Driving in Anatolia

After much angst, (almost all on my part, I assure you) we decided to rent a car and drive around Cappadocia. It proved to be a wonderful decision. The only thing I gave up was beer or wine at lunch, and since the beer is just OK and the wine is expensive here, that hardly seemed like much of a sacrifice.

We had a small Japanese car, with a manual transmission. Everyone was very concerned to know if I could drive a standard. I assured them that I have owned many manual transmission cars, and this would not be a problem.

So we got into the Uchisar town center, and tried to figure out were to go. The roads are all very well marked, and with Doreen as navigator, and a small, not to scale, almost hand-drawn map, we started out.

People don't really drive a lot here. I don't think that many people have cars. And gas is VERY expensive. So we were treated with many views like this one:

where we were essentially the only car on the road. In this particular case, this road was not even on our map. It had signage telling us we were heading in the correct direction, though. So we kept going.

The first place we stopped was the underground city of Kayseri. As I had mentioned earlier, this rock is very easy to work. And the ancient citizens took advantage of this to create cities that dropped up to eight stories underground. The one we went into has been excavated to six stories, and open to four. The ceiling (or roof, or back, if you prefer mining terms) was generally very low. Getting into the place there was one very long, skinny, narrow passageway that was no more that 3.5' tall the whole way. I am guessing it was about 100 m long, and you had to duck walk the whole way. Oddly enough, I (at 6'6") did not bonk my head once. Doreen, (at 5'8") could have used a hard hat. I guess I am just used to being closer to the ceiling.



It was uncomfortable and rather unpleasant once we got through. But the women behind us really freaked out. My guess is that the younger one was 50, the older one 70. (give or take 5 years). The younger one started crying "Mamma, I can't get through! Mamma, I don't like this! Mamma, I want to go back!". Their guide talked her down.

(as an aside, we never used guides in any of these places. When we would overhear them, we were happy we did not. They would sometimes have useful information, but more likely it was just non-sense. We had a Blue Guide, and some other books. It is better to do your homework, I guess. The guides, though, did not like us. Nor did they hide it)

We kept following the red arrows (inbound) until we saw a group of about 40 Japanese tourists coming out the wrong way. I guess they couldn't finish the trip.

You can see here how low it was:

It was worth the trip. It was crazy imagining 20,000 bodies underground waiting for the Huns to leave.

When we got out, we drove through a small town and stopped to take a photo of the scenery. This boys came up to the car and started asking our names, (in English):

We replied and chatted a bit. They did not speak much English other than "What's your name?". Look at the eyes on that one on the right. Many of these Turks have these crazy green/blue eyes.

As we started getting back into the car, the one in the middle started shouting "Donkey! Monkey! Donkey! Monkey! Donkey! Monkey!" I imagine that those are about the only "bad" English words he knew. Then as we were driving away, he spit at the car.

I attributed this more to having three 9-11 year old boys in one place. Doreen pointed out that we have never been spit at before.

We then drove down to a new discovery of an old Roman village. They would not let us take photos, but it was a heck of a thing to see.