As much as the tourist in me wanted to hit every single points on the map, hiking was a much better way to enjoy Cappadocia's beauty. My only regret was that I didn't learn about this earlier!
Itinerary of the day: Keyisdere Vadisi → Rose Valley sunset tour (+Meskendir Valley)
After two grueling days of waking up way too early, we could finally sleep in today. The only planned activity for the day was a sunset hiking tour to the "Rose Valley", starting at 3pm. The Rose/Red Valley are two interconnected valleys named after their red coloured stone. They could be seen from Goreme, but transportation was still needed to get to the valley entrance.
For the morning, I decided to just leisurely walk to a viewpoint near Goreme town called "Goreme Panorama". In the process of finding this viewpoint, we ended up discovering a nameless trail and had loads of fun exploring!
We've been going on tour after tour since we landed in Cappadocia, and never actually took a good look at Goreme town. The town centre near the bus station was quite touristy and we were pestered with endless Japanese and Korean greetings. Once we got out of it, the town was quaint.
We stepped out of the town perimeter from the northwest side and entered a farm area. Some interesting stone formations started to pop up.
We saw a sign by the roadside that pointed to a church (kilise), but we couldn't find it. An older local couple in a car saw us and asked us where we were going. Turned out that they were the owners of the farmhouse nearby and the church was located in their backyard.
The lady led us to their house and gave us the keys to the church. While visiting the church was technically free, we were kind of pressured to buy some of her knits. It wasn't much money, but these kind of practice left a bad taste in my mouth.
The church was inside a fairy chimney and didn't look like anything from the outside.
The inside of the church was really cool though! The frescoes were much better preserved than the ones we saw in Goreme Open Air Museum, and not any less impressive. I was able to take photos freely in complete solitude. Visiting this church made me wonder why I ever bothered with the museum!
After I went home, I shared this experience on backpackers.com.tw. While many travelers found my post helpful, I was reminded that visitors have to be careful not to trespass private property without invitation from the owners. Some owners blackmail the unsuspecting travelers who accidentally stepped into their property for money. Females have to be especially careful, as sexual assaults had happened in the past under these situations. It is important to keep this in mind and decline any suspicious invitations.
My father and I were quite lucky that the only "invitation" we got were two young men asking my dad (yes him, not me!) to take a photo with them.
After dropping off the church keys in the owner's mailbox, we continued on the trek towards Goreme Panorama. More and more stone formations appeared and we seemed to have entered a hiking trail on a hill, overlooking the Goreme town.
Although we never made it to the Love Valley, I suppose these stone pillars were somewhat phallic?
More of them looked like little fairy houses, dug in by past inhabitants a millennium ago. In recent days, Turkish government had restricted new residents to move into caves homes in Cappadocia (unless they were already living there), so most of the cave homes were empty.
We stumbled upon another cave church on the trail.
This church was public, and didn't have any frescoes. The architecture was however the most beautifully carved out of all the churches we've seen in Cappadocia. These structures were carved out of very soft stone, so it was rare to find walls and pillars with such sharp edges, and very little graffiti. Again, were were the only visitors there.
Some cave houses looked like they came straight out of a sci-fi movie. There had been rumours that Star Wars was filmed in Cappadocia, and some tour agencies even use this in their advertisement. This is false and a gimmick to attract more tourists! The classic movie that was indeed filmed here was the original Planet of The Apes.
After a few more climbs up a hill, we started to see more visitors few and far between.
We have explored this hiking trail for three hours and had long given up on getting to the panorama viewpoint. We found a short cut to walk back down into town, happy that we found a hidden gem. After doing some search on my "Map with Me" App, this unknown valley is called "Keyisdere Vadisi", the area is "Karsibucak", and the first church we visited was "Yusuf Koc Church".
After the somewhat disappointing dinner yesterday at a fancy restaurant recommended by our hotel owner, today I decided to trust TA reviews and went to Ocak Restaurant for lunch.
This place was a guesthouse/restaurant, and we were apparently the first and only guests at the moment. I really liked the atmosphere of the restaurant though, so I decided to give it a try. During lunch, almost every tourist in Goreme was on a tour, so the vacant tables weren't that surprising.
The hostess of the guesthouse was responsible for the entire restaurant, from cooking to serving. The menu was short and printed from a home printer everyday.
We were so hungry at this point, that a lot of the photos were halfway through eating...OTZ First up was soup of the day (lentil soup).
Testi Kebabı, or pottery kebab, is the specialty dish of the Cappadocia region. It was our last day in Cappadocia so we were happy to had finally tried it. Usually, this dish would be presented in a small pottery vase and broken at the table, revealing the meat stew inside, for the touristy appeal. At Ocak though, it was cooked in their own oven, in a larger pot, and served on a simple plate. No frills, but authentic. We ordered the lamb kebab, and it was so good! Put it on rice and coupled with a can of ice cold coke, this kebab made me a very happy person.
We had noticed that the portion of the testi kebab was quite small (enough for one person but not enough for two), as they had probably ran out. The hostess probably felt apologetic about that and kept dishing out free food for us, such as her homemade chili sauce. Made with chopped pepper and tomato, it was the perfect complement to fresh bread. She was even ok with us taking a jar of the sauce home, but sadly we had no means to preserve it.
Bread in Turkey was the best, and they were always free in a restaurant, unlike many countries in Europe. These breads were made fresh by the hostess, as seen from their facebook photo.
The dessert pudding was not sütlaç (rice pudding) like I anticipated, but a regular chocolate pudding. It was not overly sweet though and very good.
Another dessert on the house to make up for the small main course portion, a homemade cake baked and filled with some nuts and honey. Unlike most Turkish dessert this was also not that sweet and I really liked it.
We had such a satisfying meal and the price was very reasonable. We would sure to return for dinner!
We rested in our hotel room for a bit and then it was time to depart for our Rose Valley hiking tour, provided by New Goreme travel agency. The reasons I used a tour were the need for car transfer to and from the valley, and also avoid getting lost. It would not be fun to be lost in a valley with no lights after sundown! For anyone interested in doing their own hike, here's a useful website on the approximate route and distance for each valley. A decent hiking map of the area was severely lacking though, which was why I wasn't exactly confident to do the hike on my own.
Overall New Goreme was one of the better agencies we used in Turkey, as they reply promptly to my inquiries and got the job done. Before we left the hotel, it was pouring rain, so the agency gave us the option to bow out. I decided to do the hike rain or shine, but was not to happy that it might be a miserable hike.
The group only consisted of my parents and I, plus a young men from Spain. Our guide was an Estonian woman who had live in Turkey for a long time. According to her expert opinion, the rain wouldn't be as bad in the valleys and probably would clear up judging from the looks of the clouds.
She was right. After a half-hour drive, we reached the starting point of our hike, Meskendir valley. The rain had resided, and we were greeted with a beautiful double rainbow.
Signage on the hiking trails of Cappadocia was pretty shitty in general, and I was glad to have a guide with me.
Meskendir Valley was not the prettiest hiking valley, hence not many visitors choose to hike here. It had a number of natural and manmade tunnels and more foliage, but I felt it was simply added into the itinerary for the build up to the Rose Valley.
The tunnels were yellow in colour because of sulfur contents in the stone.
Each hiking valley often has one of these tea shop rest stops along the way, but the Meskendir Valley one seemed deserted at the moment...
We didn't have the opportunity to hike the Pigeon Valley, but by no means did that mean we didn't see millions of these pigeon houses. Farmers in Cappadocia carved these dovecuts into the cliff walls to attract pigeons, in order to collect their droppings as fertilizers.
We also saw natural bee hives. I had ever only seen these types of beehives in rocks from documentaries! It also answered my questions as to why honey was so cheap in Cappadocia.
After about an hour of hiking, we exited Meskendir Valley and entered Red/Rose Valley.
It was difficult to distinguish between Red and Rose Valley, because the two valleys are connected and different people had different opinions on the pinkish and reddish colours of the rocks. Locals in Goreme did not agree to the naming convention of Turkish tourism, and it all became quite confusing.
Kolonlu Kilise (Church with Columns), located on the path of the Rose Valley, was another cave church we saw on a hike that was way more impressive than the Goreme Open Air Museum.
The small frescoes around the windows were from an era earlier than the Byzantine Christians, hence the subject matter were more secular (battles, horses, birds, plants and geometric patterns).
The name "Church with Columns" became obvious after we entered the church. Again, I was impressed with how churches of this size were carved from solid rock. No frescoes in the church interior, but the snow-white walls had their own appeal.
The dark stains on the walls and celings were caused by local teenagers lighting candles and campfires, as this was one of their favourite dating spots.
The way light illuminates this church was serene.
Near the end of the hike, the colours of the rocks became more obvious as the sun started to set. Is this more pink (rose) or red? I couldn't really tell.
Horse riding was another option to tour Cappadocia, but a bit of riding experience was required.
Sunset is beautiful everywhere in Cappadocia, but I was pretty sure Rose Valley was one of the top places to see one.
There was a tea shop at the end of the hiking trail, just before ascending back to ground level. Another church with frecoes, Haclı Kilise (Church with a cross), was right beside the shop, but it was locked for unknown reasons.
I couldn't stop taking photos! This walk was even better than the walk we did in the morning. Even though we had seen the Rose Valley from the hot air balloon, walking through it on ground level was a completely different experience.
Uchisar castle at night after sun down.
My parents were not the fittest people, but they finished! This hike should be a piece of cake for anyone with average level of fitness. We were so glad to have a van waiting for us to drive us back to Goreme at the end of the hike, rather than having to walk another few kilometers along a boring road to catch a bus!
I highly recommend doing this walk for anyone who's able-bodied. In fact I would suggest to not do the Goreme Open Air Museum or the Red Tour and do more hikes in the many valleys in Cappadocia. There are far more interesting churches and beautiful sceneries to see without the vendors or the crowds!
As promised to Ocak Restaurant's hostess, we returned there for dinner. We ordered the soup again, plus an eggplant casserole.
We ordered two testi kebabs (one lamb and one beef) because the portion at lunch was not big, but now they returned to normal portion size! (We were also really hungry at this point, so I forgot to take photos at the beginning of the meal...)
Dessert was pistacchio baklava, plus free grapes on the house. Cappadocia is a wine region, and we saw so many wild, unattended grape vines during the hike. The baklava was ok, so my suggestion would be to come here for the testi kebab.
We were very grateful to have found such a nice restaurant for our last meal in Cappadocia. In the previous two days, I thought this place was a bit boring, but after today's magical hikes, I didn't want to leave!
As much as Cappadocia is touristy, it's much more relaxed than Istanbul and business owners were willing to go the extra mile. Our hotel owner Osman took off the small change in our bill after exchange rate conversion. His father drove my father to a local grocery shop for free. Our driver for the Red Tour gave my father a free birthday gift at Pasabag, and many cups of free tea for us along the way. Vendors could haggle without being rude. I really liked this place...but tomorrow it's time to leave and venture into the part of Turkey that, due to recent world event, very few tourists wanted to go.
