Family capers in Cappadocia

The picturesque village of Göreme is seasonally besieged by seemingly endless waves of backpackers, whilst the neighboring town of Ürgüp is home to dozens of boutique hotels fashioned from old Greek houses and cave dwellings. Tour buses ply between the region's mass tourism-orientated hotels and “honeypot” sites such as the Göreme Open-Air Museum and the underground city at Derinkuyu. Even the central section of the gorgeous but once little-visited İhlara Valley, on the southern fringes of Cappadocia, can be swamped with sightseers, especially on weekends.

But, and it's a big but, compared to the heaving resorts on Turkey's Mediterranean and Aegean coasts, Cappadocia remains a comparatively quiet, unspoilt part of the country.

Even better, in July and August, when the sun-seekers on the searingly hot and humid coast can do little more than loll lifelessly under sun umbrellas or retire to their air-conditioned rooms, visitors to Cappadocia can be out and about exploring one of the world's most unique regions in the relatively cool (temperatures seldom climb above the upper 20s), dry air of the Central Anatolian uplands.

So it was in Cappadocia's Göreme that a portion of my extended family and I chose to meet up with old friends -- and friends of those old friends -- visiting Turkey from the UK.

How would one extended and three nuclear families (19 people in total at one point, with ages ranging from 10 to 57) get on for a week in a part of Turkey where the beaches of the Aegean are a good 750 kilometers away?

It started with a kick

I doubt a game of soccer is on many people's hit list of things to do in Cappadocia, but that's how we literally kicked off our trip. The venue was the all-weather pitch next to the school in the center of the village, a bargain TL 35 for an hour, arranged via the friendly director of the school. The views from the pitch, of the weirdly beautiful spires of volcanic rock known locally as Peri Bacı (fairy chimneys) running in serried ranks away to the east, were stunning, especially as they were suffused by the soft pink light of sunset. We lined up seven a side (the moms, quite wisely, had opted out and sat surreptitiously sipping a fine Cappadocian wine on the sidelines and admiring the sun slipping below the horizon). Steve, one of the dads, cleverly avoided having to play by turning up in sandals, but gamely offered to perform an even more onerous task -- that of refereeing. I opted for a holding, defensive role (which meant, essentially, ambling along the edge of my own area, urging my teammates to run faster, work harder and occasionally remonstrate with the referee). My sons, Doug and Jake, aped their misfiring Middlesbrough relegation anti-heroes of last season in squandering a hatful of chances, whilst James and Pez, unfairly fit and talented 25-year-olds, bossed the game. Colin, to the disgust of his 13-year-old soccer-mad son, Fred, contributed to his side's demise with a hat trick of own goals. The final dad, Andy, contrived to rip and ruin a brand new pair of 80 euro walking boots. Oh, and the game ended, in near darkness, 7-3.

Kızılırmak

Into the valley

All of us, including 10-year-old Molly, had a love (a very, very deeply hidden love in the case of some of the teenage contingent) of the outdoors, so the İhlara Valley, an hour's drive away to the south of Göreme, was an obvious choice for a day out. We started walking from the attractive village of Ihlara, at the southern end of the valley, descending a series of steps from the pay booth into the depths. Much to the disgust of a young village boy, we couldn't resist the sight of a deep, attractive pool in the tree-fringed Melendez River, and soon we were stripped down to our bathing costumes, merrily swimming, splashing and leaping from rocks into the cool waters of the river. His day's fishing ruined, the boy pulled his net from the water and wandered off, cursing us under his breath. Further down the valley, we spotted a series of man-made caves hewn from the cliff side, and soon all but a few of us (who were watching butterflies flit over the lush vegetation of the valley floor) were swarming in, up and along a series of tunnels, steps which had once been the retreat of Byzantine-era Christian monks.

Fairy chimneys

Most of the party had visited the beautiful, frescoed churches of the Göreme Open-Air Museum the day before, so we gave the rock-cut churches at the base of the steps leading down from the visitors' center on the lip of the gorge short shrift before plowing onto Belisirma and lunch. Everyone was captivated by the platforms set in the middle of the river, where we sat cross-legged, in village style, around low tables and tucked into delicious oven-baked trout. Made sluggish by copious quantities of food (and, in one or two cases, by the odd beer), no one was quite so captivated by the idea of carrying on walking after lunch (we'd only covered a little under a half of the 15 kilometer length of the valley), but eventually we got the show on the road. If anything, the northern, lower section of the valley is even more beautiful than the upper. Here stretches of narrow gorge, where the cliffs press in and the river is forced into a series of pools and cascades, alternate with wider, open sections where lush orchards fringe splashes of meadow. Journey's end, at Selime, was welcome, and the hastily bought ice creams soon soothed somewhat frayed teen spirit.

Going underground

Our experiences in İlhara had proved that kids (even of the teenage variety), like dwarves, adore dark, secret underground places. So we headed north from Göreme to one of Cappadocia's lesser-known underground cities, Özkonak, north of the pottery town of Avanos. Özkonak has several advantages over its more famous rivals, Derinkuyu and Kaymaklı. The admission fee is less, there are no queues nor do you have to wait in hushed silence (difficult for kids to maintain) whilst the guide of the group in front of you drones on about the finer points of grain storage or underground wine presses. We stooped through cleverly cut tunnels, paused to admire the circular stones used by the ancient defenders as doors to block off entry to their underground retreat and fingered the small holes bored through the rock above the doorways, used by the locals to pour boiling oil on their attackers. So taken with life underground were some of the younger members of our group that we had to re-enter the warren of tunnels, round them up and bring them back to the real, aboveground world.

Ihlara Valley

Molly’s (scorpion) farm

After Özkonak, we drove along the valley of the Kızılırmak, Turkey's longest river, to the hot springs at Bayramhacı. We picnicked in the complex's apricot and pear tree-shaded garden, then entered our hired spring, a small, hot pool surrounded by high walls fronted by changing rooms and showers. Coming out of the changing rooms, we heard a barefooted Molly call, “Mum, what this?” She was looking down at her bare feet. “Bloody hell, it's a scorpion,” replied Steve, the nearest adult. Molly took a small, commendably calm step backwards as a crowd of teenage boys rushed over to see a real, live scorpion. To be honest, I think the creature was dazed by the heat, and Steve easily dispatched it, in time-honored fashion, with one of his refereeing sandals. Excitement over, we lounged around in the soothing hot waters, swam a few desultory lengths, chatted and admired the vast Anatolian sky “roofing” our courtyard pool. The adults loved it, but to be honest, after a first “This is amazing” dip into the naturally heated waters, the teenagers got bored, so we headed off to Avanos and browsed around the pottery workshops for a while before making our weary way back to Göreme.

Blood on the tracks

Exploring Cappadocia's glorious network of incredibly eroded valleys on a mountain bike is not for the fainthearted, as we were to discover. “I don't know what happened to the fella that came down here before us -- but it doesn't look good.” Colin, a fireman by trade and well used to the blood of traffic-accident victims, was staring down at a dark red stain in the sandy floor of our track. We carried on twisting and turning down a spectacular, sinuous path rather more cautiously than before. Fortunately, we'd already had our one major incident of the day (Andy had tumbled from his bike attempting a wheelie off the curb of the main road leading up past the Göreme Open-Air Museum, damaging an unmentionable part of his anatomy, the back wheel of his bike and his pride in the process). The valley was glorious, thick with vegetation, lined with ribs of spectacularly eroded volcanic tuff with glimpses, here and there, of wonderful fairy chimneys. This was Rose Valley, one of the most popular walking/biking routes in Cappadocia -- so popular, in fact, that there was a welcome drink stall halfway down serving freshly squeezed orange juice!

We abandoned our bikes up a side valley and clambered up to explore a beautifully painted rock-cut church (Haçlı Kilisesi), then retraced our steps and freewheeled down a broad, sandy track to Çavuşin, a pretty village dominated by a dramatic rocky outcrop literally riddled with rock-cut dwellings and pigeon lofts. “Best meal I've had in Turkey,” said Julie, tucking into a cheese- and tomato-filled gözleme (akin to an Indian stuffed paratha) at the Panorama Café. From Çavuşin, some of us returned straight to Göreme by the main road; the rest continued to Paşabağı, where we sat smugly astride our two wheels atop a high ridge, looking down at the coach loads of tourists exploring the popular, fairy chimney-filled valley below us.

The end

We stayed at two separate but equally good pensions (Köse and Rock Valley), both with small but adequate pools, hearty breakfasts and the all-important Internet access. Göreme is small and safe, so the older teenagers could wander around town on their own, even at night, mostly to shoot some pool at the excellent Fat Boys Bar. Molly's mom, Fran, managed to find time to be thrown from her horse on a riding jaunt with her daughter, and most of us, quite rightly judging it (despite the recent tragedy) to be the safest of adventure sports, soared above Cappadocia's incredible valleys in a hot-air balloon. We interspersed these bursts of outdoor activity and sightseeing with idle hours reading, playing cards and net-surfing around the pool. An ideal place for a family holiday? I can't think of anywhere better.