The Apinautica - Chapter 10: Turkey, Pt 3: Cappadocia
I've once again been too crazy busy to post the next installment of this even though it was already written. My intention had been to post all of the chapter in weekly sections in the hope that the reader here might have at least some semblance of context-within-the-chapter. Ah well. Most recent distraction on top of my other things was teaching an advanced beekeeping class in Ghana via (zoom) (google equivalent but I like to use zoom as the generic because Microsoft "teams" and google "meet" really don't clearly convey the concept). I don't think I ever thought to appreciate that putting together a top of the line teaching curriculum is for the teacher even more involved than simply having to write a paper as a student. Not only do I need to double check and flesh out the background information on every fact I intend to cover I also need to find appropriate visual aids and strategize the delivery all out. Anyway I digress. Here is the next section, including a few paragraphs that I posted last time but I'm including them again because I think they're important to the context of the whole, I'll indicate where the new material begins if one wants to skip to it.
[Previous installment]
Going Underground
I always wanted to go to Cappadocia in the center of Turkey, so I decide to head there. I catch a small bus on a nearby corner, and it winds through the narrow streets of the old city collecting passengers from various stops. Eventually, the main terminal looms ahead, a vast windowless tomb-like edifice, that swallows us as we drive down a ramp right into its dark gullet. Stepping out from the shuttlebus I find myself in a cavernous parking garage with whole freestanding ticket offices whose roofs don’t touch the dripping concrete ceiling above. Buses lumber out of the darkness like mythical beasts. Crowds of people wait in the eternal night, like some dystopian underground city. The people here are almost entirely Turks - this isn’t how tourists get around. Kebab carts vent greasy smoke into the black abyss, surrounded by plastic chairs and tables, as if on a grassy lawn rather than underground oily pavement. I ping-pong through with a few well-placed questions to people who look like they know their way around - “Pegasus? Pegasus?” I ask, and they point off into the darkness. I splash through puddles in the gloom and find the office and buses of the Pegasus line.
I climb the steps into the bus and enter a bubble of light and civilization in the gritty darkness. Soon we roll out of the catacombs, back into the gathering twilight of summer evening. Onto the highway, and soon we are rumbling through the purpling dusk, from Europe to Asia across the Bosporus Bridge, with sweeping suspension spans like the Golden Gate.
We fly down the highway through the night, and I’m mostly able to sleep on this comfortable bus, interrupted twice by rest stops during which most of the passengers exit to stand about in the cold night air gasping out acrid cigarette smoke - not quite the fire breathing chimera Bellerophon sought when he rode the original Pegasus in legend. The sun rises over undulating hills and occasional blocky villages of small apartment buildings.
Suddenly, around a bend, a town comes into view that looks like it was hewn right out of the face of the hill - stone houses project from the cliff face, but the windows continue up the rockface itself! Rock spires rear up above the buildings, dwarfing the man-made minarets. We are in Cappadocia!
[this is where last installment ended]
I step out into the fresh morning air of what vaguely resembles a quiet modern hippodrome - the bus turnaround is an oblong oval cobblestone loop with the glass sided bus shelter in middle. Surrounding it rising upward on the slopes like the semi-circular seating of an amphitheatre rise the stone buildings, minarets and spires of Goreme. The bus trundles off with a puff of black exhaust smoke leaving me alone in the crisp morning light.
I check into one of the many cave hotels, choosing a ten bed hostel-style cave room, in hopes of making some friends but there’s just two Scottish girls packing their stuff to leave. The room had been carved into the soft sandstone of the cliffs. Thick Turkish rugs carpet the floor, like dark-red warm soft squishy moss.
Next on the agenda: breakfast. I find a restaurant with nice rooftop seating and order menemen, a delicious dish Deniz’s dad had made, a stewy mix of tomatoes and peppers and a few fried eggs. But the dish the restaurant makes is a pale limpid comparison to her dad’s cooking - less the sumptuous flavorful dish he had made and more a plate of flaccid stewed tomato. I gaze off at the Dr Seussian rock pinnacles -- at least Turkish coffee is dependable.
Normally when it appears one has been broken up with, one tries not to dwell on it. One goes to work, absorbs oneself in the mundane day to day. But normally one hasn’t found oneself marooned halfway around the world as a result of the fight. It’s hard to ignore that as a result of the disagreement, one is now living in a cave in central Turkey. It's always hardest laying in bed at night, thinking about how you used to run your hand through Her hair - dark chestnut brown that falls in curls like a turbulent current, that glows fiery red when the light hits it just right.
I generally avoid package tours but it’s the only practical way to see the main thing I’d wanted to see: one of Cappadocia’s underground cities. I sign up for one and the next day a small van picks me and a dozen other tourists up from various cave hotels. The guide explains that the name “Cappadocia” comes from the wild white horses that used to live here “but today there aren’t any any more” of course. We go on a short hike through a nearby canyon, it’s deep and twisting with ample foliage in its narrow base. Dovecots have been carved into the cliff wall, and around a corner we find a vendor selling cold drinks out of a cave. At the end there is an abandoned town of stone houses hewn out of the sandstone slope, an old Greek town whose residents had been resettled in Greece after the Turkish revolution in 1923.
For lunch we are taken to a tourist canteen in the nearby town of Üçhisar, dominated by a castle-like rock of sandstone pitted with windows. The canteen is full of the sad ghosts of the real Turkish cuisine I had enjoyed with Deniz. Köfte that aren’t the delicious giant juicy meatballs I’m used to, but dry and flavorless; dolma that has just been haphazardly thrown together -memories of Deniz in her mom’s kitchen, only half-lit by the light from the refrigerator, explaining that the grape leaves need to be sprinkled with lemon-juice and put in the refrigerator overnight; mantı that is just cheap ravioli in cheaper yogurt, no garlic, no meat - memories of having a delicious bowl of mantı with Deniz at an open air restaurant at the seaside near Bursa, her eyes shining, while nearby children launched candle paper-bag lantern-balloons into the air to the accompaniment of the gentle sound of the surf lapping against stone. To the metallic clatter of a hundred tourist’s silverware I pick at the food which is now my lot.
The underground city itself, is as impressive as I had hoped. We go to Kaymaklı, the second largest of around 200 ancient underground cities in the area. This one has four underground floors open to tourists, though it has at least eight, the deepest at a depth of 85 meters. In its heyday it housed 3,000 residents, living underground for the stable cool temperatures and safety. A lifelong fan of the Tolkien books, the narrow labyrinthine tunnels remind me of a goblin city.
July 15th, 2013 - The gravelly slope gives way beneath my feet - a cascade of sand, a hiss like waves running back to the sea, scrabbling fruitlessly for traction I fall slithering down into the canyon. The slope curves into a hump like a ski jump halfway down. Sliding helplessly towards this unintentional launch, I desperately spread my arms and legs, flattening myself against the rough slope in a frantic attempt to maximize friction and avoid being launched into the airy void. Pebbles continue to skitter past as I come to a stop. Standing up, I wipe sweat from my brow, and look across the rugged canyon: manila colored sandstone - more sand than stone, the sides a sheer drop in most places. Thick tower-like rock formations rise above the jumbled slopes, jutting into the blue cloudless sky. The sun reflects mercilessly off the buttresses of rock, and I gaze longingly down into the bottom of the canyon, green with waves of tufty grass and scraggly shrubs. I look back up the slope I just slipped down and realize there’ll be no getting back up. Below me, the steep slope is a tumult of boulders and crevices. There’s only one way to go now, down there, somehow.
That morning, in a quest for more authentic food I had gone to the corner of town where there seemed to be the highest concentration of locals. Old men sat at tables under shade trees playing backgammon, ah this is classic Turkey. After having a much more authentic meal I asked the young man working at the little café where a good place to go hiking was and he drew me a rough map on the back of a piece of scrap paper, indicating the way to “Love Valley.” “You can’t miss it!” he exhorted.
Well, I missed it, Finding myself on a sunbaked ridge looking down into a narrow valley full of lush foliage, bounded by rugged slopes and punctuated with more of those surreal pinnacles. Down there was where I wanted to be, not up here on the shadeless heights surrounded by chasms. I bet there’s another cave selling beverages down there I thought to myself. I thought I’d venture down just a bit of a slope to see if there was a path down the rugged sandy side here. Just as I was concluding there was not, I had involuntarily commenced this slide.
It’s not any kind of route I’d have taken if I had any other option, but I don’t, so I carefully descend through a series of narrow chutes in the soft sandstone, sometimes essentially rock-climbing down the crumbly surface. I imagine if I fall and seriously injure myself, no one knows I’m here and might not find me in this obscure corner until I’m nothing but bleached bones. With great relief I finally reach the level ground and tall bushes of the valley floor.
I wander along the dry wash in the center of the valley floor, up towards the back end of the valley because I have an idea the trail should be that way. But there’s no trail, and no friendly Turk selling fresh orange juice from a cave. I’ve long since finished my bottle of water. Sweat runs down my forehead and my throat feels very very dry. I begin to contemplate the possibility of my untimely demise again.
But wait, is that movement up ahead? People? I excitedly round the next corner only to startle a white horse, who looks at me and darts quickly into the shrubbery. Damn. But on the plus side here’s a wild grapevine draped over a low scrubby tree like a heavy cloak, thick bundles of plump grapes hang down from its branches. I grab grapes by the handful and stuff them in my mouth without bothering to dust them off. They are delicious and refreshing. I eat as many as I can stomach and then take a large sprig of them with me as I continue up the gorge.
The valley narrows, but, fortunately, the sides are also more traversable at the deep back end, the slippery gravel held together with coarse grass. I’m able to ascend the back slope on a steep narrow goat path. I finally emerge over the rim of the valley, dusty and tired, to see the great rock of Üçhisar close in front of me, surrounded by its haphazard brood of houses, hotels, and cafes. Some Italian tourists are standing near a turquoise jewelry shop I happen to emerge beside, they stare wide-eyed as I climb from the canyon rim, and with surprise I realize I had met them in the tour group the day before.
“Where’d you come from??” they ask.
“Um, I don’t even know.” exhausted, I gesture vaguely.
And then I wander into Üçhisar to search for authentic food among the fantastical tooth-like rocks.
I feel like the paragraph in the actual underground city is kind of anticlimatically inserted here, but I don't know how to improve on it. It was really neat, worth the whole trip to Cappadocia, but what's there to say other than what I said here? Perhaps if I could somehow more closely parallel the portion in the underground garage (which is why I included it here, because it IS inherently a parallel of some kind). Thinking about this, I contemplate that in writing a travelog-memoir like this, any place descriptions must either be pertinent to the plot or contributing to the mood/tone, and I'm not really sure how the underground city does either.
