You set an alarm for well before dawn, and in Cappadocia you are glad you did. Up on a terrace cut into the rock, cold air, a glass of tea, and then the first flames somewhere below in the dark. The balloons begin to go up. By full light there are a hundred of them, maybe more, drifting over a valley that looks like nowhere else on the planet. I had seen the photograph. I was not ready for how quiet it is.
The landscape is the reason the balloons come. Cappadocia sits on deep layers of soft volcanic ash, tuff, laid down by old eruptions and then carved by ten thousand years of wind and water into cones and spires and hooded columns the locals call fairy chimneys. It is stone you can cut with a hand tool, and people have, since long before anyone was writing this down.
Because the rock is soft, people did not build on Cappadocia so much as move into it. Whole villages are hollowed out of the cliffs, and the best rooms to sleep in are still caves, now with heated floors and a view. I woke each morning in a vaulted room cut from the tuff, swung a window open onto the cold, and watched the balloons come up over the far ridge before I was properly awake.
And when the rock was not a home it was a hiding place. Under the plains there are entire cities dug straight down, level upon level, some of them eighty metres deep, with stables and chapels and great round stone doors that rolled shut from the inside. Whole populations went underground when armies came through and stayed there, breathing through air shafts, for as long as it took. You climb down into one and the temperature drops and the daylight goes, and you understand the place a little differently after.
The valleys are best on foot, and best at the end of the day. Rose Valley and the Love Valley and the Red are laced with trails that thread between the chimneys, and in the last hour the tuff turns the colour of a peach and then of an ember, and the whole thing empties out. I walked until the light went and had a long stretch of it entirely to myself, which almost never happens at a place this famous.
On the last morning I went up. In the dark, a field of balloons lies on its side and slowly stands, the burners lighting one after another until the whole plain is full of them.
Then you climb into a basket, the burner roars over your head, and the ground simply leaves you. There is no lurch and no sense of speed, just the valley opening out below and the other balloons rising all around into a sky going from grey to gold. The pilot took us down into a canyon until the basket brushed the tops of the chimneys, then lifted us out over the whole plateau. It is a tourist thing to do, one of the most touristy on earth, and it is worth every cent.
You sleep inside the rock, and you wake to a hundred balloons.
Go for at least three nights, sleep in a cave in Göreme or Uçhisar, and book the balloon for your first clear morning, because the winds cancel more days than you would think. Walk the valleys yourself in the afternoons, and go down into one of the underground cities at least once. Set the alarm even on the mornings you do not fly, because the balloons go up whether you are in one or not, and there is no bad seat for them. I left with dust in my boots and the rare feeling you get from a place that turned out, for once, to be even stranger than its pictures.
