Cappadocia, Türkiye

We woke up to sunshine, the first time we’d seen a clear blue sky in Ankara. Had another large breakfast, packed up, and used Uber to get a taxi to the airport.

The Sixt car rental was on the arrivals level, but communicating that to the taxi driver was beyond our ability, so just went to international departures. Went through security to enter the airport, and then found our way down to arrivals. The Sixt folks were efficient, even offered us tea while they completed the paperwork. We are now the proud renters of a Dacia Duster!

All our luggage fit in the back without issue. We’ll be doing some sightseeing on transit days, with all our stuff in the car, and didn’t want luggage visible in the locked car. I don’t think car break-ins are a thing in Türkiye, but we prefer taking less risks.

Got out of the airport parking garage without stalling (it’s been a while since I drove a standard). The narrow ramps and turns was good practice to learn the car. It’s right-hand drive in Türkiye, so we’re now at 10 left-hand and 4 right-hand in our career count of car rentals. It’s a newer car with CarPlay, which made it much easier to use my phone for navigation.

We arrived at our hotel in Cappadocia just before 3pm. It’s built into old caves overlooking a valley, about ten minutes drive from the tourist hub of Göreme. The hotel and the view were both amazing, like out of a fairytale.

It was a perfect day weather-wise, and rain was forecast for tomorrow. So we dropped our bags in our room and headed out for some sightseeing, destination Derikli Kilise (aka Column Church, or Kolonlu Kilise).

We parked in the car lot (100 TRY, about 3 CAD) and headed out. At first I thought Direkli Kilise would just be right there, but it looked like a bit of hike, up and down 100m valleys. We walked down into the first valley towards Üzümlü Kilise. It has some cool painted ceilings, although you can only view them from the gated entrance to the church.

There was a coffee shop beside it, so had a Turkish coffee (in our rush to maximize the good weather, we had skipped lunch), and chatted with the owners on how to get to Direkli Kilise. Their description was different from what I could see on the satellite view of the paths in Google Maps. We decided to follow their directions, as they were local.

They did say the return trip would take 90 minutes (Google said half that). It was 4pm by now, so we figured if we didn’t get to the church in 30 minutes, we’d just turn around. Sunset was at 7:04 so we had plenty of daylight left, but we didn’t want to get lost in the valley after dark.

The path took us through some amazing rock formations. Some of the bushes were in bloom, and the purple and pink flowers really made the scene. We’ve seen a bit in our lives, and this was impressive.

We continued along the dirt trail, taking pictures every step of the way.

We later looked up that we were walking through Rose Valley, supposedly one of the top hikes in the area.

The path took around the edge of a plateau. On Google Maps I could see that Direkli Kilise was just across the valley, and could see the dirt path in satellite view. So we followed the path down into the valley, towards the church.

We finally came up to the front. There’s a metal bridge across what I guess could have been a moat. This leads to a small cave. There’s a shallow staircase from the back, which wraps up and bends to the right. I squeezed up, and popped out into a huge church carved out from the inside of the rock. It was just me and Heather in the church, it was quite amazing. It’s also called Column Church cause there’s four pillars holding up the rock above the church.

Anyways, exited the church and then looked at the satellite view for the best route back to the car. Fifteen minutes later, we were driving back into town. Total round trip hiking from Üzümlü Kilise was about an hour, of which 20 minutes was just taking pics.

We stopped at the Bim in town to get water (that’s a mini market here), and then drove back to the hotel. Someone had nabbed my prime parking spot outside the hotel, so we had to park about 50m down the street.

We were tired and hungry. Decided to go out for dinner and then come back to shower etc.

I WhatsApp’d our hotel guy, and he suggested Narin for dinner, about a ten minute walk. We ate at the very unfashionable hour of 6pm. It was quite good.

That was it for our first half day in Cappadocia, an excellent start.