Friday we arrived at the Village Cave Hotel in Cauvusin Village in the region of Cappadocia. We were met by our host and fed a claypot stew and the best mercimek soup I've eaten in Turkey. (Lentil soup made with onion, and potato. It's my favourite) Saturday morning we got up at 3:50 am and the bus picked us up at 4:20 am. We had a small breakfast at a local restaurant with a huge group of people and loaded back on to buses for the ride out to the balloon departure site. Cam and I had a balloon ride south of Calgary about 17 years ago. For the kids this was their first time.
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| The man with the most important job. |
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| Cam zipped around and offered to take photos of the other people who would be sharing the ride with us. There were 11 passengers and 1 pilot in our balloon. |
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| Our pilot seemed to be an adrenaline junkie. We brushed the tops of apricot trees and narrowly missed some of the rocky tops of the fairy chimneys. |
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| Fairy Chimneys from above. |
The sky over Cappadocia is filled with balloons every morning. Our landing was quite rough; I banged the back of my head hard, but we all lived to tell the tale!
After some quiet time and second breakfast, we had a walk around the village, went for a drive and then in the early evening attended a whirling dervish ceremony. This is a sacred right so no photography was allowed. There was a lot of bowing, a lot of whirling and some very arabic sounding live music in an ancient caravanserai built in the 1200's. Caravanserai or han are stopping places for travelers located 40k apart from Turkey to China. We saw quite a few in Cappadocia which have been converted to other purposes.
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