I had managed to sprain both my ankles, not easy to do I can assure you, and it requires an expertly timed trip and a twisting fall into a roadside drain. Something a stuntman would be proud of. Unfortunately, I'm no stuntman and the pain meant I could barely walk, and could only just drive. I needed to rest up. Not far away was Halfeti, a place I had heard mentioned as being a beautiful destination on the River Euphrates.
I have travelled to many historic sites, but until recently I had never even heard of the colossal statues of Mount Nemrut in Southern Turkey. It was on a trip to Cappadocia that I picked up an old copy of the Lonely Planet in a cave hotel which had one of the weathered heads on its cover. Since then I have been planning to visit.
I was toying with the idea of going to a Turkish bath. It was a 'Must Do' according to all the advertising boards outside the travel agents lining the streets. It was just that something about the idea of lying on a slab being pummeled by a big bloke did not attract me, maybe if it were a lady working on me I might have changed my mind, but that would be far too unseemly for Turkey's fairly conservative morals.
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In a restored Silk Road Caravanserai near Urgup, the Sufi religious ceremony of the Whirling Dervishes is performed weekly. It is a separate order within the Sunni faith of Islam and although once practised throughout the middle east, it is now limited to small groups in Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon and Indonesia.
Discovered by chance in 1963 when a homeowner, renovating his cellar, broke through an earth wall and discovered a passageway, Derinkuyu is a huge subterranean city in the Cappadocia region.The region has many of these cities which were built in the seventh century and used to hide from marauding armies, particularly the Romans who had a tendency to raid the Anatolia region to procure slaves.
Slow cooked lamb kebabs |
View from an abandoned Cave house looking towards Pink Valley |
Volcanic eruptions two million years ago caused the region of Cappadocia to be covered by thick ash, which became soft rock (or in geological terms,Tuff). Erosion over time left only the harder remnants of the Tuff, which has been shaped by the elements into amazing formations; towers, chimneys, mushrooms, and rocks that appear to have been sculpted by Henry Moore. The soft rock also enabled the inhabitants to carve out their cave homes in these towers, and to go underground at times of danger.
The Basillica Cistern |