Legend of the fairies

We started today off with delicious breakfasts at the hostel, we had them out on the balcony with a view of the fairy chimneys cave houses and hostels.
our tour had 15 people on it from a variety of countries which was interesting to hear different stories. some of the people were very interested in our trip and the fact that we had quit our jobs to travel. i think we worry less about this less than anyone else!
the first stop of the tour was a panorama view of Goreme where our guide gave us a run down on the history of Goreme. We found out the legend behind the name of 'Fairy chimneys' back in the day it is believed that fairies lived here before humans arrived. when the humans started coming the fairies didn't want to live with them so they turned themselves into pigeons and as a thank-you the humans constructed 'pigeon holes' and dedicated their lives to feeding the pigeons and using their poo to make fertilizer. over the years though interest in the pigeons has died off and people have stopped feeding them so the pigeons have found other places to live.
next stop was an underground city. there are apparently over one hundred underground cities in Cappadocia but most are closed to the public. the one we went to had eight different levels including kitchens, living areas and bedrooms, a church, a morgue, and stables for animals. originally the underground cities were built to escape wild animals and the harsh winter conditions. the city we were in had no toilet! hundreds of people lived their and they had to use bottles as toilets!!!!
Ewen pretending to be a Zombie coming out of a hole in the floor of the morgue.
we went on an hour long walk in a valley, it was only 4km so this was nothing to us after our epic days of sightseeing in Vietnam and also Istanbul. It was a very picturesque valley, we walked right next to a stream and there were cliff faces on either side of us. int he river someone had put benches for people to sit on with your feet dangling in the water, also their were two restaurants with seating on the river. we saw frogs and a bright blue dragon fly. at the end of the walk we had lunch sitting on cushions on a platform over the river.
A random donkey tied to a tree in the valley. hopefully someone was coming back for it!
some rock formations and you can just see a platform with tree trunk seats, this was the first restaurant we walked past, we were a bit disappointed when we didn't get to stop but turned out the place we had lunch at was just as awesome.
a chair built over the river, some others were put directly in the water
a cave church in the valley, the pictures in here are painted on pigeon egg shells, over the years the erosion has caused them to disintegrate and it is not a heritage listed church.
here is where we had lunch
some of the pigeon holes in the walls of the valley. not sure who used to climb down here to feed them, I'm sure the concrete steps with hand rails weren't there back in the days of pigeon worshiping!
our next stop was at a monastery built into the rocks. it is thousands of years old and was fascinating to see, at least 200 people used to live their at a time. we saw kitchens where you could see the cooking holes with scorch marks on the walls behind them. in the church you could still see some of the paintings on the walls and the roof. we were told that under no circumstances were we to climb up a tunnel going to the top of the monastery as coming down is very dangerous. Ewen was a bit disappointed when he couldn't even find the entrance to the tunnel. our guide told us that it is always the Australian boys who seem to end up going to the top of the monastery then complain when coming down saying they think they are going to die, it must be a dam steep climb!
it was interesting to see the lack of safety rails at this monastery, you could climb right to the edge with nothing stopping you from falling, also their were lots of holes in the ground which were not made obvious, one girl from our tour nearly fell down one.
it was a lot of fun exploring the different rooms and we took some gorgeous photos of the views from the monastery.
this was the view of volcanoes at a petrol station our mini bus stopped at. despite it been summer their is still snow on the tops of the volcanoes.
we spent the night at a restaurant experiencing a 'Turkish night' after our hostel forgot about us we finally got to the restaurant 40 minutes late. luckily we hadn't missed much. the whirling dervishes were dancing when we arrived but we still got to see about 10 minutes of them dancing which was interesting and beautiful to see.
many different types of traditional (and nontraditional) dances followed. one of them involved a man getting his face shaved.... in another one a girl rode a horse around the room.
the price of the night included dinner and unlimited drinks so i tried to make my monies worth drinking wine i didn't even like, i made it through about five glasses which is a pretty good effort for me. the night ended with everyone dancing to bad 90's music, me making friends with some girls from Canada and Brazil.

Piet the wino

The last act was a belly dancer who chose ewen as one of her male dancers, you can see him here in a pink skirt. i got a great video of him dancing, im trying to upload it at the moment but it goes for about 6 minutes so we'll see if it works here, otherwise you'll all have to wait until we get back to see Ewen shaking his stuff!!!
It was a great but very tiring day over all.
this hostel has been really good for meeting people, we've been able to give advice to people traveling to Vietnam and gotten some advice on places we are still to go. we've met people from all over the world, it helps that internet connection is only available in the common room so everyone sits in there with their laptops swapping stories.
tomorrow night we leave for Olympus, yet another overnight bus!!! We were meant to be going to Konya next but have decided to skip it due to having sooo many places we want to go to we are running out of time. we thought a month would be plenty of time for Turkey but turns out we could have easily spent two months here.