Cappadocia
Cappadocia is a region in the centre of Turkey where very strange forces indeed have shaped the local rocks into bizarre formations. All the tourist guide books describe the surroundings as 'moon scapes', which is a good start for a description but not because the formations in any way resemble the moon; it's just that they look absolutely nothing like anything else on Earth. I spent nearly a week in Cappadocia staring at the rocks, trying to put into words just how cool it really is. But I can’t even begin to describe how the rocks look. Go see for yourselves .

What I can tell you, though, is what I did. The first day we were there we took a tour provided by our pension around some of the outlying valleys of Cappadocia. The first stop was a panoramic lookout over the Goreme valley, where we were staying. With the amazing view as her backdrop, Serap the guide started the day with seemingly knowledge facts about how these incredible rocks were formed. There was something about volcanoes, something about different varieties of rock, something about different forms of erosion, and a whole lot of empty nodding coming from yours truly. A few days later, another pension owner attempted to explain the formations. Her explanations were a little more fantastic: volcanoes sent rocks flying through the air and ash swirled around in gales, which all somehow resulted in the creation of some fantastically phallic objects. But the explanations still made no sense to me. If someone had started talking about valleys being formed by the scarred belly of a giant rainbow serpent, it would make just as much sense to me.

Kaymakli underground city
It’s not all weird-arse rocks formed by nature, though. We humans played our part as well. The next stop on our tour was the Kaymakli underground city. Various oppressed people through the ages took advantage of the very soft and malleable rock to carve out enormous labyrinths over generations to hide from the bad guys. The rock was so soft that it crumbled off the walls under just a little pressure from my hands. Having the house come apart in your hands is not the most reassuring phenomenon to occur tens of metres underground, but it did mean that the locals could build the cities in years rather than days.

I was amazed at not only the scale of the city (eight storeys underground) but also how complete and ordered the towns were: animals were kept at the top levels so they were easier to move in and out and didn’t stink up the entire place; and most houses above ground had their own entrance to the city that could be sealed off with a massive circular rock, which looks like nothing but the door to Bilbo Baggins’ house. This door, though, wasn’t made of the soft local rock – it was carved out of harder stone elsewhere and dragged behind horses to the underground city.

Don’t get the wrong impression about the city though – it wasn’t a builder’s kit construction with straight lines and nice corners. The floors were uneven, the corridors were tiny, the ceilings would slope down suddenly and invisibly to smack me on the head and, perhaps coolest of all, windows at the top of one room would peek into the floor of another room. Passage between rooms would start with you doubled over carefully descending a slipperly floor until you find yourself somehow climbing a ladder. I was truly thrilled by the surroundings. The second we got some free time to explore, I sprinted away from the group to lose myself in the rooms and passages, like a five year old. It was great.

Leave it to a Canadian, though. About halfway through the tour, maybe 30m below the ground, Susan from just south of Toronto asks the big question: are there any earthquakes in Cappadocia? I had safely packaged away that little beauty deep down somewhere, but here it was for the group to consider in a tense moment. Happily, Serap dispensed with the uncertainty, informing us that there is no history of earthquakes around these parts. My relief was somewhat tempered by her encyclopaedic recitation of Turkey’s recent history in earthquakes. Just in case you were wondering, there have been a few. I managed to continue the tour only by reassuring myself that if there had been earthquakes in the last millennia or so, there would actually no longer be an underground city for me to be standing in. And since the past was safe, I figured the next 20 minutes were pretty low risk. My panic thereby relieved, I turned to the more immediate task of paying out the Canadian who asked the question.
After emerging from the underground city, feeling just a little bit Indiana Jones, we went to another cunning use of the local rocks – a monastery built inside a mountain. Apart from being above ground and thereby better lit, the construction of the monastery was pretty similar to the underground city. That is to say, extremely cool. There was one unique attraction: one side of the hill had somehow fallen away (probably an earthquake, I thought), leaving some of the innards of the monastery exposed. Walls (and floors) of rooms had fallen away, leaving dramatic and breath-taking room-sized views out into the valley.

What struck me about both the city and the monastery is that while they are made in completely foreign environments out of foreign materials for, well, a bunch of foreigners, the residents still built exactly what we would build today: schools, kitchens, churches and even wineries. (Let’s face it, you’re living underground hiding from Attila the Hun. You’re going to need a nice merlot to sleep well.) The thought of kids screaming about not wanting to go to school -- inside a mountain – was truly fantastic.

Valley of the fairy chimneys
The next day, Amanda and I hired cool-as-it-gets Peugot scooters and hooned around to some of the closer sights. Easily the most memorable was the Valley of the Fairy Chimneys, the site of those very phallic formations I showed you before. We drove past the valley first to some lookouts to capture that Kodak moment. Then we went back down, parked the Pugs and after getting some helpful pointers about which formations are the best to sketch from a bored machine-gun totting dude in a uniform, we went exploring.

It’s hard to explain the beauty of the rock formations, which is why I didn’t before. At a certain time of day, when the sun casts longer shadows, when you’re in the right mood and when the rocks are formed just so, the effect is incredible. I could look at them for hours, as though I was stoned, always appreciating new aspects. Come back to the same place tomorrow and all you’ll see is some funny looking rocks.