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From Göreme I wandered over to Ürgüp, five miles to the east. A town of about 18,000, Ürgüp has a reputation of attracting a more up-scale clientele than Göreme. There are plenty of chi-chi boutique hotels but I finally found a fairly modest but extremely comfortable guesthouse ran by a friendly young couple. “Welcome to our home,” they said, and it actually sounded as if they meant it. My room was an actual cave lined with stone.   My hotel in Ürgüp (click on photos for enlargement)  My hotel was on a quiet back street, but the downtown square was just a three minute walk away.  Downtown square of Ürgüp, with Temenni Hill beyond. The mausoleum of  Kilicharslan IV can be seen on the summit. Mausoleum on the top of Temenni Hill.  A signpost appears to indicate that this is the tomb of Seljuqs of Rum ruler Kilicharslan IV, who fled to  Ürgüp after the Mongols captured much of Cappodocia in 1243. He hid in the caves here until Seljuqs who had sided with...

Update : Mormons have now jumped on the eschatological bandwagon: “They predict the full moon Sept. 28 is the next sign the world is ending.” See  Why Some Mormons Are Preparing For Doomsday . OK, that does it. I am maxing out all eight of my credit cards before September 28. I guess most of you are making plans to observe the Supermoon / Lunar Eclipse coming up on September 28. As you know, that night the moon will be only 221,753 miles from earth, the closest it gets during all of 2015. The average distance of the moon from the earth is 238,000 miles. The moon will not get this close to earth again until November 14, 2016. It will appear 30 percent brighter and 14 percent larger than normal. But the Supermoon alone is not the big deal. The big deal is that there will also be a total lunar eclipse the same night. A Supermoon and a lunar eclipse at the same time is a rare event. It happened only four times in the twentieth century: in 1910, 1928, 1948, and 1982. It will not a happe...

Whenever I strike up a conversation with anyone in Göreme, the first question they ask is, “have you taken a balloon ride?” l quickly discovered that balloon rides are the main reason people come here. I talked to three people, two women and a man in their mid-twenties from Belgium, who had flown to Istanbul in the morning and then taken the 5:10 p.m. flight to Kayseri. From the  Kayseri airport they took a bus to Göreme, where they stayed the night. They got up the next morning at 4:30 for a balloon flight and after the balloon flight went on the so-called Red Tour of the Cappadocia region, leaving Göreme at 9:30 a.m. and returning at 6:30 p.m. Then they took  the bus back to Kayseri, where they caught the 11:00 p.m. flight back to Istanbul. They planned to stay two days in Istanbul for a little shopping and sight-seeing and then fly back to Belgium. They claimed that the entire trip was planned around the balloon flight. Seeing as how everyone else was taking balloon rides i...

Having sated, at least for the time being, my interest in Seljuq architecture, I wandered off to the town of Göreme, thirty-two miles to the west of Kayseri . To get there I took the city bus to the Kayseri airport, and then caught one of the many, many shuttle buses to Göreme and nearby towns. Including myself there were twelve people on my shuttle bus. Eleven of them were from China. For a second I thought I was back in Beijing . The bus took about forty-five minutes to get to Göreme. A ticket cost 20 lira ($6.65) Göreme is in the middle of a region famous for its phantasmagorical landscapes carved from volcanic rock, cave houses and hotels, old Greek churches, and balloon rides. Göreme reportedly has a permanent population of only 2,000, and it is safe to say almost everyone is somehow connected with tourism (I have been told that a lot of people who work here actually live in nearby villages). The town consists entirely of hotels, restaurants, travel agencies, carpet stores, gift s...