Cappadocia, Turkey

I always seem to reach a point on vacation where the vacation is moving faster than the blog.Now that We've been home a few days, I'm catching up on unfinished blogs, including this one..

On the way to Cappadocia,  Alice and Carnot stop to show us this old caravanserai. These were built about every 40 miles on the "Silk Route" between China, Rome, Constantinople and other trading points. There is some restoration work going on here but it looks like the project is going to last awhile. 40 miles is about what you can do on a camel in a day.

The "Silk Route" was actually a network of linked land and water routes.The entrances to the caravanserais were built to be large enough for a camel and its burden.

This particular Caravanserai could accommodate 800 camels and lots of people. It's a well built fortress. A caravanserai, or khan, or fondouk, also Han (in Turkish) are also known as caravansary, caravansera, or caravansara in English. Carnot tells me that travellers could stay in these for three days with no charge.

Alice and Mrs. Phred explore the Caravabserai.

We spend the next two nights in our cave rooms, which are carved out of the soft volcanic rock found everywhere in the Cappadocia region. Cave hotels are very big here. Carnot and Alice volunteer to take the room below.

Mrs. Phred and I sleep here in our cave.

Roses at our cave hotel in Cappadocia.

These cave houses were inhabited until 1952. At that point the government provided newer housing for the cave dwellers and turned this all into a major tourist attraction.

These young people are taking wedding pictures in the world Heritage Park that we visit in the afternoon.

Cappadocia rock formations with windows and doors and pigeon roosts carved by our humanancestors...they prized the pigeon guano for fertilizer....perhaps they sometimes ate the pigeons?

Camel.

Alice and Mrs. Phred walk barefoot in the salt lake between Ankara and Cappadocia.