99 balloons, some of them red

Now this is what I call an excursion...!

Okay, so somewhere along this great voyage of, er,  humble self discovery I appear to have been diverted.  Suddenly I’m staying in fancy hotels and merrily dropping wads of cash doing funky touristy things.  Didn’t I say in Istanbul that this was an approach I wanted to avoid?

I put up my hand to go on the balloon ride this morning.  It’s expensive (Euros 111 per person for an hour), but this region is supposed to be one of the best ballooning areas in the world.  And when in Rome (Turkey)...

I’ll let the video show you the sights.  [to come...]

Suffice to say that after many weird and wonderful touristy things over the years (yes, bungy-jumping, paragliding, whale watching, scuba dives and skiing, etc...) this was one of the best. 

The landscape was created (if not by Him/Herself, of course) by the ash from huge volcanic eruptions.  Where big rocks landed, this compressed the underlying material and strengthened it against the eroding forces of wind and water over the millennia - hence these huge towers topped off with a giant rock.  I never knew that.

This was a region where ancient Christians tried to escape persecution - the lion-bait era, that is.  They dug their underground complexes, or simple caves hidden in the rocky towers.  They look wonderful from the outside - funky little doors and windows; pigeon roosts carved in grids.  (The pigeon guano was prized for fertiliser, but the roosts were also used to disguise buildings that had been hollowed out into secret churches.  Random facts like those added a bit of interest and connection with the past.)

I had a moment in a museum - looking through the pocketful of coins I’ve collected over the past two weeks.  I found it amusing to see a collection of currencies displayed in one of the showcases: remarkably similar to those in my pocket.  Suddenly I could identify with the point of the display: such archaeological geek-fodder was indicative of the trading that happened along the Silk Road.  Coins from far afield indicating the trading partners, just as my pocketful did 2000 years later.

Given the  4.15am wake up call the rest of my day was pretty quiet once the balloon trip was finished.  After a snooze I went for a wander.

I found a barber in the village.  I quite like getting a haircut somewhere foreign, to experience a bit of the local culture of that country.  In Tokyo and Hong Kong you get a head massage; in the UK a cup of tea and chat about the football scores; and here in Turkey I had a clay mask, hair tonic and aftershave.  Quite the beauty treatment, and good value too.  Maybe now my bike helmet will fit more comfortably...?

The rest of the group did interesting hiking trips, with our Swiss rider JB familiar with the area after working in Turkey for a number of years.  Others took their bikes out - Rory and Oliver whooping it up off-road and coming back caked in white dirt.  Seriously?

Lots of people doing the same thing, but I didn't mind that at all