{"id":125,"date":"2011-05-21T06:44:09","date_gmt":"2011-05-20T18:44:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hailes.co.nz\/blog\/?p=125"},"modified":"2011-05-21T06:44:27","modified_gmt":"2011-05-20T18:44:27","slug":"rock-houses-and-underground-villages","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hailes.co.nz\/blog\/2011\/05\/21\/rock-houses-and-underground-villages\/","title":{"rendered":"Rock Houses and Underground Villages"},"content":{"rendered":"

Friday 20th<\/sup> \u2013 Day 7: Konya – Cappadocia<\/strong><\/p>\n

Today is the halfway mark on our tour with 6 days to go.\u00a0 We are not counting day 1 & 14 as I don\u2019t consider them as tour days.<\/p>\n

We have left by 8am and head off across the Obruk Plateau.\u00a0 Our next night will be in Nevsehir, Cappadocia.\u00a0 It all very flat on a long straight road.\u00a0 Our first stop is the Sultanhan Caravansary.\u00a0 They used to have one of these about every 40km as this was about what a camel could walk in a day and of cause it was the place to park your camel and rest up in safety.\u00a0 This one was the most well preserved and largest in Turkey.\u00a0 It smelt like the camel caravan had just left for the day.<\/p>\n

We next stopped at the underground city of Sarhati.\u00a0 Very impressive a large community space built under ground.\u00a0 They were originally built by the Greeks to hide from the Arabs.\u00a0 When they had the land swaps in 1922 the Greeks were moved away with nobody knowing of these underground villages.\u00a0 None were known about by the Turks until a shepherd fell into one in 1957 and then they started looking for them.\u00a0 They have found 16 so far.\u00a0 Apparently this is the safest to show the tourists but still very impressive.\u00a0 It would not have been hard to get lost as I discovered when I started to do my own exploring.\u00a0 As it was three dimensional and small poky little passageways between openings I got disorientated very quickly.<\/p>\n

We arrived in Cappadocia and quickly saw the rock houses.\u00a0 Truly amazing conical shape rocks where people had hollowed out to live.\u00a0 You have to see them to believe them.\u00a0 Some had a mushroom top on.\u00a0 The government has now\u00a0 stopped people living in them but there are hundreds all over the place.\u00a0 As we stopped and had only been out of the bus 2 minutes it started to hail.\u00a0 If Gokce need away to get folk on the bus quick this was it.\u00a0 People literary ran for the shelter of the bus as the hail quite hurt.<\/p>\n

Because of the weather we headed for a rug co-op that we had scheduled for Saturday and were shown the intricacies of rug making and of cause got the opportunity to purchase the bargain of a lifetime.\u00a0 Doug and Ngaire succumbed so it was our turn to laugh.<\/p>\n

Off to the hotel and some wines while some of the group went to a Whirling Dervishes show.\u00a0 At US$40 per person we gave it a miss.\u00a0 Apparently it was very spiritual according to some when they came back. Dinner was good and back to the room as Margaret & I need to be in reception at 4.40am tomorrow as we are going to do the Hot Air Balloon ride in the morning weather permitting.\u00a0 Yahoo.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Friday 20th \u2013 Day 7: Konya – Cappadocia Today is the halfway mark on our tour with 6 days to go.\u00a0 We are not counting day 1 & 14 as I don\u2019t consider them as tour days. We have left … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hailes.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hailes.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hailes.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hailes.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hailes.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=125"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.hailes.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":127,"href":"https:\/\/www.hailes.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125\/revisions\/127"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hailes.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hailes.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hailes.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}