Day 59 (Turkey): hiking around Goereme

today’s distance: 0km
total distance: 4801km
riding time: 0h

I woke up late … slept like a stone and had a slow start. This meant of course that I would be heading into the heat of the day … and a good number of tour groups as I was doing the tourist tour at the Goereme Museum, which is impressive though not as much when you have been to Ihlara before.

It was funny though to see the masses of people being channeled and moved along by their guides.

I had wanted to hike quite a bit, decided to put it off given the previous day and found buses to get me from one place to the next. Here are some pics from Devrent Valley and Pasabagi. Cool places and worth a visit for sure.

The really good part came at the end of the day. I am sitting in an internet cafe uploading some pictures and turns out the guy next to me is German and heavily involved in documenting hidden churches in the area. It was an interesting meeting to say the least. Bernd left Germany seven years ago and showed me a few places and put things into perspective that I would have a) never found and b) never seen the connection. We walked up an alley in Goereme, he said to go into a hole in the wall and we stood in a church. Extremely amazing. There are houses all around it and it was used for all sorts of purposes, but was clearly a church originally. We also went to see a basilica just on the outside of Goereme and again, he let history come alive. Extremely knowledgeable and very forthcoming, his website - www.berndputz.de - is a place to take a look at.

We discussed all sorts of things over dinner, which lasted well longer than I had thought. Good stuff.