The Turkish Car Tour

Our tour of Turkey began in Kusadasi, where my parents arrived via nine hour overnight bus and Kenny, Sarah, and I arrived via one hour ferry from the beautiful Greek island of Samos. Thankfully my dad was holding up a sign with our names on it to welcome us to our next country. We had a great dinner and walk around town before putting my blurry eyed parents to bed.

In Kusadasi we rented a car and headed off to Pumakkale and Cappadocia, now two of my favorite places in the world. In Pumakkale natural spring waters have created travertine formations and pools of water that look exactly like snow. So as you look across the horizon you see green grass, dry and dusty landscape and then wham...white, smooth rocks with water flowing down them.

We arrived in Pumakkale late in the afternoon and by the time we settled into our hotel and headed to the travertine pools it was just starting to get dark. Once we got there we took off our shoes and began wading through the cool ankle deep water up the hill. The majority of people were coming down the hill at this time of the night and soon we were some of the only people left. It was an amazing sight and to explore it at night was magical. The next morning we went again and saw the ancient ruins that sit atop the hill. The entire place is unlike anything I have ever seen. The sad part is that human use of the water and the tourism industry in the area has caused a lot of the water to be diverted and many of the formations are being repaired by white painted concrete.

We headed from Pummakale to Cappadocia to see another magical and awe inspiring sight, ferry chimneys and rock formations. Again we arrived at night and although we could see silhouettes of the formations we had no idea what was in store for us. What we did get very excited about was the brand new, rather inexpensive and very nice cave hotel room that we had booked. Our hotel rooms were built into the side of a rock outcropping and each room was in a pitch back cave with rock walls.

Although we arrived later at night and were quite tired we got up at 5:00 am to be picked up for our scheduled hot air balloon ride. When we pulled up to the launch site the balloon was being filled with hot air and glowed in the early dawn darkness. The ride was incredibly smooth, except for the small incident when we ran right into one of the rock formations. We sailed over several towns where all the buildings and homes were built right into the rocks. There were several other hot air balloons in the air and we went through a good chunk of memory on our camera taking photos. It was also very cool that our balloon pilot was the only female balloon pilot in Turkey and that when it was time to land she did it in the back of a pickup truck bed. We celebrated the experience with a champagne toast.