Wednesday 20th June

We awoke refreshed and got up in good time to enjoy the typical Turkish breakfast of cheese, tomato, cucumber, olives, boiled egg, bread and coffee. I now seem only able to take tea or coffee without milk, Turkish style, even at home. We packed the luggage back in the car and drove away from the hotel looking quietly confident until we were round the corner where we stopped and scrabbled for the maps.

The very first major junction seemed impenetrable and I was not even sure if I was going the wrong way down a one way street or not. A passer by, attracted by my heartbeat, pointed out the entry point into the mass of traffic and in we plunged. From where we were there is a fairly direct route to get onto the road to Ürgüp. In addition there is another way which takes a little longer and requires several changes of direction. We went yet another way which takes even longer and takes one through several seemingly identical junctions and several streets which have identical shops in them. Even the pedestrians looked familiar. What a strange town Aksaray must be.

The road to Ürgüp eventually gave us our first glimpses of the strange, strange landscape of Cappadocia - a moonscape of fairy chimneys capped by mushrooms; houses - entire villages even - cut into the sides of cliffs and all manner of views and vistas. It is a veritable photographers heaven and hell all at once. Heaven because each corner brought yet another amazing sight and hell because the photographs couldn't possibly do justice to what we were seeing. We were armed with both a fairly modern digital camera and a heavy and clunky SLR which I hadn't used for probably 10 years.

Only time and a large chunk of processing money will tell me if lugging that heavy camera bag was worth the effort. Photos by people much more talented than I am are on sale all over the area, of course, but I had great fun clicking away anyway. I wish the digital camera made as satisfying a noise as my trusty old SLR instead of the pathetic little beep it emits.

We pressed on to Ürgüp and stopped at another "Information" sign only to find we were in zombie territory. The man running the information centre had clearly lost the will to live and we were mumbled at for ten minutes and given a small map. Details of the only hotel in the entire area were handed over, run oddly enough by a friend of his, and we met his cat. The cat, even when it fell asleep, was more animated than its owner. I have no idea how good the Turkish health service is but charisma bypass operations appear to be available. We left in the way that people leave a really dull party.

Just 200 metres up the road we found a perfectly good hotel which had totally escaped the notice of the information chappy and since it was on the right and therefore easy to turn in to, we turned in to it. Had it been on the left we may never have discovered the charms of the Melis Hotel - Ürgüp.