Ruth packed us a lunch, and we set off heading due north out of the city towards a cave that I had read about. One of the things that attracted me to this particular cave was that one of the reviews said "you will be the only ones there except for the cows"!
How could Turkey's largest cave get so few visitors? From looking at the map, I assumed it was because of the 3.8 km (2.4 mile) uphill hike to get there. We were overdue for some exercise, so we were looking forward to the hike.
And we did hike up, although you could drive. The single lane dirt track road is rough, but a car could do it going slowly. In fact, as we were hiking back down, a car passed us making it's way up.
A paved road leads you to the dirt track.
The paved road we drove up on.
Beautiful scenery.
Too bad we didn't have any sunshine.
Pretty goat.
Eating olives?
Evidence of old civilizations?
We parked the car at the turn off where it became a dirt road. Like I said, the dirt road really wasn't in bad shape if you took it slowly. In fact, I wouldn't hesitate to take a small motorhome up there and camp for the night! Anything larger might have a hard time getting turned around.
Hiking up the dirt road.
The road we drove up on.
We are heading up!
Stopping to enjoy the scenery.
Getting some nice views.
Still heading higher!
The end of the road.
GPS 37.232448, 30.711383
Then it was a short hike to get up to the cave entrance.
Wow!
The cave is huge!
Let me give you a better idea....
Can you see me?
Remember, you can click on the photo to make it full screen.
Zoomed in a little more.
I took this from where I was standing, looking back out.
Can you see Ruth?
There are Roman ruins inside the cave.
What you see when the light is off.
We went in as far as we could with the light from my phone. We really should carry around some rechargeable LED headlights for when we do this kind of thing!
And then we made our way back out and sat and had lunch in front of the big entrance, and then hiked back down to the car.
Really enjoyed Friday's outing!
Good thing, because we are back into another lockdown weekend here in Turkey. We will get out for our 5 km (3 mile) power walk for an hour though. As tourists, we are totally within our rights to do so, even though we don't think it's fair that we have different rights than the locals. Still, we will take advantage of it for the benefit of our own health, and that's all.
We've got another 10 days here in Turkey. We are purposely overstaying our visa by eight days, which expires on January 11th. I don't feel right about doing that, but it's on doctor's orders, and he is giving us a letter stating that fact, so from what I've read the outgoing border control people should be okay with that. Worse case scenario, we might get a 600 lira ($100 CAD, $81 USD) fine per person. And we have read that a relatively short overstay like that won't affect our ability to return to Turkey once three months have passed. Not that we have any intention of coming back that soon, but of course we do want to return with our new motorhome one day.
And then we will be off to Tanzania. It will certainly be an interesting country to visit since they have no Corona restrictions at all. We will talk some more about that tomorrow.
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We love the part where you are enjoying each day without crowds of people!!!!
ReplyDeleteWe are loving that part too! :-)
DeleteNice hike for you. Good you are doing some good uphill hiking in preparation for your Tanzania hikes. Boy, I am really getting a lot of local advertising on this site now. I wonder if my settings have somehow changed. I cant comment where I usually do either.
ReplyDeleteKay, you might want to download and try the "Brave" browser. I get no ads at all!
DeleteYes, we need to do some more uphill climbs to get us prepared for Mt. Meru and Kilimanjaro, hopefully this coming week the weather will cooperate and we can get some more good hikes in. :-)
DeleteThe ads aren't set up by us, they use algorithms so when you get ads it usually has to do with things you have either searched for or looked at recently on our browser.
So Emily, you do realize that by restricting ads, you also restrict the revenue that sites such as ours receive for publishing content that you enjoy.
DeleteWould you prefer to pay for the content yourself out of pocket? We would happily remove all the ads if enough people thought that the content they enjoy reading on a daily basis was worth a monthly out of pocket contribution.
Otherwise, it's the ads that support some of what we do.
Kevin, I never click on blog ads. If I use a browser that filters them out, does that still affect your revenue? I am asking an honest question, because I don't know. I don't mean to cause any problems for you and Ruth, since I do love your blig and feel like I know you, but on a laptop, the ads can get very annoying. I don't block them on my phone, only my laptop. Thanks.
DeleteYou don't need to click on them. They just need to be shown on your device. Yes, if you use a browser that filters them out, it does affect our revenue. I mean, it's pennies. But the pennies of hundreds or thousands of readers add up to meaningful revenue. The point remains though... if not for the ad revenue, how would many websites survive?
DeleteI hear you, Kevin. In the future, I will read your posts with ad-blocking disabled. I'm not going to commit to doing that across the board, though. A lot of the things the Brave browser blocks are not actually ads, but other nasties like third-party trackers. That is the real reason I'm using it. Not that I have anything to hide, but I just object to those on principle, much more than I object to ads, so long as they aren't intrusive and I can just ignore them.
DeleteThank you for your understanding Emily! :-)
DeleteI'm really enjoying seeing all the lovely spots you're finding in Turkey. It's especially nice to find a place where you're the only visitors...especially during a pandemic. Glad things are going well with your eyes and hope that you both adjust 100% soon.
ReplyDeleteThere are so many lovely spots to explore, and many of them have little to no people, partly because we search out little known places. We think that even without Covid many of these places would still have little to no one around. We really have been doing our best to stay away from crowds and we want to continue that, it takes away a little of why we like to travel to other countries though because we do like to interact with the locals but for now we will just continue staying safe and keeping our distance.
DeleteYes, our eyes are adjusting, I don't think our vision will ever be 100% but it will be so much better than what we had. :-)
What an interesting cave! The size is quite intimidating and foreboding to explore for me! Lol! Glad you decided to look it up!
ReplyDeleteWe really wished that we had proper headlamps and then we would probably have gone further into the cave. It was a bit weird being in a cave so big and one that isn't developed and to be the only ones there, yes it was a little intimidating. So glad that we made our way up there though. :-)
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