Day 2 - 6 July Cappadocia

 

We started at a civilised time today, 9am after a buffet breakfast.

First stop on the bus was Ozkonak Underground City. This is an old, large, multilevel underground complex beneath the town of Ozkonak. Apparently there are many of these scattered around the area, taking advantage of the soft stone. We went through several chambers linked by increasingly long, narrow, winding tunnels where you had to bend double, before retracing our steps.

 

The next stop was a rug weaver. A short demonstration on how Turkish rugs are made from wool, cotton and silk before a much longer display of their wares, none of which we bought.

For lunch we went to a restaurant with views over the valley. Like most of our meals there were dips and olives to start which were nice but unexceptional, then a bland lamb stew with rice and a dessert, in this case semolina. We had a few minutes so walked up to a view of Uchidar Kalesi, the local hilltop rock fort.

 

The stop in the afternoon was similar but this time a ceramics workshop. There was another demonstration and brief tour then a visit to the showroom, where we bought nothing.

We got back to our room around 3.30 and couldn’t resist a sleep. At 5.40 we were bussed off to dinner in a kind of underground dinner theatre. The food was the same – our fourth lamb stew and rice in two days. This time with dancing. A mix of belly dancing and folk dancing which was quite skillful but went on too long.

When we got back to the hotel there was some sort of promotion going on with disco music, and lights controlled from a balloon basket accompanied by flames from the burners that sent waves of heat for 50m.