Up and down towards Cappadocia, and Turkish kindness

After visiting Hatay and Gaziantep, we decided it was finally time to turn our wheels to Cappadocia, the most instagrammable place in Turkey. Who hasn’t seen pictures of hot air balloons hovering over strange rock formations at sunset? Anyway, our first problem was to actually get there. As mentioned last week, we made it on to the plateau, but that doesn’t mean it’s all easy going up here. It’s a lot of climbing, with a steady speed of 6 to 8 km/h, only to rush down on the other side of the mountain and do it all again. But the views make it all worth it. Snowcapped mountain tops, little villages and the grey, brown and pale green colors of the barren hillsides. We saw the mighty Euphrates river. And power lines. Power lines everywhere. Campsites were easy to find, and in this time of year there is still plenty of water, but we think it might be a lot tougher in summer.

Being in the mountains also meant that the weather became more unpredictable. We literally would be putting on sunscreen and 20 minutes later getting our rain jackets out, since a thunderstorm would be rolling over the top of a mountain. Several times we had to scramble for shelter, as the rain came by horizontally and the wind was sweeping away road signs.

Luckily we made it to Göreme alive. Göreme is the “capital” of the Cappadocia region and normally crowded with tourists. Again here empty restaurants and hotels. No balloon flights, all due to the nation-wide lockdown until May 16th. It must be hard for the locals, but they still are as cheerful as ever as we cycle past. This leads us to….

The famous Turkish hospitality

Every single travelblog that covers Turkey will elaborate on this, and now it’s our turn. After more than 6 weeks in Turkey we can attest; every thing they say about the hospitality is true. Everywhere we get invited for cay. People stop us in the streets to have a chat (they are so curious!). They won’t let us pay for our breakfast. They come running after us with bottles of water after we left their restaurants. They honk and wave and encourage us when we are climbing. When we ask if it’s OK to camp somewhere, they immediately ask if we would like to come to their home. When we sit on a bench in front of their home, they’ll bring us tea. We basically can’t leave a place without having a tea.

One of the best stories was in our first week, when we were climbing a hill. A white van overtook us and stopped on top of the hill. A guy got out, sprinted to the back, opened the door and got out a plastic bag. When we reached him, panting and sweating, he handed the bag to us, said something in turkish, got back into his van and drove off. We were left, slightly bewildered, with a bag filled with 1 kg of chocolates.

The sad thing is that it also made us realize how uncommon this is in the Netherlands or Germany. We are ashamed to say that in the beginning our first thought whenever we were stopped by someone was: “what does this person want from me?”. It wouldn’t cross our minds to invite a complete stranger into our homes, especially if you can’t understand a word they are saying. It’s sad that this hospitality is not part of our culture. It’s even sadder to realize that once we’re back home, we’ll probably revert back to our old habits of suspicion and individuality.