We first went to the castle of Uchisar, first occupied by the Hittite people around 2000 BC who carved it out using iron tools. The small windows were for shooting arrows at their enemies and the large windows were for pouring out hot oil. People are not allowed inside because it is too full of booby traps to be safe!
Next we went to a former cave monastery of Goreme. Early Christians hid from the Romans here in the first century AD. There are frescas here from around 1100. It was in use until 1923, when secularism became the rule in Turkey.
In the afternoon, we went hiking around an area with mushroom shaped "chimneys" (rock formations).
We stopped at a pottery workshop and weaving co-op. The Turkish rugs were beautiful, and it was great to see women working at the loom (where they are employed by the government and receive free health care, which most citizens do not have, as we were told by our guide), but I wasn't ready to spend hundreds to lug around a rug for the next week and a half, so I left rug-less.
We also visited "imagination valley," where if you just squint your eyes, you can make out a camel, a penguin, and other figures out of the irregularly shaped rocks. Allie and I were laughing because we had had practice with this last night. One of our waiters at dinner taught us how to make Turkish coffee and then read each other's fortunes out of the remnants left on the sides of one's mug. Allie sure has a great imagination so she was seeing dolphins, roses, boats, and other figures that fortunately portended a nice, happy future.
Tonight we board an overnight bus to Fethiye, the coast!
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