Hiking Through the Hills

Right around Goreme, there's plenty of breathtaking valleys and rock formations. So, today I figured that I'd explore them on foot with the help of two big bottles of water. I started off with the Open Air Museum, which is the prime site for cave churches. There's probably a dozen of them ranging from ones that you could barely see the frescoes, to the dark church where the blues are stunning. Blues are the first colors to go when exposed to light so many of the church paintings are reds and yellows and look a little odd. Not this one. It was quite impressive. The other interesting thing about the Frescoes was that some of them were painted in red and look like they were drawn by a kindergartener. Just very basic shapes. I overheard one of the guides saying that it's their rough draft of planning out the paintings. Just like the pencil sketches that people would do now to figure out the layout. However, it was in a dark, staining red, so if the Fresco breaks down, it can often leave the sketch still on the wall.

With all the churches at the museum so close together, I wonder how many of them were actually churches. See most of them had graves which previously held bones. I wonder if it was a little like the Valley of the Kings and most of the churches were really tombs.

After the open air museum, I headed up the road and quickly realized that the map I had was virtually useless. It gave me the rough locations of things, but not the trails. So I decided to improvise and just follow the random paths that were heading in the direction I was interested in.

I ended up walking along a ridge to the west of the Red and Rose Valleys going by one spectacular view after another. Some of the trails were a little difficult because the sand was loose and it was steep, but it was doable. There were also grapes everywhere, some looked like they were being cultivated, while others were definitely just left alone, so I had a few snacks. The area is just incredible. With the many layers of rock that were slowly cut away, you have a mosaic of colorful formations. It's also the perfect mountain biking terrain because there's lots of interesting terrain that twists through the hills and the vegetation isn't high, so you can see and go virtually anywhere. On top of it all, many of the old abandoned caves are still open, so you can just walk up to them and explore. I found a couple of churches that weren't labeled and ended up eating lunch from a cave halfway up a fairy chimney. Very idyllic.

Really, there's not too much else to say about the day. The truth is in the myriad of pictures that I took that should be uploaded in a day or two.