The roses open from a bud in the morning and are ragged remnants of flower by evening. The extra demands of all our visitors put a strain on the water supply and every other day the taps run dry. Or at least this is how it was in 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002… Cue July 2009. None of you will need any reminder from me of the thunderstorms that drenched the country last week. In İstanbul, they were strong enough to blot out visibility from one side of the Bosporus to the other, and in some parts of the country they brought flooding so severe that lives were lost in seconds. In comparison, our sufferings here in Göreme were chickenfeed, although they were unexpected enough to leave us gasping.
The thing is that living in caves has its quirks which have to do with the fact that we're living in naked nature. Sure, we've put in the electricity, the ADSL lines and the sewerage, but the fact remains that our walls are not made of concrete over which water flows to an easy exit. No, with a cave-house you have to accept that you are living in an outsize sponge that soaks up water with enthusiasm, only to spit it out again once it becomes saturated. Leaks spring up everywhere, so last week was one in which people found themselves scrambling around to find all the bowls and buckets that they'd stowed away in spring, assuming that they wouldn't be needed again until November at the earliest.
These unexpected leaks and the associated rockfall were bad enough, but as anyone will know who has ever visited a show cave, damp rock has its own very specific and rather pungent odor, so now all our homes smell musty in the bargain. This is particularly peeving as we usually assume that we can use the bone-dry summer months to air the caves like laundry ready for the next winter soaking.
Of course, there are a couple of upsides to all this excitement. Not only are our water sources holding up nicely this year, which means fewer tankers trundling up to bring relief to the hotels, but we don't even need to draw on them to keep the gardens looking green, which hopefully means more in reserve for winter, too.
There's also a faintly comical side to the unseasonal storms. We shouldn't laugh, but we can hardly help the wry smiles as we spot some of our visitors rushing past in flimsy summer shorts and T-shirts, and “I hope you packed a sweater” is not a sentence we normally expect to hear dropping from the lips of tour guides at any time from mid-June to mid-September. It's small comfort as we tip the buckets of gritty, rock-sieved water down the toilet and ask ourselves if this is the tawdry reality of climate change, but of course, by next week the sun will be blasting down again, and we'll be back to moaning about how hot it is.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
