Staying in a cave isn't as great as we expected it to be - our initial awe of the cave room wore of quick as we realized it was a little moldy, since the bathroom had no ventilation and it turned out the minor amount of rain we experienced seeped down through the rock and started dripping into the room.... but i guess that's part of the charm.
other than our room - cappadocia is just amazing - we spent an afternoon exploring the landscape on our own, first at the Goreme open air museum, which is filled with rock/cave churches, covered in amazing frescoes and then hiking one of the valleys to the next town and up a rock castle - the highest point in cappadocia to have a view of the land. We had a lovely big dinner and drank a ton of cheap jug wine (again)made two more friends, Maui & Nasha)and did a little bar hopping, we found the local pool hall and got our game on (none of us were to good, but the next day we knew a lot more people in town)
we spent the next morning taking it easy after our night of jug wine and then met up with Walking Mehmet to walk several of the other valleys - Mehmet is the local walking guru, a free spirit who has an open air office near the town square, where he does a little big of gardening, cooking, and relaxing in his handmade hammock. A smoker (as pretty much every turk is) he effortless walks the hills, peaks, etc that we all struggled up. He led us through amazing landscapes and showed us views, churches, pigeon houses and just gorgeous nature. We capped off the evening with a turkish dinner and dance event - we saw dervishes, folk dancers and belly dancers (who seemed a little bit more like strippers then we expected - one came into the room from a red lit cage in the ceiling) We got back to our cave room only to find that the dripping had gotten worse - so I finally requested that we swap rooms - at least to sleep in - the gang shifted rooms into a nice dry cave the smelled fresh and clean - and actually had a ventilation shaft for the bathroom - so it turns out all caves are not created equal.
The next day we decided to be big tourists and took a bus tour to the underground city, the ihlara valley, and to see a couple more sights. The four of us were exhausted and enjoyed catching up on sleep between sights - i think our tour guide was a little put off by all our sleeping but we enjoyed a day of being carted around between activities. Jacinta, Russ and I left Ryan behind that evening and took the night bus back to Istanbul. We popped some sleeping pills and the 11 hour bus ride felt like 3 and we were in Istanbul before we knew it.
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