URGUP, CAPPADOCIA, TURKEY

by Dan Winters (posted by his more techy savvy daughter)

 

  "Sometimes your only available transportation is a leap of faith" --  Margot Shepard

Turkey on the Rocks     

This Cappacocia region is a geologist's pornography. There are huge x-rated rock formations that are so stupendously weird that they are beyond words—designed by Tim Burton's production crew on acid or by Frank Zappa when he wasn't hungover. Trust me. Google Cappadocia, then book a trip. Just as weird, there are thousands of caves, dug and lived in by hundreds of thousands of Turks for centuries. What do you do with them now that condos have been invented? You are correct. Answer C: Make them into tourist hotels. We stayed in one. Our room was in a cave. It is the thing to do when you are in Urgup. It could not have been more stylish. It maybe is the coolest place we have ever stayed. Here is the irony. A cave's Achilles heel has always been that there are no windows, all the light and air has to come through the front door.  A belch stays with you for hours, a two day old open can of tuna for a season. We've all lived in stuffy holes like that in college. We have been avoiding them since.

 

 

 

The Turkish Bath       

We had to do it. There was a Turkish bath in Urgup. We had some time and it looked perfect considering it was built a couple of hundred years ago. We ordered the Traditional Bath, it cost $10 each for 45 minutes, we turned down the coffee scrub—it was another three bucks. It was 10 a.m. and we were the only customers, apparently in Urgup, bathing is an afternoon sport. It was a good thing because we didn't know what the procedure was and the manager did not

speak English. He gave each of us what was clearly a table cloth (I think my Mom had the same pattern. I can see the tin foil of the TV dinners on it). We got naked, wrapped the table clothes around us and were led to a big public bath area, fortunately empty. There was a 12 foot diameter, 2 foot tall tiled circle in the middle surrounded by benches. On the benches were marble cisterns with metal dog bowls in them.

The attendant instructed us to use the dog bowls to pour water on ourselves, then to lay down on the circle thing. We did, the circle was warm, the water was warm. The air was hot. As we laid there sweating, we had the same thoughts: 1. Hope a tour group doesn't show up, 2. This is exactly like August in Illinois. Three hours later (OK, fifteen minutes), we went to a joint massage room and met our masseurs. Carol's was a mid-thirties man wrapped in the same table cloth. He had some serious back hair, but it was well groomed. Mine was 55ish, pot-bellied with a smokers cough or maybe tuberculous, it was hard to tell. Nice guys. The first thing they did was to take a pot scrubber (that is what it felt like, could have been a piece of Astro Turf) and scraped the epidermis off most of our bodies. It was OK, we deserved it. The highlight of the Turkish bath gig is they pour all this luxurious soap foam on and rub it around. It feels great, kind of like a sponge bath when you were seven months old. Yeah, that good.

 

 

 

Erectile Dysfunction

Other than cave dwelling, hot air ballooning over the looney landscape at dawn is the Cappadocia experience. We read that in high season, there are over a hundred balloons flying a day, close to 1,500 white knuckled, jet lagged, partly hungover, camera-ladened tourists. The foreplay is van pick up from hotel at 4:45, blind ride to a field somewhere, wait while the staff erects the huge balloons. They start erection by blowing. Fans blow into a

large cavity. This causes the limp balloon to slowly rise until it is engorged, finally popping up firm and erect. I signed up twice but both times my balloon failed to complete the erection process. Carol assured me it was not my fault. It was the weather. I was unsatisfied.

In a display of marital-felity, Carol was there at both nonevents. She had nixed ballooning due to a fear of former sheep herders being in charge of safety. A gamer, she wanted to see the takeoff but the van driver refused to let her ride along. This, he explained, was due to corporate assholeness, showing that Turkey is progressing toward becoming a modern economic state. So she cabbed it, facing serial hurdles: There were a whole bunch of desolate, unlit takeoff sites. There was no record of which van went where, the cabbies only spoke Turkish, but did chain smoke, it was cave hotel dark, she hadn't had coffee yet and she had to go to the bathroom. Impressive. Like I said Carol is a gamer.