Cappadocia

Cappadocia is a landscape that a volcano wrote and people finished: the ash of Erciyes and Hasan, hardened to tuff and carved by wind and water into the fairy chimneys, the cones and the ribbed valleys of Göreme, and then hollowed by monks, farmers and refugees into churches, dovecotes, houses and, at Derinkuyu and Kaymaklı, whole cities eight storeys underground where thousands could hide with their animals. Göreme, the village of cave hotels, has at its edge the Open-Air Museum, a monastic complex of rock churches — the Dark Church, Tokalı, the Apple, the Snake — painted in the tenth and eleventh centuries and a UNESCO site since 1985; around it the valleys — Rose and Red for the walking and the sunset, Love for the tallest chimneys, Pigeon under Uçhisar's castle rock, Zelve's abandoned village, Paşabağ's monks' chimneys, Devrent's imaginary animals; Avanos on the red river turns pots as it has since the Hittites; Ürgüp keeps the wine and the smart hotels; Ihlara, to the south-west, is a green canyon of churches walked in a day. And every clear dawn a hundred balloons rise over all of it, which is why the world comes.

The traveller flies into Kayseri or Nevşehir, sleeps in a cave room in Göreme or Uçhisar, and takes the balloon on the first calm morning — the four-thirty wake, the burner's roar, the ground falling away and the whole valley below in the pink light, an hour that is the reason for the trip; the Open-Air Museum after breakfast before the coaches; a valley on foot in the afternoon — Rose to Red, ending on the sunset ridge; the second day underground at Derinkuyu, then Avanos for the wheel and the river; the third, Ihlara's canyon or a horse through the Sword valley, and the whirling dervishes at Saruhan in the evening; and, always, a testi kebab cracked open at the table and a glass of the local wine on a terrace with the chimneys going gold.

The Guide's honesty: the balloons fly at the wind's discretion — perhaps two mornings in three in the good season, fewer in winter — so the traveller books the flight for the first morning and keeps the second in reserve, and pays for a licensed pilot and a smaller basket, which is worth it; Göreme is busy from April to October and its lanes are for walking; the underground cities are for those without claustrophobia; the tuff crumbles, and the ledges are looked at, not climbed; and a hundred balloons over the Rose valley at first light, seen from a basket or a rooftop with a tea in hand, is one of the sights of the Earth that photographs cannot spoil, which is why the Guide keeps this page in its morning light.