Goreme Welcome

I don’t know about you, but whenever I travel to a place I’ve never seen before, I do quite a bit of research. Months before the actual trip, I start gathering info about the location I’m about to visit.

So it’s fair to say that I had a pretty good idea about what Cappadocia had to offer in terms of landscape and scenery. Still, there’s no website, no flickr set or YouTube clip that can prepare you for what you’re about to experience once you cross that last hill and descend into Goreme.

When we were about 20Km away from the destination, we decided to ditch the GPS (the directions were wrong anyway) and take the easiest road (even if maybe a bit longer), through Nevsehir. Once there, we finally saw the first road sign pointing to Goreme. Before then Uchisar.

Not only that, but we could also see the subtle change in landscape. More of the famous rock formations started showing up as we got closer to our destination. It was like nature left a large scale bread crumb trail for us to follow.

Goreme Road

As we were approaching Goreme, it became more and more difficult for me to focus on the road, as my eyes were constantly drawn to the amazing scenery. It all seemed so familiar, yet so new and exciting. Right before reaching Goreme, the rock citadel of Uchisar (highest town in Cappadocia and visible from miles away) unfolded before our eyes. The view (as you can see from the photo below) is spectacular!

Goreme Landscape

We finally reached the Goreme town center, which is an interesting combination of traditional restaurants, cafes, shops, travel offices and vehicle rental places (car, ATV, bike, etc.). We kept going and eventually found Taskonak, our “cave house” style hotel.

We were pretty beat after the 8h drive from Istanbul, so we took a shower, had some dinner on the terrace of Kelebek Hotel (they run Taskonak as well) and enjoyed the beautiful view, then went straight to bed. I could feel this was going to be a great vacation!