28 October - Sunday - Checkout, time to leave the pension. I drive up to the next town to see some of the landscape.
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| Tourists checking out the fairy towers |
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| Eye Tree |
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| Found a safe place to do some hiking where I couldn’t get lost. Still there was one place which required climbing and after a couple of attempts I gave up. Just wasn’t tall enough to get a firm purchase on the trail and didn’t want to risk falling 4 feet. |
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| No, I didn't try to climb these... |
Visted the Zelne Open Air Museum.
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| Note the footholds...ropes were used to climb up |
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Had 90 minutes to kill before driving back to Kayseri Airport so stopped in Avanos and looked at pottery.
Ended up buying Earl a gift -- a Hittite bull.
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| Demonstration of pottery making |
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| Out of the blue in the middle of nowhere...pops up McDonald's sign on the road to Kayseri |
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| Not all of Cappadocia is covered with fairy towers. A great deal of it is barren. Mt. Erciyes in the background. |
I had called the car rental company to let them know I was turning the car in at 6pm as I wanted to get back to the airport while it was still daylight. I showed up and started to worry when no one came by 6:15pm. Called again and the agent came right over and explained that there had been a time change and it was actually only 5:25 pm. Argh, Daylight savings time strikes again…even in Turkey. It was a long wait to catch my 8 pm flight to Istanbul.
Arrived at Istanbul airport and was waylaid by the commercial shuttle people before I get a chance to find the local bus to Tacsim. Well it’s 10:30 pm and who wants to deal with public transport when I don’t even know where the hotel is located off Tacsim. So divested of 50 Lira I arrive at 11pm at the hotel. Earl is there and said he didn’t get into Istanbul until 7pm, because of a 4 hour flight delay. He too had been subjected to the 50 Lira airport shuttle transportation fee as the local Havas bus only runs every 90 minutes to Tacsim. The Nippon hotel had run out of rooms so we ended up in the grand suite with the Jacuzzi.