OMG. We are now in 2022! Fortunately what happens on the night between the 4th and the 5th of January is not a harbinger of what the year is going to be like. It was a very long night. First, I had to wait for 8 hours in Ankara to take the flight to Istanbul SAW (on the Asian half of Istanbul), then I had to take the midnight shuttle to Istanbul IST (on the European side of Istanbul), and wait there another 7 hours for the flight to Nevsehir in Cappadocia. In Nevsehir I took the shuttle to Göreme, 25 km away, and finally got to my hotel around 10:30 am. I figured I traveled a good 27 hours to get here.
Before I tell you about Göreme, let me go back to my transfer from Istanbul SAW to Istanbul IST. The outskirts of Istanbul have certainly changed a lot in the 15 years since I was last there, and the city looks lively and modern (instead of Byzantine), with brightly illuminated freeways everywhere. But the real shock came when we got to Istanbul IST, which is a palace of steel, glass, and enough lights to turn the night into day. I remember the airport, Ataturk International IST, as a rather cramped and understated facility, and was sure impressed by the transformation. Just before my flight to San Francisco SFO I am supposed to stay in a small hotel just across the street, but I cannot even see the street!
So I checked in and got ready for a six hour wait for my flight to Nevsehir, when out of boredom I decided to check Google Maps to see what route I will have to follow to get to my hotel across the street. Google Maps came back with 45 km and 13 hours walk on foot! What? Surely there is something wrong in here. The GPS marker puts me at the shore of the Black Sea, but I know that Ataturk International is near the Sea of Marmara. What is going on? When in doubt ask Google, which in very succinct language told me that at the start of the pandemic the Turkish authorities took the IST designation away from Ataturk International (now ISL), and assigned it to the brand new airport they had built 50 km away. That is as if someone were to take the SFO designation and give it to Santa Rosa! Imagine you had booked yourself in a hotel in San Bruno, just to find out that you were going to have to take a cab from Santa Rosa (and viceversa) to fly into (or out of) SFO. Grr! I had booked accommodations near the airport just so I would not have to depend on expensive taxis and traffic to catch my early flight back home ☹
Anyway, I took the 2-hour flight to Nevsehir, and was shocked to see we had landed in the middle of nowhere! There was desert all around us, and nothing but a handful of houses to be seen. Ay, ay, ay, I sure hope I have not made a blunder coming here.
I had made a reservation for the shuttle to Göreme, but was disappointed to see that no one was holding a sign with my name on it. Now what? Well, when I doubt ask. The gentleman I asked listened politely, heard the word “Göreme” and pointed toward a man who was hurrying in from the parking lot. Yes! He had the sign with my name 😊 Ten minutes later we were heading out, and after half hour of ride entered into the magical landscape of Cappadocia, which I will attempt to describe in a later paragraph. The shuttle dropped me off in front of the Küfe Hotel, smack in the middle of Göreme, where a smiling lady welcomed me and showed me to my room. Home at last!
I was too pumped up to take a nap at 10 am, so instead I dropped off my backpack and went out to investigate the town and its surroundings. The region in general, and the town in particular, are world famous for the fantastic forms that weathering and erosion have carved through a sequence of lacustrine deposits and poorly indurated, unwelded ignimbrites. Geologists refer to these erosional forms a hoodoos, though popular imagination describes them as fairy mushrooms, pirulíes, stout garden gnomes, or even phallic symbols. Turn an ice cream cone upside down and you will get an idea of what hoodoos look like. There are dozens of them all around us, and they are big! Since the Bronze Age folks here found out that the soft ignimbrites could be dug into to create caves, which in no time evolved into dwellings worthy of a hobitt. The cool thing here, then, is for your hotel to extend a few meters into one of these hoodoos and announce itself as a cave hotel or a troglodyte dwelling.
I was of course interested in the geology, and in taking beautiful pictures, so I followed my nose and pretty soon was trudging on goat paths looking for vantage points. I am sad to say that folks who lay power lines are not always aware of the visual pollution that they impose on us amateur photographers. By the time I decided to head back I was pretty far into the country, so when I got to Göreme I was sporting a pretty hefty appetite. Thank you to the Arab world for inventing shawarma 😊 Then the previous sleepless night hit me, and when I got to my overheated room at 3 pm an impossible drowsiness hit me, and I conked out until midnight. By then it was too late to do anything, so after working on this blog for a half hour, and seeing a short movie, I went back to land of Nod.
I had a second round in the chamber, however, because I had also booked a tour of “The Highlights of Cappadocia” for 9:30 am (assuming I would be back on time from my balloon ride). So I had a leisurely breakfast, and at 9:30 am stood at the porch of the hotel, ready for pickup. And then 10 am came and went, and 10:30 am, and … I finally decided to stop playing the fool, sent a heartfelt generic curse to all tour operators, and walked out into the town to make my own luck. And good luck it was. I found an outfit that offered scooters for rental, walked in, and 10 minutes later I was on wheels, free as a … roadrunner?
It was wonderful 😊 I went up every side road I found, looking at the rocks and finding just the right angle to take a picture of the unusual landscape. I try not to torture my friends with hundreds of photos from the same vantage point, but feel free to ask me to see a selection and you will fall in love with the place.
The way I see it, this region was very similar to the Cuenca de Libres-Oriental, in central-eastern Mexico. I did my PhD work in the volcanic center of Los Humeros, which sits at the north end of this endorheic basin and which I have gave my Planetary Geology students as a likely terrestrial analog for the pateras of Venus. If you are a normal person the previous sentence should make no sense, but to me it is clear as day. An endorheic basin is one that doesn’t have drainage to the sea, so it is normally filled with a thick sequence of fluvial and lacustrine sediments, alluvial fans, and the occasional volcanic products of your local volcanic center. If you happen to be dealing with a strongly compositionally-zoned magmatic system, then you get all sorts of rhyolitic ignimbrites, air-fall tuffs, and occasional basalt flows interbedded with the lacustrine and fluvial sediments. Now, open such basin to drainage to the sea, as is happening to the Cuenca de Libres-Oriental near Teziutlán, and in no time whatsoever you have erosion dissecting the whole sequence of volcaniclastic lacustrine deposits, ignimbrites, and basalts to create a whimsical landscape like that of Cappadocia. The question now is, where is the equivalent to Los Humeros here in Turkey? I shall devote my wanderings tomorrow to answer this question.
My meanderings brought me to the handsome city of Űrgüp, which not only has its share of spectacular landscape, but also has some very modern and comfortable suburbs. It struck me that construction standards are as high as those of Europe or the US, and undoubtedly follow the guidance of the International Building Code. Then I reflected that this was a good thing, because Turkey has its own dangerous transform fault, the North Anatolian fault, that runs along the whole northern shores of Anatolia (now the Asian part of Turkey), just off the Black Sea. Here in Cappadocia we would be in a similar position to the Mojave Desert, where the fault has given birth to a host of trans-tensional basins, conjugate faults, and volcanism.
In any case, I enjoyed my visit to Űrgüp, and had lunch there at a small bakery, where the enterprising owners also run a small eatery offering oven-baked goods to a well established local clientele. I had a type of Turkish pizza, very thin and very crispy, to which you add parsley, tomato slices, turnip slices and pepperoncini. Very yummy. The owners must be in their late 50’s, but they were full of energy and smiles, transacting business with the speed of lightening and using the sophisticated accounting method of keeping all cash in a drawer where all payments went in and from where all disbursements came out of. I was contentedly admiring the comings and goings when it struck me: I am far into Asia Minor, not understanding a lick of Turkish, and yet I have been welcomed by one and all into the fold of this small eatery. I am very lucky indeed.
On my way back I stopped at the town of Avanos, at the shores of the Kisilirmak River (which is ultimately responsible for the draining and spectacular erosional forms of Cappadocia). It is a cute city, with its riverside promenade, and the hub of an important ceramics industry. I visited the Güray Müze underground ceramic museum, which is housed in a man-made excavated cave of great elegance and beauty. The pieces exhibited range from the Bronze Age to the 1900’s (they are OK, but not great). The real impressive part comprises the workshops and the shop rooms, which go on and on and have one exquisite piece of pottery after another. I was ready to buy a truckload, so it is a good thing that I have neither the money to buy them, nor the place to put them. There are wine decanters that are 1 m tall and can probably hold 20 liters!
Happy and tired I decided to have a special dinner I have seen advertised: Testi Kebabi. This is a terracotta pot, of the size and geometry of a large Babushka. In other words, it has a bottom and a top half, and is hollow. The cook puts the whole fixings (lamb pieces in my case) inside, seals the two halves with a smear of clay, and puts it straight into the wood fire. After a good 20 minutes the pot is pulled out, set on a bed of salt soaked in alcohol, and is brought to the table in flames! Very impressive. Of course, you, the tourist, have no idea how to get to the contents inside and get burnt, which affords the waiter a moment of mirth. Then he comes in, armed with a hot pad and a small mallet, and with a decisive tap separates the two halves and voilá, there is your dinner! I took many awesome pictures, but to be honest the dish was kind of bland. But now that I have the idea I will try to recreate it, and I am much better cook than whoever put my Testi Kababi together 😉
And look at all those balloons! There must be at least a 100 of them, which at 30 heads a piece, makes for a might army of tourists, 3000 strong. Floating gently, suspended in mid-air, even the more fearful open their eyes in wonder at the birds eye view that rolls under our feet. I notice, once again, the value of photogeology, which allows us to easily see faults and fracture patterns, different formations, and the extraordinary dendritic pattern of valleys and ridges that formed when the basin was breached. My camera is working incessantly, trying to capture a view that can only be understood when you are there.
Our pilot had his fun, and brought us down until we almost touched the ground, almost brushing against the top of hills and small trees, only to later lift us to a height of 800 m above ground level. Then he told us that we were going to land, and that we had to brace for a hard bump, grabbing to the loops on the sides of the basket, and crouching to better absorb the impact. I found the bending hard but could see that we could easily be tossed around if not well braced. Then he laughed and told us to stand up and not look so silly and scared. We were about one meter from the ground when out of nowhere the crew materialized out of thin air and grabbed at the ropes, gently tugging the basket until it landed square on top of the trailer that was to transport it back to town. As the balloon deflated we crawled out of our cubbies, and the crew celebrated our successful balloon ride by offering us a glass of champagne (and of course passing the hat).
It was the best experience ever!
Back in town I went back to the scooter rental place and got wheels for my next exploration trip. I have found that Google Maps includes a Digital Elevation Model (DEM), and looking at it I found two possible volcanic sources: Hamurcu volcano (?) 40 km to the east, and Őzyayla volcano (?) 20 km to the west. My plan was to explore Hamurcu today, and Őzyayla tomorrow. So here I go, in my little 125 cc Honda scooter, joining the heavy trucks along highway D-300. It was cold, and it was scary. Actually, the big trucks were for the most part OK, but the jerks that drive cars think that they can pass me at a distance of a couple of meters and that is just fine with them. Assholes. After 30 km of cold head wind I was chilled to the bone, seriously questioning the wisdom of my expeditionary plan. Ahead of me lay a broad valley, mantled in a thing fog, and beyond it I could barely discern the outline of a snow-clad range, maybe 30 or 40 km away.
In due time I made it to Hamurcu, and found indeed a mean little somma, no larger than 5 or 10 km in diameter, dotted with post-collapse domes. The somma (the name given to a small caldera, like that of Vesubius or the Nevado de Colima) had been breached, and the eroded interior showed an intracaldera ignimbrite of no peculiar distinction. The broad depression has been settled by farmers and the village of Hamurcu, so it lacks that “natural” character that makes volcanoes so attractive. There were a large number of loitering Turkish dogs, which are large, white, and aggressive. I am glad I don’t have to map this particular volcano. On the way down I kept looking at those snowy mountains, who stubbornly remained covered in clouds. I never got a good picture of it, but at some point the veil of fog lifted and I could see in the distance the outline of a huge volcano! The individual “mountains” were large domes, which led like stair steps to the craggy summit, so I am going to label it a dome complex, like Mount Lassen, but much more spectacular. To me it looked like Mount Denali, retreating unto the distance behind a wall of inaccessible subsidiary peaks. Later I found out from Google Maps that this is Erciyes Mountain (volcano) and is 12,850 ft or 4,000 m high. The surrounding valley is 3,400 ft or 1,000 m in elevation, so the mountain rises an effective 3,000 m, or about as large as Mount Etna.
Still, majestic as it is, Erciyes is not likely to be the source of the Cappadocian ignimbrites, because it does not show any evidence of having fueled a large Plinian eruption.
Highly satisfied with the results of my trip I headed back, again under a freezing wind, but found time to detour into the valley of the very fine Kisilirmak River. Unfortunately when I got home I was chilled to the bone, shaking uncontrollably, so I got rid of my cold clothes, jumped into bed, and took a well-deserved nap. When I got up I went up another of the fabulous ravines of the region, took tons of pictures (including a sunset shot of now cloudless Erciyes volcano in the far distance), and had a tasty meal of lamb chops. Life is good.
The following day … “How was your exploration trip this morning, Horacio?” … I don’t want to talk about it. … It was freezing cold, dangerous, and pointless. It started when the first light of dawn was showing, and since I was warm I didn’t feel the chill of the air, but as dawn broke the wind from Siberia picked up and penetrated everywhere. It even lifted my helmet, so my brain froze as well as the rest of my body. The highway was treacherous with ice but mercifully there was very little traffic that early in the morning. And then I reached the city of Nevsehir, which is not a handful of desert houses, but a large and beautiful city, with its share of cliff dwellings but many new handsome apartment buildings. It is cut by an incredibly deep canyon where the Kisilirmak River runs through. But I don’t want to talk about it. … Because the city is inhabited by jerks, who drive too fast and have no regard for the safety of scooter riders. It should be named Jerktown. And just outside the city the quality of the highway deteriorated enormously, so riding became a scary compromise between sliding on the thin layer of ice, bouncing in the ruts of big trucks, and being passed by said big trucks. I definitely don’t want to talk about it … By the time I reached a point where a side road headed in an interesting direction I was out of time, unnerved, and shivering, so without having discovered anything interesting I had to run around, and run the treacherous gauntlet of icy roads and big trucks. But I really don’t want to talk about it … because I had to cross through Jerktown one more time, and this time the jerks were out in force, competing with each other in terms of jerkiness in rush hour traffic, and threatening my life and limb over and over again. I am just not going to talk about it … but I will tell you that by the time I got back to Göreme I was one solid block of ice, and it took me about two hours leaning against the heater in my room to thaw out and stop shivering.
By noon I was human again, and was ready for the shuttle to take me to the airport to catch my flight to Istanbul IST, where I had already booked a 40-euro taxi ride to my hotel in the outskirts of downtown via Booking.com. I love it. Without any fuzz my facilitator was waiting at the exit of the airport, walked me to my taxi, and an hour later I was dropped in front of my hotel, the Florya House Hotel. Small and unassuming, and with a wonderful friendly staff, the hotel is along one of the lively streets of modern Istanbul, Florya Street, full or coffee shops, restaurants, grocers, mini-markets, and other friendly businesses. The street invites you to walk along it and just soak the atmosphere. I know I am going to like it here.
I have two days left before I head back home, and part of me says that I should spend them at the hotel, recovering. But I am in Istanbul! I am just going to go out for a little bit, to visit Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque, the Basilica Cistern, the Spice Bazaar, the Marmara seashore, the Grand Bazaar, the Bosphorus … it is not going to be as relaxing as I thought at the beginning. I was in Istanbul 15 years ago, with Chrissy and Gustav, so in my mind all I need to do is “remind myself” of the many pecularities of this cosmopolitan city. Its greatest claim to fame is that is spans two continents, with a European half west of the Bosphorus Strait, and an Asian side east of it. The Bosphorus Strait is the narrow connection between the Sea of Marmara to the south and the Black Sea to the north.
I started my exploration by learning to navigate the Marmaray metro, which runs parallel to the seashore of Marmara, and connects my location in the west with the city center. It is a perfectly modern metro system, but I had to figure out how to buy my ticket in Turkish, and the stations do not have signs in them! (later I discovered that if you are fast you cam catch a name of the station at the very beginning of the concourse). I woke up early, so I was in the metro by 6:30 am, and at the Sultanahmet Square by 7:30 am, still in darkness. So I joined the crowds for morning prayer at Hagia Sophia, walked through the fog-shrouded square to the Blue mosque, learned all about Islam in the explanatory panels, learnt that the Basilica Cistern was closed for renovations (bummer, because that was one of the must-see places in my list), meandered through the Egyptian Spice Bazaar as it was waking up—there is nothing more colorful than this market place—and had a fish baguette for breakfast at one of the market stalls. Later I had a tasty crispy lamb “hagis” baguette for lunch, and on the following day a tasty breakfast soup thickened with barley (the eating possibilities in Istanbul are endless!).
Starting at 11 am my main mode of transportation was the one-day ticket of the Big Bus, which is currently operating two routes through the city. I got down at the Naval Museum, which is now housed in a new facility and is very nice indeed. Folks here are very proud of the Ottoman Empire, and of its naval control of the eastern Mediterranean from the Middle Ages to First World War, so I saw rooms and rooms of the many battles won by the Ottomans. In the Ottoman vein, there was one panel explaining how the Turkish Marines had to intervene in Cyprus in 1974 “to stop the human right violations of the Greek Cypriots against the Turkish Cypriots”. Comes to show that history can be told from different points of view.
On my second and last day I limited myself to a cruise along the Golden Horn estuary (that cuts the European side of Istanbul into the southern Old City and the more modern northern Galata district) and the Bosphorus Strait, which separates the older European part of the city from the newer Asian side, where a lot of the modern construction has taken place. The shores are as desirable as the Cote D’Azur, and there are a few grand old seashore chateaus and many new high rise apartment buildings with beautiful balconies and views to the sea. But I am really getting tired, because form time to time I will doze out despite all the beauty scrolling in front of me.
On the way back from the dock I stumbled unto the main train station, which to my experienced eyes looks like it is out of commission. Curious I checked Google to see if there were trains from Paris to Istanbul, and it seems you can get here via train in a couple of days of travel. Then I googled “Orient Express”, and found that once a year you can travel in luxury from Paris to Istanbul (or viceversa), in 5 days, for the bargain price of 30,000 British pounds per cabin. I don’t think I will be doing that anytime soon.
And that is it. I am now in my room waiting for someone to collect the samples for the PCR test, and tomorrow I will be heading for the airport at the wee hours of the morning to fly Air Canada to Heathrow, then Montreal, then San Francisco. Air Canada is being a pain in the butt regarding the Covid paranoia, so if I am arrested for a 14 day quarantine in Montreal you will have to wait until February to hear from me again. Maybe I will use the time to rest and recover.
Then again, Spring Break will be upon us soon. March 25 to April 4 … hmm … where shall I go next?
Finis
No comments:
Post a Comment