Day 12 – September 12 2024 – Göreme – Konya

As we did yesterday, leapt from bed around at dawn. Christmas! Balloons! fully prepared (except that the Olympus Pen e-pl8 stopped working on the terras) … and nothing happened.

Some guys were cooking onions in a drum down beside the Otel. Guests stood in silent vigil until dawn became morning, some retreating, disappointed. Muttering. Some taking advantage for the ongoing salvos of selfies, posing for their partners; using the wifi to upload, checking their poses, their pouts or moues, the creases on their dresses; finding inadequacies, re-shooting and uploading. One lycra-clad woman did stretches and worked out with a rubber strap.

Then…

above the ridge, the tiny onlookers shrieking as Let’s Go Explore’s gondola seemed about to sweep them off. From completely different directions, today, than yesterday, balloons.

smoke from cooking onions,

and in this odd effect caused by zooming in, which I quite like, from the opposite far ridge,

slowly emerging, like puffballs,

some selfie action going down on the terras, Russian couple, partner non-participant,

trying to leave was a trial, Orhan not to be found. (And now I think about it, this followed the drama of the previous day, when, on returning to our Stone Palace, we found our room un-serviced. Service clearly an issue in Göreme. And Orhan was not to be found; not at the rug shop where he hung out, not at the smoking table; his friend or colleague or business partner, perhaps all three, at the rug shop, knowing nothing; who averred to J that it was we who were remiss, in not putting out the Please Service sign … Orhan had been asleep, all afternoon, it turned out. He turned up with clean towels and reluctantly replaced with an empty the full bin. Still half asleep.) Now, it wasn’t so bad. We left the key on the counter, had places to see,

At the top of the list was Tokalı (Buckle) Church … John Ash writes of it being the most beautiful of all the painted churches in Capadoccia (in Turkish, Kapadokya, which as usual for Turkish is phonetically correct, whereas the English vacillates between double pp’s and double cc’s, or seems to, while the Greek is also quite clear, Καππαδοκία, however, note the double ππ) and writes of it hidden, off the track beaten by the industrial-scale tourism in the 90s, when he was writing, to the Outdoor Museum, with its ticketed entry.

Believing it hidden but in plain sight we stopped 300m or so down from the gated entry, could find nothing, waving google like a dowsing wand, then 200m or so, and I climbed up into some apertures cut into the tufa to find no painted interiors; then, right opposite the entry to themepark Eastern christendom, a sign for it, Tokalı, and a busload of tourists preceding us in, past the ticket office, where, the virtue of this arrangement, we didn’t pay.

No pictures taken. Overlooked by guides explaining to the tour … and a huge scaffold which rather looked like a theatrical installation than anything else. Made of wood, going up 3 floors; the question we had is, What are they doing? there looked to be paintpots, people doing cleaning work, sort of art-departmenty people, a guy at a keyboard engaged with several monitors like the sciency side of the operation; and in the alcove, several younger people under supervision, as if on work experience.

Is it preservation or restoration? It certainly looked more like the later, as if the blue-that-lasts-a-thousand-years were being touched up, with some modern substitute for azurite. My notes say, Jesus has a nice face, solid mandalas. Mary mother, deeply maternal rather than demonstrative. A busload of Japanese sneezing on azurite.

We walked down to where we had left the car. To the left, sol,

and to the right, sağ, another recombinant VW,

Where we didn’t go: monastery, a series of U-turns had us at a rutted track of a road, which little Clio couldn’t have handled. So we got so far on foot as to spot the monastery on a distant hill. And turned back. And we didn’t go to the so-called underground cities. They sounded claustrophobic and as cheerless as bombshelters–of which when they were excavated they were the contemporary equivalent–without decoration, inscription or even graffiti to suggest they’d been, rather than of hiding, places of habitation.

Coordinates were set for Rose Valley, Güllüdere and Kızılçukur, Red Valley. The road led to where we’d gone in search of the acıl for the harder stuff, that seemed to be kicking in as our guts were not kicking out. Then a dust-sandy road where only one other car was parked and we walked in … the temperature around 36-37C,

We discovered some vestigial painted chapels in this region and here got an idea of how much the landscape had altered in the time since the tufa had been dug out: those cavities high above the valley floor had not involved any kind of aerial contrivance, no scaling of the rockface, but where they were the rest had fallen away. They had at one point been easily accessible.

a pigmented stripe,

Having followed a sign with Red and an arrow down the valley and Rose with an arrow up the valley we found a path …

And met a guide who’d sent his tourists up the steep slope to see this,

(His back was bad. He didn’t go himself.)

Having seen what we could see, got lost, and having had to retrace our steps we were again on the approach to the valley when … a Caddy convertible, roared up into the valley, Russians, a trio of Priscillas in flouncy dresses, one sitting on the top of the back seat while a guy crouched in the seatwell filming her with a cellphone. Their laughter rang out. There was a soundtrack of some sort, badly curated or curated with the same taste as the scene they were in which was not the one they thought they were in.

37C in the car, reached for the Powerade.

Another series of U-turns followed before we reached the straight,
Good-bye – Hoşç kal – Capadoccia!

It was taking the secondary roads to Konya J discovered something wrong with the car. It stalled each time we stopped at the traffic lights. Drivers hitting their horns behind us, she went for the ignition … This was not going to wash for the entire duration of the roadie, that she either ride the clutch at the lights or try a key restart every time it stalled. We had to contact the hire people, B2, but how? And could we get service out here on the road? It was that bad.

I said, Just for an experiment, let it stall. I know the instinct is to reach for the key-ignition when it does, but resist. And. Let’s see …

As soon as the clutch was depressed to put it back into gear, the car restarted. It was a modern car thing!

A petrol conservation thing!

J’s workaround, however, was to use the handbrake not ride the clutch to curtail the whole stalling-restarting thing. And then we thought, how would it have been, if we had contacted the rental car people … and complained that there was something wrong with the car! like asking where the invisible horses were that pulled it.

Konya, the Hich Otel,

Gizem (same as Izmir) our hostess. Signed in, passports handed over, checked, we were treated to purple sherbert, drink of the sultans and excellent Konya hospitality.

The street,

View from the window, onto Mevlana Müzesi, mausoleum of Rumi, a site of pilgrimmage,

Atlas room, at an uncorrected angle,

our door,

Out into the environs early for dinner,

A family style restaurant. This had chunks of stale bread under the sauce,

This had no sauce at all,

The turquoise-tiled tower belongs to Rumi’s mausoleum, museum,

We were in search of beer.

I asked at a tobacconist, he asked his neighbour, the barber. Directions brought us to a supermarket. I asked at the checkout. Boy with big lips shrugged, I dunno!

Thanks! I said (for nothing).

I wrote,

In Rumi's town.
Very dry.
He would be displeased.

…

about to bed, at 10.30, there was a bang on the door.

Who’s that!? I yelled.

A woman’s voice.

I opened the door.

It was hot milk and bikkies, presented as part of the hospitality.