Yuksel Hotel Goreme

... bed. The first night Samsung found out about Manu's evil plans and threw the cat out of the room. The last night we spent in Göreme Manuel camouflaged the kitten with his hand. He was not able to camouflage the cat's purring though, so he pretended to have some digesting problems.
However the night was quite fine until the cat became active and Manuel was happy because he could watch Jonas and Helmut throwing the cat from their bed over to ...

... list too.

Last night was the end of Ramadan, so no more canon firing when it is time to eat in the evening and no more drummers beating the streets at 3.30am to wake people up to eat in the mornings. We shall kind of miss it.

However, of all of the many highlights of this journey so far, this morning we arose at 5am to take a hot air balloon trip across Cappadocia. So amazing that words fail us, perhaps the pictures will help.

... and began to make deep growling "monster noises" which made people jump or nervously run away. The pinnacle of this was when a huge tour group came through and Tom was roaring so loudly the group could not hear their guide. Lindsey, Brittany and Sarah were laughing so hard they had to hold on to each other, and the wall, to remain standing.

Finally, a Swedish girl bravely entered the tunnel only to be chased out by Tom. She did not seem to think it was quite as ...

... overlooking Goreme which provided cool scenic panoramic views before we headed to the underground settlement of Derinkuyu (They were used in the star wars movies). These settlements it is thought were used by the early Turks as defensive positions, in times of trouble they would shut themselves in their self-contained hideaways underground until they could return topside. Derinkuyu is one of 36 underground settlements open to the public of the 110 or so they have ...

... his own camera. Not a big deal... someone even requested a picture of us at the Tokapi Palace! Maybe the Egyptian Bazaar was cheaper than the Grand Bazaar, but it was nowhere as big and impressive. Frankly, it was down right disappointing. I got some little stuff and that was about it. I met up with Laura at Coffee World, a pretty nice and spacious coffee shop. I don't drink coffee ...

... At 8pm, she took her bus to south Turkey, where she is staying in tree houses for a few days! I picked up lots of presents at the Bazaars, but found out later that the price of shipping would be about the same as buying a plane ticket home, dropping my gifts off, and coming back. Instead, I bought a $15 backpack to carry the extra load. Most of the other travelers I come across have backpacks at least 3X the size as mine. I have backpack envy. I took tons of ...

... those sultans really lived liked kings (ha ha). The palace had it all in its hay day including a harem home to about 15 or so ladies. There were some of the jewels and things on display when we went and I saw the biggest diamond I had ever seen, it was massive, roughly the size of a golf ball, and there was no security sensors or anything just some dude standing next to it but he looked pretty disinterested so you could say security was pretty lax there. After ...

... steaming thermos. So began a trend whereby those in seats 1 through 8 were fully serviced and catered but the remaining passengers only got a nice hot cup of go and get stuffed. This is no simple exaggeration - there was a fight in the rear as we neared Tabriz and we tell from the cuts under his eye that our co-driver was a key protagonist and possibly the instigator. But he returned straight from the melee to offer us more tea. That's service. Indeed, we ...

... and China. It was during this conversation that we learnt that the visas are a nightmare to organise (particularly for Russia) and that there were no places with their company until end of August. Time to have a rethink. We learnt another lesson here that we shouldn't book flights until we had everything in place and more information. Just as we finished on the phone to London we bumped into Fahad and Adeel (the guys we went to the Groove ...

... grain and other things underground, the population simply packed up above and took their chickens, cows, horses and pigs down with them where they could live comfortably for a few months at a time. Giant circular stones sealed them inside and a clever system of smoke dispersal meant they could cook and the invaders wouldn't see any signs of it. In the event that the invaders managed to locate and open one of the rock doors, a system of booby-traps meant that they would be picked off ...