9:45 AM
Pamukkale, en route to Ephesus
I am pleasantly shocked at how much is powered by solar energy. From tiny villages to the biggest cities, solar panels on every rooftop, some more conspicuous than others, sitting beside water tanks warming in the sun. It's impressive. Almost too impressive... Must be a law, or an ordinance, or maybe it's actually cheaper.
This is fast becoming the "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead" trip. The past two days have been packed sunrise to sunset.
Back to Cappadocia...
- First night, dinner at S.O.S., and it was so great. Tons of food for 10 TYL. Awesome bread, salad, crazy good fries, and our entreé, the "pot kebab": Veggies (for us) cooked in a sealed clay pot that we hammered open at our table.
Terrible photo because I forgot my flash
We talked with the son of the restaurant's owner for a while... Or rather, he talked, we listened. Not in an annoying way, he was just so full of energy and excitement about everything it was hard to interject. I keep saying it, but everyone is so unbelievably nice here! And not just helpful nice, but genuinely interested and funny nice.
- Next morning, 16 May, we're up at 5am for our balloon ride. I have literally been waiting my entire life to ride in a hot air balloon. Mama, boyfriend, best friend... All scared of heights. Our ride took us out to the balloon-port, a big field near the UFO Museum.
(Wonder if that's where some of the content comes from... Mr. UFO Caretaker peers groggily out his window upon waking, his vision not yet focused, he sees a huge, sailing orb in the sky....)
There were several other companies setting up shop, too. We were riding with Sultan, who had two balloons taking off that morning, lying on their sides filling with air. They just use giant fans to fill them! One was not filling so well. It was not ours. Our pilot — all balloon drivers are licensed pilots — was named Ishmael. Jolly guy. Our basket, or gondola, was packed, maybe 16 people, including a group of old Korean ladies who were all the same height, same hair, all wearing red.
That's my ass climbing into the basket
Didn't even feel the balloon take-off, just all of a sudden we were airborne, skimming the earth, clipping some trees. At one point I counted 21 balloons in the sky. Then we went higher and higher until the few people on the ground were mere specks. We were maybe 1000 meters? I'm not sure, unfortunately. In any case, it was like a live version of Google Earth, the way we zoomed in and out, sailing up and down, in and around valleys, even breezing past someone's bedroom window. Guess that's the risk you take when you live in a fairy chimney.
That's our hotel!
Balloon in the valley!
Landing was impressive, if only for the complete randomness of it. Because you're at the whim of the winds, you can never precisely plan your route, and certainly not your landing site, so when you see something good, you go for it. In our case, we dropped right down in the middle of a road, blocking traffic for a sec (one driver got out to take photos... I imagine a hot air balloon landing direct in front of your car is always a novel experience no matter how many float overhead on a daily basis). The ground crew travels around following you as close as possible, and they were right there when we set down. Ishmael lifted the balloon up again, and with a crazy sharp precision that trumps even my most spectacular parallel parks, sets the balloon basket snugly into the flatbed of the crew truck. See, the baskets are far too heavy to lift up, even after all us tourists crawl out, so they have to land it on a vehicle. Amazing.
After a successful flight, champagne toast! At 7 AM on no breakfast! All right! We got flight certificates.
Back at the hotel, exhilarated and exhausted, we packed in breakfast before jetting off for our 9-hour Cappadocia tour extravaganza. Yowz. Killing some time hanging with the house kittens (maybe a month old?) and the free internet. Oh, in addition to the solar energy, Turkey is completely wired! There's wi-fi all over this remote mountain town.
Tour tales to come.
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