A little walk to help digestion

After lunch we had a look around in Ihlara Valley.


Frans and Tuncay show the beautiful surroundings.

Runch in Ihlara Valley

We had lunch in this cute little hut in the river at Ilhara Valley, just before the hordes of tourists arrived.


Lunch was expensive, but fortunately we did not know this while eating, and it was pretty tasty!

Underground cities

We visited some underground cities, that were apparently used to hide from enemies. The wheel shaped stone was used to block off the entry. Although it is not know exactly how far these cities extend, they are most definitely humongous and they have 8 levels at some places.





Tuncay and Anke really look eerily animalesque as cave dwellers.

Meet the Flintstones

Our hotel room was a cave.

A modern stone age family has a jacuzzi in their cave.

Runch in Ürgüp

After riding around for a long time, looking for La Padella restaurant, we had to admit defeat and ate at Adana Ocakbaşı, which was not too bad, not too bad. In fact, it was wonderful wonderful.

Capadoccia, part II --- biking edition

We rented three mountain bikes to explore Capadoccia. It was a lot of fun (for Frans and Anke) and a painful experience (for Tuncay, since it was his first full day bike ride, and the first time on a bicycle since he was 12). This is the start of the day, which can be seen from the smile on Tuncay's face.


Çavusin


This is the end of the day, after a long climb uphill on a busy road, followed by a steep cobblestone road downhill. Fortunately, Anke took the photo in such a way that you can't see the pained look on Tuncay's face :)

Dinner at Alaturca

Meze:

Kayseri Mantısı:

When the site of the restaurant is back up, we will try to find out what the name of this dish was: How could we forget! We made a variant of this dish to prepare for our visit to Turkey! It is Hünkar Beğendi:


And the piece of the resistance, Ali Nazik:

Capadoccia, part I

Together with Tuncay we took a night bus to Göreme in Capadoccia. The landscape around there is somewhat weird... It is full of so-called fairy chimneys.



The stone is soft and to say that there are loads of caves is an understatement.


Many of these caves were turned into churches. In the Göreme open air museum there were about 20 on a very small piece of land. This seemed a bit of an overkill, especially since the locals are muslim.