Dec 2021 - Jan 2022
TAEcation all I ever wanted
TAEcation all I ever needed
[Sung to vacation by the go go go’s]
The plague year has been long and it was super great to get out and about to see the world. That little song snippet was our own little anthem the past few months as we were excited for the trip.
Cappadocia
Kat and I started our trip off to Turkey with a bang! We met our old friend Tae Hi Yoo in Cappadocia, specifically the village of Goreme, singing the jingle above. An army veteran and current grad student, he spent the pandemic saving money from LA’s silly high housing prices by traveling the world while doing his masters degree online. No we were / are not jealous, you're jealous.
That was Tae’s second time to Cappadocia, a land famous in antiquity for its horses. The name means “land of beautiful horses” in ancient Persian. It also happens to be his last stop on his travels around the world, the subject of a book in development, so we were very lucky to see him before his triumphant return to Los Angeles!
The Cappadocia region was an ancient home for troglodytes, a fancy term for cave dwellers. Most of the cave houses have been converted to cave hotels since tourism is about half the local economy per our guide, the other half being agriculture. There’s even an underground city that housed over 5000 Christians from persecution from the Arabic invaders during the Byzantine era.
The area is famous for its hot air balloon rides and extremely instagram-able viewpoints, boasting fairytale like volcanic chimneys, houses carved into the ash walls and heart shaped frames for your photo. It’s even more beautiful with a little bit of snow on the ground in the winter, though that comes with the cost of bone chilling cold.
To be honest I wasn’t super excited about the prospect of a hot air balloon ride. Being forced to stand still in frigid weather for an hour? Sure there’d be beautiful views though that type of passive super touristy experience often doesn’t appeal to me. The hot air balloon ride came highly recommended though from several friends, including the immortal Tae Hi Yoo.
So how was it? Yes the weather was frigid -- a cool minus seven degrees Celsius. And yes the views were beautiful. But boy was I wrong about the overall experience. It’s hard to convey how magical that mode of flight is. Words really don’t do it justice. Really the only way I can try to share the experience is with this fun clip from the extremely underrated movie *The Adventures of Baron Von Munchausen* (1988).
We ended up watching the balloons every day we were there and riding them one day. Winter is definitely shoulder season and there’s still an ongoing pandemic so we avoided the crowds. There were a few less balloons, around seventy rather than the summer peak of over two hundred. They were still extremely beautiful. See below for a fun little amateur time lapse video of the hot air balloons I recorded on my almost ancient iPhone 8.