Up, Up and Away
There comes a time in every trip when it’s not technically over, but you feel that you are just biding time until you flight home leaves. That time has now come for the 2019 Turkey Tour. We are in Cappadocia in a lovely hotel called Argos. It’s funny that Argo is the name of the Ben Affleck film that tells the story of Tony Mendez, the CIA exfill specialist, who draws the assignment to get six American embassy employees who are hiding out in the residence of the Canadian Ambassador to Tehran out of Iran. It’s a suspenseful and well-executed movie and has many of the elements we face here in Cappadocia. This is an exotic place with a hotel room that is all about stone walls and arches that make the place feel rustic and Middle Eastern yet comfortable for people of all cultures. The bathrooms, in the Turkish tradition are expansive lounges more than just utilitarian rooms that happen to have running water.
The hotel is built on a hillside and is in the very midst of the spires, faeries and sandstone that define Cappadocia. That means that every room can be denominated in the number of stairs it takes to climb to your room. I feel lucky that ours is only 25 steps or so. Getting to the restaurant is a hike with a climb before or after depending on the relative location of your room. The rooms are spread out over the hillside with the owner buying up adjacent properties such that he has expanded his little boutique hotel from 30 to 60 rooms going who knows where from there.
This morning we awoke at 5am in order to gather to get bused to a dark field in the less populated part of town. We had booked a balloon ride in a hot air balloon operated by Kapadokya Balloons, one of several dozen operators that have sprung up in town over the past fifteen years. As stated by our guide, Kaz, Cappadocia has gone from a place where ballooning is available to a place where ballooning is a main event. Every souvenir stand attests to this as it’s hard to find a souvenir that does NOT involve balloons. The balloon companies have their program pretty well figured out and ours started by passing out juice boxes and breakfast pastries. By the time we arrived at our designated balloon, we had passed dozens more balloons in various states of inflation and preparation for launch.
The ride itself is thrilling for several reasons. First, assuming you haven’t ballooned too much, the physical act of silently rising in the open air is pretty exciting all by itself. The Göreme Valley at dawn is an amazing place to get a bird’s eye view from a balloon. And then there is the the art of flying the balloon to make it less of a balloon ride and more of a balloon tour. What is meant by that is to drop down into some of the many canyons and ride through the faeries and spires for a closer look. Screw the photo opportunity view spots we stopped st yesterday. The view on a crisp morning balloon ride gives you by far the best look at these amazing natural wonders and all than man has done to and with them over the millennia. The ride/tour itself took a bit more than an hour and our quandary about where we might come to a landing resolved itself when we spotted the truck and attendants. Our Turkish pilot, who spoke a bit of Japanese, Hindi, Mandarin and more than a bit of English, bragged that he could put the basket down exactly on the flatbed truck it came off of at the start. He did not disappoint to our amazement. We clambered out of the basket while the crew both packed up the balloon and set out our ceremonial champagne toast (cherry juice with some non-alcoholic fizzy cider). Photo ops and tipping were allowed and encouraged.
Cappadocia now boasts over 150 hot air balloon licenses, which means the daily tour capacity is about 3,000. They are supposedly allowed to launch 100 first and then an added 50 one half hour later. All I know is that my quick visual count put it at 120 balloons in the air at once, which is truly a sight to see at sunrise over Cappadocia.
After breakfast and bag packing, we headed off in a van for a tour of one of the underground cities Cappadocia is known for. It seems that the Sumerians came to the area in 3,000BC and chose to protect themselves and their writings (they are attributed with introducing the written word to mankind) by digging caves in which to hide from attacking armies. My guess is that once you realize the ease with which the sandstone can be hollowed, the idea of caves both above and below ground make sense. You can see it even today in the hollowing out of every hill by local farmers as a place to keep their potato crop dry and cool.
The last place we stopped was for a wonderful lunch at a local home, which was set up for private dining for groups like ours. This was a family affair with Dad running the show and Mom and Grandma doing the heavy lifting in the kitchen while junior served and cleared. We had a great meal with all fresh ingredients from their own gardens and pens. The local touch was a great finishing to our visit to Cappadocia.
We still have the dinner where Skip and Kaz will get their due applause for another amazing, fun and safe trip. We rill discuss going to northern Spain and Portugal next year and we will all talk about our wondrous experiences. And then, when we wake up and head to the airport for our flight to Istanbul and our night at the Four Seasons Bosphorus, we will be doing what we always must do and head up, up and away to our homes until the next American Flyers Adventure.