Open Air Museum

There are a ton of Open Air Museums in Cappadocia. This is the one in Göreme was especially notable. The whole enclosed village was a monastery from back before the 4th century, and most of the churches there are from before the 10th century. It makes everything in France look like it was built yesterday. Some of the churches had been buried for centuries under layers of pigeon poo, so after extensive restoration they had their original brilliant colors back for the world to see...14 people at a time.

Go if you can though- it was one of the only places where the faces on the frescos were intact, as the Iconoclast fervor that grasped the area meant they had dutifully scratched out and visage. There were a lot of stairs to climb, but the path is paved. Towards the end of the day, the crowds thinned enough to not have to wait in line to see the churches.

Most of the official museum sites were really well-preserved. Too bad though, you couldn't take pictures of the frescos inside the churches at the official Open Air Museum because they want you to buy postcards and books at the gift shop.

The remarkable El Nazar church was photo-friendly, and the guardian looked as though he hadn't gotten up from his chair in days.

But most of the churches off the main site would let you take pictures, and only a few of the more spectacular churches even had a guardian charging admission, which was somewhere around 50 cents.

A plea for the masses: the area around the Open Air museum had a handful of horseback riding outfits where you can take a guided tour through the canyons. I must say, almost all the horses I saw looked terrible. They were almost all too thin with no access to water while tied up in the hot sun, and most of them had saddle sores and rubs from ill fitting equipment. One of them had a huge swollen bulge on one side of his face (probably an impacted tooth) causing his halter to rub the skin raw on his face. I saw very few well-tended feet. Please, if you go to this region (or any place, for that matter) and want to ride, make sure they are giving you quality horses that are well taken care of.

You should not be able to see the hip bones sharply like this.

Or see their ribs like that.

While in the US and most of Europe, the humane society called if they are sending animals out to work that are that thin and neglected, alas, different countries have different standards, and it is up to the potential riders to judge for themselves.

I did find one group that looked healthy in weight and well taken care of:

Her nose was a bit sunburned, but no ribs and perfectly trimmed hooves. Plus she was sweet and wanted attention, so I almost had to do some frantic internet searches what kind of penalties horse thieves get in this country.

Red Roses for Me

Despite dire forecasts and distant rumblings of thunder, rain gear was packed and we headed out to explore the many valleys around Göreme on foot. The trail heads are about 1 kilometer outside of town, very close to the open air museum.

It was hard to get lost, yet there were very few marked trails or maps that actually had a scale and detailed trails. It's basically just a series of valleys you can loop in and out of without much else to veer off to.

Perhaps a dozen other people were encountered the entire day, including some Turks who has gotten their SUV so bottomed out that not even a tractor could help them out. But mostly everyone else we encountered were friendly hikers and farmers.

There wasn't a lot of posted signs or directionals, and when there were, they didn't always reconcile with the maps. Still, there were dozens of caves and churches to explore on your own. In between the fairy chimneys, there were fields filled with fruit trees and furrows of crops, and we would see farmers on their unirrigated land, bringing in water by truck and watering the crops by hand, with buckets and collecting pigeon droppings for the caves.

As always, I wished I had better lighting to do the landscape justice as it was overcast without a shadow to be seen. At least it didn't rain!

For the most part, it was fairly easy hiking.

The main trail was usually wide and sandy, but the deeper into the valleys you went, it got more rugged and vertical. You could pretty much see the points where tour buses would drop off masses to walk to a certain point in the valley, take some pictures and then turn back around. It was rewarding to get past that point, and climb to the many fairy chimneys that cropped up around every turn. As you climbed, the trail got steeper and the sand and gravel made for some slides on the descend, but over all it was pleasant as it could be. There was very little garbage strewn on the trail either, which ofttimes is my top criteria for weather I could call a hike enjoyable or not.

We had a nice four-legged companion for a couple hours of the hike. Despite trying to feed his scrawny ass everything we had with us, he politely spat out the granola bars and then looked up at us with hopeful eyes. It took a while, but he finally lost intrest and found a new group of hikers to journey with. Hopefully they had jerky.

Red and Rose Valleys were both gorgeous. Every time you looked up, a new, interesting rock formation would erupt from the earth.

Really now. I could just go on and on with the pictures. It was an incredibly dramatic place.

Some of the cave churches were so tucked away, the paintings were really vivid. I had no idea what this one was called as we just happened up on it and there were no signs or plaques or anything on the maps to clue us in that they existed.

Bring plenty of water is there was no place to