Oh wait, that was me, on my own, walking into a cave-bar in Cappadocia, Turkey.

Cappadocia is utterly unique in its geology and geography; so fantastically unique that a bar in a cave is nothing special. It’s often referred to as a ‘moonscape’ purely because it looks so other-worldly.

Before you an appreciate the oddness of the landscape, you need to know how it was formed. The area was once volcanic, and over thousands of years massive amounts of volcanic ash were deposited. Finally there was a huge eruption that covered most of the area in hard, metamorphic rock (like basalt or onyx). Since then, the mountains of ash and rock have been eroded to form quite unique and stunning formations, like the Penis Valley.

It’s actually been renamed ‘Love Valley’ in recent years — damn local tourist board! — but it quite clearly shows you just how weird Cappadocia looks. Newlyweds are meant to stay the night at the foot of the giant penises as some kind of fertility ritual. I’m not sure if ‘modern’ couples do it, or just the cave-dwelling types.

And so we’re finally back to the topic of caves and troglodytes again.

This continues on from my stories of Istanbul and Antalya, and I suggest you read both for some backstory, some history of Turkey, and some pretty photos.

Flying into Cappadocia I was greeted with a fantastic view; I was also greeted with the shortest runway I’ve ever seen. We were in a large, commercial jet (200 seats), and somehow our pilot was going to squeeze this thing onto a runway about a mile long. Obviously we made it, or I wouldn’t be here now, but it was mighty close. The airport itself was more of a warehouse, with a rusty corrugated iron roof. Bag reclaim was… well… it’s hard to explain just how much of a joke it was. But I’ll try.

We were on the tarmac having just disembarked, watching our bags being unloaded. About 20 feet away was the entrance to the terminal, and an ominous looking hole in the wall with a plastic curtain dangling down to cover it. We walked through some double doors, and to our right was a conveyer belt about 10 foot long. About 100 of us were in this tiny reclaim room — it can’t have been more than a few meters across — waiting for our bags to arrive. And sure enough, the bags arrive, pushed through the plastic curtain onto a static conveyer belt. Obviously the motor that drove the belt no longer worked. The bags quickly began to pile up, until all 100 of us lurched forward into the messy morass of bags, hunting eagerly for our possessions.

I finally escaped the fracas, and the airport, to find my cave hotel pick-up waiting. We made quick progress to Urgup, one of the few towns in central Cappadocia. As we drove, the landscape became more and more… penile. Finally, after driving up a few steep inclines, I arrived at my base of operations for the next few days — a cave. It was a very nice cave, with a bed, a shower and even electricity, but it was still a cave that had been carved into the ancient volcanic ash by special cave crafting troglodytes. Just kidding about the troglodytes bit — but there are specialised cave makers in Cappadocia!

The entire area is literally covered with caves that have been carved out of the soft, volcanic pummice. Until the 1970s the caves were actively populated, until the government finally deemed them unsafe for living in (something about cave ins killing some poor nomadic hippies). Nowadays you can’t technically live in a cave, but through some loophole, if the cave is attached to a normal dwelling, it’s OK! As a result, you can stay in a handful of cave hotels in the region. It was quite a unique experience; made even more so by the fact that I had wireless internet, a comfy bed and then, when I looked up, I could see proof that I was living in a cave that had been lovingly hand-crafted, perhaps thousands of years ago.

The highlight of my trip to Cappadocia, and the main reason I’d flown 2 hours to central Turkey, was for an at-dawn hot air balloon flight over this volcanic Turkish moonscape. I set my alarm for 4am and prayed I’d be awake and ready for a 4:30am pick-up. Before I knew it, we were driving across the backroads and rough-hewn mountainside looking for a good place to take off from.

I’m not going to ply you with thousands of photos taken high in the sky (you can view lots of them in the Turkey gallery), but I’ll give you one of my favourites. Our balloon was being piloted by Lars, one of the most experienced balloonists in the world. Apparently he had more total hours in the air than anyone else in the region, possibly the world, and he liked to prove it by dipping into valleys, jetting along, not more than 6 inches from the mountainside, and then lifting quickly out with a thrust from the massive burners above us. We’d quickly ascend thousands of feet and  look down at where we’d just been.

If you look at some of the photos in the Turkey gallery you can see this valley far below the balloon. Quite a thrill, I assure you, especially during the rapid ascents, and definitely one of the highlights of my short-but-eventful life.

Lars ended the amazing flight by landing the balloon on a trailer the same size as the basket. I kid you not: he landed it on a trailer about 2 meters long and 1.5 meters wide. What a hero!

That concludes this entry, but next time I will talk about the other important factor of Cappadocia’s history: its ancient civilisations of cave-dwellers and their churches. In their caves you can find sites of Christian religious significance dating back to 300AD — the oldest remaining sites in the world.

This continues on from my hot air balloon flight over Cappadocia in central Anatolia, Turkey. If you like, you could also read about all of my adventures in Turkey.

Below us, as we flew over the unique, wild moonscape of Cappadocia, were thousands of hand-carved dwellings and churches. From above, we couldn’t make out much — just valley after valley of ancient villages and cities. I couldn’t wait to get down there and actually explore on foot; getting lost in some of the most ancient man-made structures on Earth is a dream very few people can fulfil, but I was about to!

I’d booked a small tour to Goreme (Göreme) National Park for later that day. Just three of us, and a tour guide. To say I was excited would be an understatement. Fortunately, I would be sharing the tour with a lovely, young American couple — and Americans can’t get enough of hairy, bouncy easily-excitable British guys!

Cappadocia and its ancient cities are so unique and so special that it’s actually a UNESCO ‘World Heritage’ site. That’s no surprise, considering some of the world’s most ancient, recorded history occurred there: It was the home of the Hittites in the Bronze Age and later provided considerable resistance to Alexander the Great, even as he was riding high on the wave of a world-spanning empire after destroying the Persian Empire.

Coming up to ‘modern’ history, and birth of Christ, Cappadocia was a safe haven for religious types. While Christians the world over were being persecuted for their cultish beliefs, priests were holing up in the hand-hewn caves now found in Goreme National Park. While it’s impossible to date when the structures actually became churches, it’s believed there were sites of Christian worship long before Emperor Constantine ratified Christianity as the religion of the Roman Empire.

Today, Goreme has the remains of the oldest churches in the world. To tell you that it’s weird to walk through a hole in the wall and find a 10th century Byzantine fresco would be a gross understatement. Around 900AD, the monastic complex at Goreme was carved out, and within 300 years, scores of churches were cut into the earth itself. Fast forward to today and there are still more than 10 fantastically preserved churches; churches that you can simply walk into!

What I found interesting was how small these churches were. Perhaps due to the constraints of their tools, or their knowledge of engineering, the largest churches were only 3 or 4 meters square. You’re walking into a single room — soom of which were vaulted — literally plastered with murals and frescoes. I wonder if they were small for another reason though: perhaps these churches were built back when religion wasn’t about being grandiose and self-important. Once upon a time, religion was probably about prayer, and finding solace in some greater entity than ourselves. A small room, with a priest, would be more than suitable for that, right?

Somewhere along the line, probably hand-in-hand with advances in engineering, churches became bigger, vaster and more pompous. If you’ve been to a truly huge cathedral, I think you can relate to that feeling of awe and wonderment as you cross the threshold and look up at the stained glass window above the altar — but that’s the majesty of the building, not God touching you. I assume that churches grew in size as faith swelled, and their eagerness to reach the firmament increased. It’s the same reason banks are always large, imposing structures — they inspire you to trust and believe in whoever dwells within, whether it’s the bank manager or high priest.

I don’t want to get too stuck into the topic of religion, as it’s rather obvious that the churches in Goreme were certainly not used as some kind of control structure; there were simply too many Churches for a single priest, or some particular rites of worship, to prevail! They were meant only as places of worship; vestibules of silence where you could be on your own, or with God.

We poked around for a few hours, scampering from room to room, trying to avoid the incredibly hot summer sun. There were houses, baths and even halls where they would gather to eat (but again, they were small, only a few meters across). My favourite features, though they scared me senseless, were the pitch-black escape tunnels that ran out of the city into adjoining valleys.

Building a city at back of a valley is already fairly hard to penetrate — you have to climb a mile-long incline to get there, with almost no cover — but, if an aggressive force actually made it to the top, there were a few tunnels that had been carved, by hand, out of the solidified volcanic ash.  These tunnels — which could be longer than a mile! — would enable the women and children to safely escape to another valley.

They also enabled poor, hapless, home-sick tourists like myself to escape to… ’safety’. Egged on by some hopelessly enthusiastic American (’Dude, I bet it’d be totally awesome…’), I finally steeled myself and climbed up some near-vertical stairs into the escape tunnel itself.

What followed was an experience I don’t really want to relive, but I will anyway, for your sake and certainly not mine. The stairs you see in the photo were just the beginning — there were two more flights, each one more run-down and life-threatening than the next. On the last flight, before the tunnel itself, the American in front of me slipped, fell, and broke the torch he was holding.

We were plunged into complete darkness. Most people have never experienced real darkness — the kind of darkness that you only get when you’re surrounded on all sides by at least 100 meters of rock. You’d probably consider a dark, moonless night ‘quite dark’; dark enough to bump into other people, at least. Let me tell you, a moonless night is about 10 times brighter than that escape tunnel — an escape tunnel that I was sure would shortly become my final resting spot. How ironic.

‘Eric?’ I called out quietly. I don’t know why I called out quietly; probably because of some primordial urge to lay low and pray the velociraptor doesn’t eat me.

‘Seb?’ came back the hushed, not-quite-so-enthusiastic voice of Eric the Enthusiastic American.

‘You’re right, this was totally awesome.’

‘I think I’ve busted my ankle, Seb. I can’t move.’

And so we crawled on in darkness. Or rather, I crawled on, using my super-human inner geek-strength to drag Eric behind me. Minutes went by, and soon hours. Scrapes from the jagged lining of the tunnel turned into bruises when we tumbled down some stairs and ended up in a pile of scared, sweaty man flesh. But we persisted, and eventually — about 2 hours later — we emerged into another valley to be greeted by a beautiful Anatolian sunset.

We were cut up and bleeding, shaken and stiff, rendered blind by the return of the sun. Worse than all that though: we had no idea where we were. The agreed meet-up time had long past, but when you don’t know where you are, it’s very hard to know where to go. Somewhere, Eric’s wife was eagerly awaiting his return.

I stood up, and looked down at Eric’s scratched, crumpled heap of a body.

‘She’ll be wondering where I am, Seb…’

‘I’m not the most athletic person in the world, Eric. I’m not sure I can carry you all the way to safety, after dragging your broken ass through a mile-long half-meter-wide tunnel…’

He grunted pathetically up at me. I sighed deeply.

And that’s how I walked off into the sunset, with an American called Eric in my arms.

Phop, phop, phop.

The sound of a fan mere inches from my gonads. The slightest of  slips and, in spectacular fashion, all hope of future Sebastians goes down the drain. Earlier, some of my leg hair got caught between the blades and it hurt like buggery. A small price to pay for wind-chilled testicles though; if they get too hot it can make me impotent, right?

I took my shirt off hoping for a slight reprieve and it worked for a while. But now I’ve soaked through the chair I’m sitting in and not only am I hot, I’m sticky. Sticky.

I’m amazed that my keyboard hasn’t yet short-circuited. I’ve been looking into getting one of those plastic covers that they use in McDonalds to prevent them from getting gunged up with grease. Mind you, death-by-keyboard-electrocution has to be the best way a geek can go…

It’s made all the worse by spending 80 to 90% of my waking life in front of three computers, four screens and an amplifier that generates enough heat that my cats always flock to it in the winter. It’s about 3 kilowatts in total, which is great in winter… but not in the summer. Perhaps I should get out more I often find myself thinking as I swing around in my computer chair, waving my arms about like a retard and desperately trying to create a breeze.

But in a brief moment of clarity I realise I shouldn’t be moaning or despairing: melting into an amorphous puddle of goo in a bedroom surrounded by high-tech equipment with a tall glass of cold, clean water is a lot more desirable than passing out in the wild undergrowth of Central Anatolia, Turkey.

And so it is, with gooey stumps that would make a leper proud, with gangly digits that were once well-formed and finely-honed typing machines, I write this entry.

I had planned to write something else, something deep, but the pervasive heat is debilitating. Instead, I’m going to tell you about the few times I’ve almost died of heatstroke or dehydration. What a thrilling topic for a blog entry. I’ve interspersed a few pretty photos to make it less boring.

June 29th 2009, Sussex, England

(See picture at start of entry)

Consumed four pints (2 litres) of water… and sweated it all out again through my fingers. Laptops should be outlawed in the summer. Sat outside in the sun for a while hoping the breeze would somehow utilise the sweat that glistens from every part of my body. No breeze, just felt like my brain was being baked while still safely within the confines of my skull. The feeling of sweat dripping from under your arms onto your hips and legs is quite unique, but not entirely unpleasant.

July 2007, Cappadocia, Turkey

In hindsight it was perhaps rather stupid to take a taxi ride out into the middle of nowhere and then pick my way over the weird and wonderful ‘moonscape’ terrain of Cappadocia. On a normal day I guess it would’ve just been silly, but in the middle of summer with temperatures reaching over 40C (100F) and only a small bottle of water it was stupid. I was very nearly a winner of my very own Darwin Award. As with most of my recent exploits, it was obviously to take photos — and it was probably worth it, despite the near-death experience. Check out the lovely hand-carved cave that I found while crawling along the ground, gasping for air and praying that someone would find me, or I would find civilisation. This is probably over 1500 years old!

Somewhere in South England, 1996

I actually keeled over in some woodlands by school, back when I was 12. We’d been exploring (as kids do, when they go to private schools in the countryside and they’re skipping a class they don’t like) and… I guess I pushed it too hard. I’ve never been the fittest person in the world — the thought of exercising just for the sake of being fit is completely foreign to me — I always thought I’d rather be reading or sitting in front of a computer learning something.  The pen is mightier than the sword, right?

Anyway, where was I…

Yes, I passed out in the woods and my friends had to carry me back to school. I am told that, to avoid getting into trouble, they conjured up a great story that involved me being bitten by a snake. Unfortunately, we had leaves and twigs in our hair — oops!

Ostia Antica (30 miles from Rome), October 2008

Instead of Pompeii I decided to go to Ostia Antica, an ancient ruin that has always been overshadowed by its volcanically-preserved sister. I think Pompeii is meant to be in better condition but a) Ostia Antica is only half an hour instead of 4 hours from Rome, and b) it’s almost completely devoid of tourists — so I went to Ostia and it was awesome! Except for the nearly-dying bit.

For the 8 hours I was there I saw three people — and we’re talking about a large city that once had a population of 75,00 people! Originally it had acted as the harbour city of ancient Rome between the 7th century BC and 4th century AD, and some pesky Arab pirates finally caused its downfall in the 9th century. Anyway, I ended up very lost in some ancient Mithraic catacombs; lost and without water.. in the dark. Let me tell you something: ancient religious sites are scary. Dark and scary and damp and silent… except the occasional skitterings of creatures you will never see. I will write about it properly as my travel stories of Italy have finally reached Rome — but the point is… actually, I don’t know what the point is.

Why am I writing in this weather? I’m going to look for another fan…