Cappadocia Caves and Moped Madness

James and I are just now wrapping up our time in Goreme, Turkey, which turned out to be a ton of fun. The first day we wandered around and checked out the landscape, which I can best describe as looking like the surface of some crazy alien moon. We also checked out the Open Air Museum, which is a series of dwellings and churches carved into huge rock spires by early Christians about 1,900 years ago. Speaking of caves, we spent both our nights here in a cave! Several hostels around here have converted some of the ancient caves to be a bit more comfortable by modern standards, and it was actually a pretty comfortable room. As for our second day...we got scooters! We were intending to take a guided tour, but we slept in and missed the bus. Alas... If I may paraphrase a man wiser than I, "When fate makes you rent a motorcycle, you rent a motorcycle". Our mission: We found out on Thursday that we're only about 100km from where they shot all the Tattooine cave house scenes from Star Wars, A New Hope. We needed some sort of destination to justify the riding of scooters, so we figured what better place than the home planet of Luke Skywalker? Destination: Ihlara Valley. We had 8 hours of scooter time,so we picked the farthest point on our map that we could make it to in 4 hours, and drove in a giant loop. It was an incredible experience. There were times when we would drive from huge, rolling hills to massive, flat fields of wheat, to winding mountain passes to super-steep valleys all within the space of an hour or two. As a bonus, we hardly saw another soul the entire time. It was like we had the Turkish countryside to ourselves... well, ourselves and several goats. Also, one really angry dog. He chased us for a good half kilometer at 50km/h looking quite angry/starving. It was at that point I became extremely grateful we opted for the "Sport" scooter models, which eventually outlasted the dog. The few Turkish children we did see all seemed to get a kick out of a couple of OBVIOUSLY foreign guys driving around a hundred kilometres from the nearest tourist outpost. Most of the waved and honked their bike horns, and one kid tried to race me down the street on his bike! He was pretty fast for an 8 year old, but I totally kicked his ass. Time to go inquire about getting some transportation to Istanbul tonight. I can't say I'm particularly excited about another 10+ hour overnight bus ride, but at least the Turkish bus lines know how to treat their clients. What would be a $200 ticket in Canada is closer to $20 here, and they have cabin attendants who provide complimentary coffee, tea, water and snack cakes for the duration of the trip! Of course, this means there are also frequent bathroom breaks, but it's a nice touch nonetheless.