The Love Valley hike was also stunning, though even there we couldn’t escape being reminded that we were never far away from the encroachment of tourism and technology. Munching down a few grapes at a rest stop we sat and watched as a dozen or so Israeli mountain bike riders blasted past. It looked so incongruous.

Imagine travelling far and wide to get to a spot as unique as Cappadocia only to do something you could do anywhere, really. When they get back home, what have they seen? I’ve nothing against mountain biking and have enjoyed it myself, but it’s like travelling to Paris and spending most of your time in the hotel room watching CNN. To each his own, but part of me felt like saying, hey guys: stop and take a look at what you’re going through instead of what’s just beyond your front wheel.

We capped off our Love Valley walk with a fresh-squeezed glass of orange and pomegranate juice from a man we spotted about 15 minutes away.

I know I had plans to poke around Ürgüp and maybe find our old hotel, but as soon as we stepped out of the Dolmus on the afternoon of our fourth day I realised it would be impossible. Trish, you would not recognise Ürgüp in the least. It’s still a provincial Turkish town, but they’ve let growth get out of control to such an extent that many parts have been ruined by some of the ugliest hotels you’ve ever seen. Simply awful structures, built to warehouse the tourists who probably thank God their itinerary calls for only one overnight in the place.

And that central square where we watched hours of folk dancing at a local celebration of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Atatürk, the massive rock outcropping looming up in the background? They’ve besmirched the space by plopping some gaudy excuse for a clock tower off to the side, obliterating the rest by spreading a two-storey shopping mall over the remaining two-thirds of it.

We made up for it by enjoying a long lunch on an outdoor terrace on what’s left of the square at a very good restaurant, but didn’t linger in the town long after.

I was kind of expecting Ürgüp to be a bit of a let-down because I’d read up some more on it and at the last minute decided not to stay there but at Uchisar instead. Uchisar you may recall is at the base of this enormous rock outcropping – what they call a castle – which dominates the whole area. We wanted peace and quiet and a bit of a view, and got more than enough of all three.

Every morning we watched from the breakfast table as no less than 32 hot-air balloons ascended from the valley floor, some wafting quite close to our perch as they drifted to a landing on a flat spot on the other side of town. It’s a huge business when you consider it costs between €100 and €150 for a ride and each balloon can carry between 12 and 20 passengers.

Just down the road from our spot they’ve opened up in the past year a luxury spa and resort hotel with facilities to rival some of the best places we’ve ever stayed at. I’ve enclosed a copy of their promotional CD, which we received as part of an elaborate gift bag we received after walking into the lobby simply to enquire if they had a business card so we could look the place up online later.

At least the investment in new housing, hotels and developments like that one are bringing work to the local craftspeople. We talked to a stonemason who used halting French to explain he was working for the French owner who was planning to turn the old building into a pension. He was using an ancient hand-tool to put the final shape on a building stone made from the same light-beige volcanic material you find everywhere here. Now they’re also using it to carve patterns in the facing stone; the results are quite beautiful in their understated simplicity.

They’re also very careful in Uchisar not to overwhelm the original feel of the place. You can still see the foundations of many places abandoned decades ago, but the newer buildings on top are kept to no more than two storeys as they cascade down the steep valley side. That’s how they’ve laid out at new spa resort, and it blends in very well with the surrounding area.

Part nine of a 10-part series. Part eight: a dive into nostalgia. Part seven: knife fights, confusion and a freezing cold night. Part six: untitled, I suppose. Part five: underneath Istanbul. Part four: the Blue Mosque smells like cheesy feet. Part three: sleepwalking through Turkey. Part two: a look back. Part one: the long letter.

Backtracking to Istanbul and Cappadocia, Turkey

The first time I was in Turkey, I was barely 21 years old.

Spring, 1981. Leonid Brezhnev was leader of a powerful Soviet Union which had invaded Afghanistan less than two years before, neighbouring Iran and Iraq were at the outset of a hideously brutal war lasting eight years and costing upwards of 1.5 million lives, Saddam Hussein was America’s friend, Turkey had gone through a coup d’etat and was in the grip of martial law, some brain-addled second-rate actor from the forties was barely six months in the White House and some nutjob had already taken shots at him, Paris Hilton was four months old and soiling her diamond-studded diapers but at least back then her ass was covered with something, and I was nearing the end of a year-long journey which had started out only as a planned two months riding the rails in Europe via Eurailpass.

The winds kept blowing south and east, and I kept tumbling with them.

They say you shouldn’t backtrack in life, that if you’ve traveled to one place already you shouldn’t return lest the memories of the place be spoiled. No place stays the same, and neither do you.

That’s probably why I haven’t gone back to Israel, a place which has changed so much and that holds so many memories of unique experiences for me. I was there for a whole half year in the winter of 1980 – 81, working first as a ski patroller at Mount Hermon in the Golan Heights and then briefly as a kibbutz volunteer – until the day we got shelled by Katyusha rockets from over the border in Lebanon.

Hah! When my American girlfriend and I told everyone we were getting the hell out of there and heading to Turkey, they all said, whoa – dangerous place right now!

Of course it wasn’t, but it did turn out to be another journey that can never be repeated. We spent a month and reached as far east as the border regions with Georgia, Armenia, Iran and Iraq, travelling through areas which are now pretty well off-limits unless you willing to approach a simmering war zone or risk getting kidnapped for ransom. We were happy to be the only foreigners for hundreds of miles it seemed, and I wonder if going back to the safer areas of the country would be a colossal disappointment, an impossible comparison between a past burnished by selective memory and a present staring me straight in the face.

Selective memory – no kidding. I caught some bug and was sick for most of the the last two weeks in Turkey, surviving on boiled eggs and sesame-seed bread and returning home a sunken-chested straw-haired scarecrow.

So it was with a mixture of apprehension and anticipation that I pressed ‘”book now” last month to reserve flight tickets from Hamburg to Istanbul for a two-week trip later this month that will be one of discovery for my wife and the little red-haired girl, and of rediscovery for me.

We won’t be going anywhere near the turmoil in the far east, though. Our plans are to stay in Istanbul for five nights, then take an overnight train to Cappadocia for five nights, then back to Istanbul.  We have friends from our Hong Kong days now living in that city and we’re looking forward to seeing them, too.

About the photos: They were all taken in Cappadocia, a fairyland of cave dwellings, hobbit houses, fresco-covered walls of underground churches, whole cities carved out of soft volcanic stone.

My girlfriend and I travelled to Turkey before the country had its tourist boom. Most everywhere we went we were greeted or even followed by curious locals just wanting to get a better look at us. The lady in the blue blouse top-right in the photo above was an English teacher who glommed on to us one afternoon and gave us a tour of the town of Ürgüp with her friends, later inviting us all over to her place for tea and cakes. She was the only one of the bunch who spoke any English.

I have this flashback travel fantasy film that plays over and over in my head whenever I look at these shots of us with all those friendly women back then. I take a few prints back to the town, show them to shopkeepers, rail station clerks, taxi and bus drivers, hotel receptionists, and ask them if they recognise any of the people in the photos.

“Yes!” one of them says. “Her! I know who she is!” And I’m given the address of the woman whose youthful image they’ve recognised, and after much searching go knock on her door, eagerly introducing myself and thrusting the nearly 30-year-old photo into her view.

“That’s you!! I’ll say. “Do you remember me? Do you remember sitting for this picture?”

She’ll look up at me and smile and invite us in for tea and cakes.

And in the meantime she’ll have learned some English… or German, or French… and we’ll finally get to know each other a bit. I somehow feel like I know them anyway, I’ve showed their image to so many people over the years.