MikePadgett.com

Göreme

— Leaving the city for the desert: the rocky landscapes of Göreme, a town in Central Anatolia that has become a popular destination for backpackers.”

The passenger demographic on this flight from Istanbul to Nevşehir is mixed. Almost everyone here is actually bound for the town of Göreme, about 30km from the airport. Arguably more visitors to Göreme arrive by bus, for reasons of budget or greater leisure.

I’m standing outside the single building that handles both arrivals and departures at Nevşehir. Despite prior arrangements, nobody has come to collect me. During the cab ride that I’m eventually forced to take, I get a good look at my surroundings. Rolling, dry hills uniformly the colour of muscovado sugar, interrupted occasionally by little vineyards – most producing raisins rather than wine – and orchards of figs and apricots. Staples of Central Anatolian cuisine.

We roll through Nevşehir itself, a city of empty, forlornly hopeful boulevards. Tower blocks with no relationship to the landscape. Twenty-six thousand people live there and yet I see only one: an eastern cowboy with long, slick hair wearing denims and boots. A mobile phone in a holster and car keys in hand.

The morning is already hot when I arrive in Göreme to a suitably warm profusion of welcomes and apologies. Host and driver take care to settle up out of earshot, the Turkish way, and I take breakfast overlooking the old village. Basic, comfortable cave houses packed in nor particular fashion around monstrously stout needles of rock. These hoodoo headlines grab all of the viewer’s attention, reducing the village itself to a footnote.

People were attracted here millenia ago by the harsh, alien landscape and they’re still coming today. Only the religions have changed. Paganism, christianity, islam and now commercialism. This latter explains the rustic tracks marked by gleaming street signs. The surprisingly sensitive upscaling of certain cave dwellings. The mess of downtown: carpets and trinkets and pide and carpets. Restaurants with photographic menus. Freestanding cash machines and a busy bus station with transport to Malatya, Erzurum, and ‘dangerous’ Diyarbakır. There are curious Turks from the big cities. Middle-class, middle-aged ballooners. Young, unshaven backpackers. Toe dippers and veterans.

Open Air Museum

I take a tip from my host and decide to visit the Open Air Museum during lunchtime. The tour groups are busy nosebagging during the hottest hours and I can expect not to have to queue for the churches.

Ascetics came to live here at least as early as the seventh century, praying to their god and depending on the goodwill of locals for their sustenance. They cut niches, shrines and then whole dwellings into the rock needles they found, painting symbols and then sophisticated frescoes. Finally, the metaphor of isolation was discarded and small groups of faithful formed monastic collectives named after saints.

The big draw today are the well-preserved paintings in the churches (kilise) at the top end of the museum. Climate and ignorance have effectively protected these artworks for many centuries and, apart from a certain amount of later defacement for religious reasons, the colours and compositions are vivid enough for their meanings and symbolism to be clear to visitors.

Night falls and the wind rises in Göreme. I’m rather tired and mindful of an early start tomorrow. I seek out Café Safak among the jumble of gift shops and samey restaurants. Ali the owner is friendly and keeps house while his wife does the hot, hard work in their tiny kitchen. At some point, a young oriental girl begins to wait on tables, the first of numerous employed in Göreme’s tourist trade. After some lentil soup and filled bread pancakes (gözleme), I head back to my cave for a bit of sleep.

Hamam

After my epic walk the following day, I take a nap and then do a Turkish hamam up at the Kelebek. This is not a strictly authentic experience (young oriental girls instead of brutal, burly Turkish men) but I’m not complaining. The process goes as follows:

I strip down to a cloth around my waist (peştemal) and enter a long, warm room with a marble platform in the centre. Around the sides are niches with warm water taps and bowls used for the soap massage which we’ll come to in a moment.

I enter the sauna in one corner and barely get started chatting to a Canadian couple when one of the girls collects me for my soap massage. I lay face down out on the marble platform and she pours on bowlfuls of warm water, then lathers my feet, legs, torso, back and arms in thick suds. She massages each bit and pours on more water. Turn over, then rinse and repeat. Finally, I stand over by a niche and get another couple of swills of water and we’re done. The best sensation is actually having these bowls of water poured over me.

I hang out in a quiet room and find it a little cold after the tepidarium I’ve just left. Somebody is coughing violently elsewhere in the hamam: obviously they can’t take the steam!

Pretty soon I’m being led away again by a different girl, this time to a treatment room with the obligatory harp and dolphin soundtrack: sort of melodic but lacking in musical structure. I’m here for reflexology, thinking it will be great after 28km on the trail. In fact, it turns out to be rather painful, despite having stretched earlier on my return to the cave. In reflexology, every part of the foot relates to the health of an organ or other part of the body. The way this is going, I reflect as I push my face hard into the doughnut headrest, I must be dying all over!

Back to the quiet room and after due relaxation, I change and leave for dinner, feeling pretty great after all.

That evening, at the terribly named Fat Boys’, I meet a couple of backpackers from Québec and Milan who hooked up somewhere in Turkey about ten days earlier. We swap stories, drink coffee and they share a nargile. I envy them somewhat, since tomorrow I will have to go back to Nevşehir, but in the grand scheme of things we’re all just passing through.