Monday we got up after sleeping in and got ready for our Cappadocia green tour. There are two main tours that all the companies do, the green tour and the red tour. The red one covers the open air museum which we did on Monday, so it was pretty straight forward for us to go on the green one. We booked it through the hostel, and it showed a little bit of diversity throughout the region. It was a long 8 hour day in a mini-bus, but I had a good time. We started off heading up to the start of the Pigeon Valley to a lookout there with all the fairy chimneys.
Our next stop was to the Derinkuyu Underground City. This was one where people didn’t live there permanently, but where they’d go to hide out from invaders and attackers, letting them pass by, then resuming their lives on the surface. Typically spending less than a month underground at a time. Everything was hand carved out of the rock, and it goes down 8 levels. It was even connected to another underground city through an 8km tunnel. They used large stone doors that were set from the inside so that the invaders couldn’t get in. They also had a well that was off a deep aquifer that wasn’t connected to any wells on the surface and had many ventilation holes. There were a bunch of people in there and things got a little too claustrophobic for Nathan, but Kim and I persevered through to the bottom.
Next we went to the Ilhara Valley. It started from an earthquake, and was expanded from water erosion and a small creek running down it. There were 400 steps to the valley floor, where we saw a cave church, then did a 4km hike down the valley to a restaurant for lunch.
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