I’ve wanted to go to Cappadocia since I was about fifteen, so this was the fulfilment of a dream.
It didn’t start out promisingly.
The flight was racked with turbulence, and I had opted for some reason not to take my make-flying-less-of-a-nightmarish-ordeal pills. It was raining. Again. On the shuttle bus to the hotel there was an obviously very posh English couple who spent the entire trip complaining loudly about their ‘useless’ travel agent, and her ‘lavish commission’ because their names had been misspelled on the driver’s sign, causing about thirty seconds of confusion before they were allowed on the bus. Then, as we started to glimpse the first rock formations through the gloom, the woman broke off from her complaining for long enough to make some vague comment about them, to which her husband said, dismissively, ‘oh yes, I’m sure we’ll be seeing quite a lot of them’, then went back to complaining about the travel agent. I wanted to knock their stupid, over-privileged heads together.
Sadly, the closer we got to Goreme the harder it rained, and the less we could see. I started to feel a bit depressed. This wasn’t what I had dreamed about. Trapped in a van in the middle of a storm with a pair of cantankerous rich bastards.
But then we got to Goreme, and it was everything I’d ever wanted. It was still raining, but the rain had lifted enough that I could actually see more than ten metres in front of me, and I did a bit of soggy sightseeing with a huge grin on my face.
Hooray. It more than made up for how miserable I’d been in Istanbul. I squelched around for a while, then retreated to a cafe to sit damply over a glass of excellent Turkish wine (who would have thunk it?) and a gozleme. Purveyors of Turkish food in Australia really ought to be taken out and shot for besmirching the reputation of possibly one of the most delicious cuisines on the face of the planet.
I sat happily in said cafe with my gozleme and wine, and the lady who ran the place sat at the table next to me and seemed keen to chat. She didn’t let the fact that she only knew two English phrases (‘is warm, no?’ and ‘good food?’) and that my Turkish was non-existent (shameful, I know) stop her, and we had a lovely time, smiling at each other. I pulled out my camera to look at my pictures and the lady’s two little girls stood over my shoulder and looked at my photos with me. I took a picture of my food, which they laughed at – fair enough, too. But it was delectable, and deserved to be documented for posterity.
Ah, so this is the famous warmth of the Turkish people I’d heard so much about. I almost wanted to cry, and thank them just for being so completely the opposite of horrible.
That night I wandered down the hill from my hotel into town to have a drink and some dinner somewhere. I had a beer at a cafe called Fat Boys (run by an Australian, they have Vegemite toast and meat pies. I snobbishly refused to eat them, something I now regret as it has been months since my last taste of Vegemite), then decided to stay for dinner. I ordered kofte, and was sitting reading my book when the power went out, leaving the room lit only by street lights. My food arrived shortly after, and I tucked in. It was delicious, and yet oddly soft and smooth in texture. I sat there in the semi-dark eating my kofte, and was half-way through it when it suddenly occurred to me that the reason it was so soft might have had something to do with the power going off halfway though it being cooked... I chose not to use the light from my iPod check how cooked it was, and decided to try and finish eating before the lights came back on. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.
More beer, some possibly raw mince and a couple of hours later I wobbled back to the hotel, had an ill-advised glass of wine in the hotel bar then went happily off to bed. After a crappy start to my holiday, I was happy to be somewhere so wholly agreeable.
