The first day, I went on a bus tour to a region that was too far to walk to and included an underground city. It turns out that most of the pictures they show of the underground city were taken in areas where the tours are not allowed to go, so it was somewhat disappointing. I met a couple in which the guy was Portuguese and the gal was Polish. They referred to themselves as the "Poltuguese Couple" and I learned from them, among other things, that in Poland, western TV shows are dubbed by one person. All the voices in every show are done by just one guy and he doesn't vary his voice at all depending on the character. The first few words are said by the original character in English and then the dub guy pipes in over top with the translation.
The next day I wanted to get as far away from tour groups as I could, so I wandered around the various valleys on my own and scrambled around on the rocks. My Poltuguese friends went up on a hot air balloon, but it sounded to me like there would be too many people packed into the basket for it to be enjoyable.
Navigating my wanderings of the valleys was a bit challenging because there were hardly and signs and the few signs that were around were misleading. I followed one trail that supposedly led to a valley, but instead, the trail just turned into a creek. Shade is hard to come by in Turkey, so my hikes were quite sunbaked. At one point, I was looking for a famous place called "Love Valley". I asked a fellow hiker and he pointed me towards some building with a starting point sign that I never found. Instead, I ended up wandering aimlessly, encountering a group of farm workers resting in the only shade as far as the eye could see, and then scrambling up a steep hillside full of pricker bushes to be back to the road. I finally came across a sign that pointed to some place that I'd never heard of, but also had the words "Love Valley" scratched into it. I walked in the direction it pointed, but still wouldn't have found the valley if it hadn't been for a Turkish guy selling freshly squeezed juice by the side of the road, right next to the unmarked trail turnoff. I guess they don't bother to mark the trails because hardly anyone follows them. Everyone is on the bus tours. When I finally made it into the narrow valley, I could see the tour-goers on the cliff above taking pictures. So, maybe I'm in a few photo albums now.
Cappadocia isn't particularly pretty. It has a very strange and unique feeling to it. Apparently, George Lucas filmed a scene from the original Star Wars movie here. As my Poltuguese friends put it, "This place feels like the end of the world".