Cappadocia - Day Two

We wake up early and go for a walk specifically to try to see the hot air balloons that are so famous in Cappadocia. As soon as we walked out of the hotel they were easy to see. Scores of them filled the sky and in the pre dawn haze they were particularly beautiful and other worldly. I dragged Willy around for an hour or so, taking photo's of the phenomenon that we were witnessing. Willy counted eighty-six - several had landed by this point, so it would have been close to one hundred at it's busiest. Insane!

On our return journey we stopped in at one of the bus company offices and bought our onward tickets. We chose a ten pm trip to Antalya - a ten hour ride. It was cheap, much, much cheaper than an airfare and saved us a night in a hotel so ya know, we figured that we could suck it up.

We got back to our hotel absolutely knackered, climbed back into bed for a quick nap... And woke up at four minutes to ten am - our check out time. Shit! As we raced through re packing our bags Willy tried to brush his teeth and discovered that there was no water. Odd. Oh well, wasn't like we had time anyway. At three minutes past ten (we are super fast) we emerge into the lobby/lounge/dining area where a male guest is going out of his mind, yelling at our hosts because he wants a shower. They hand him a bottle of water, telling him he's too late, all of the hotels turn off their water during the day (lesson relearned re showering at night). It gets worse. We grab our breakfast an disappear off to the rooftop garden thing to eat where I spend half of breakfast fending off a stray cat. By the time we re enter the main area things have cooled off dramatically. We arrange to leave our bags there for the day and head off to find adventure.

Any idea of adventure gets abandoned fairly quickly as the temperature climbs steeply. The idea of walking in forty something degrees makes us want to cry (following yesterday's efforts I have developed a minor heat rash - so gross) and we instead make a beeline for the only (?!) pool in town. It's at another hotel and we pay a huge amount to utilise it - we don't care though, we need to submerge ourselves in water for a while, and we are a looong way from the beach.

We hang out poolside for hours, ordering water and hamburgers from the hotel kitchen, reading books,  etc. Then the sky opens and our forty something degree day becomes a washout with a huge amount of rain. A few minutes later the HAIL starts - where did that even come from?! I get changed and on our way out we get nabbed by a man who works for the hotel, he is very nice and we can't say no when he invites us in for coffee and cake. We sit chatting with him for a long time, and before we leave he gifts us a little Cappadocia snow globe. It's all rather lovely. After retrieving our bags from the hotel, we return to gift him several little greenstone necklaces for himself and his girls.

There's nothing we can face doing in the insane heat, so we end up in a restaurant where we have good internet for the first time in Cappadocia and some shade. There's also really good food and beer, we're pretty happy with this and hang out there until it's time to get the bus.