Either way, it was much too hot to move far from a fan, and sales of bottled water skyrocketed as the tourists struggled to keep up the sightseeing regardless.But Ramadan is upon us now, and all I can think of is the poor women who work as cleaners and bed-makers in the hotels. I would feel equally sympathetic to the men who work as builders except that in my heart of hearts I can see two scenarios developing. One, they stop work for the duration which means an end to the perpetual drilling and scraping (hooray!), or two, they start work immediately after breakfast and keep going through until midday (boo!).
The cleaners, on the other hand, have no such easy options. This is the height of the tourist season when there’s not a bed to be found in the most popular hotels. There will be no alternative then, but to keep going somehow, which means stripping all the beds and changing them between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. when the heat is at its most intense. After all, the tourists are hardly going to vacate their beds at 4 a.m. to make life easier for the staff, nor yet are newcomers going to wait until evening to be able to occupy their rooms.
Sixteen hours is an incredibly long time to go without water in this heat, and I fear for the consequences, really. The only way I could imagine going without liquid for that long is if I stayed very, very still and did very, very little indeed, preferably in an air-conditioned office. To the contrary, most of the cleaners and bed-makers will be rushing up and down the stairs that are an essential feature of the cave hotels. The only people even vaguely in my ideal position will be some of those working for the belediye (municipality), and even then I’m not sure about the AC.
“Will you be fasting?” I asked a friend who runs a popular restaurant and who spends the day carrying plates of food back and forth across the road from the kitchen to his tables.
“Of course,” he said. “It makes us more patient.”
From an outsider’s perspective that seems a tad unlikely. “And I worry about the roads,” said another friend who suggested that it might be wise to time our shopping trips for earlier in the day than usual.
We’ll see. Maybe the hot spell will pass. Maybe we’ll have an early autumn. Last week, after all, there were two days when sudden winds whipped up and made it dangerous to walk about for fear of being impaled by flying debris. The temperature slumped a degree or two, although within hours it had ratcheted back up to full strength again.
The fields are yellow now, the grass scorched to nothingness and in my garden only the geraniums have the energy to push out fresh blooms. Surprisingly, though, there have been none of the water outages that are a usual feature of the Cappadocian summer. But then perhaps it’s not so surprising really given how frequently it rained just a few months ago.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
