Cappadocia Day 2

We started our day very early with a 4am wake-up call for a chance at a balloon ride. The weather was still a little iffy, but they hadn’t flown the day before and today looked better.

When we arrived the balloons were partially inflated on their side, but soon they finished the inflation process and some balloons started taking off. Soon we were climbing into the basket and took off around 5:20 am.

The baskets are huge holding 24 people and the pilot. 12 people on each side, divided into four groups of three.

We flew right over the Göreme open air museum that we visited yesterday and over Zelve, which we don’t visit. The small dots in the fields are grape vines.

The pilot first took us up to 900 meters AGL and then descended slowly over the next 20-25 minutes to a couple hundred feet. We didn’t quite see sunrise at the top, and the clouds started coming in, so I think he wanted to get down below them before they got thick.

They launch balloons in two waves. We were in the first wave, the next one launches about an hour later. The first wave had 104 balloons, the second had 66 balloons for a total of 170 balloons.

Then went back up to go over a town and landed on the other side of the town.

We then returned to the hotel at 7:15am and got a chance to get cleaned up before starting on the rest of the day.

The day focused on the lives of the rural people in the area. We went to the small town of Çat population around 2100. We first met a grape grower out at his fields. He has a small operation with 2 hectares (just under 5 acres) of vines. The vines are a local variety that can survive in the arid climate here. They don’t use the wire trellis system, the vines are kept very low to the ground to conserve water. It reduces the yield. He gets about 5000 Kg of grapes per hectare.

He has to cover the roots of the vines to protect them in the winter, then uncover the roots in the spring. It wasn’t quite the time of year to do that yet. There is about one vine per 10 square meters. It used to take him and his wife about two long days to uncover or cover the vine roots. He’s a few years from retirement from the village and has a bad back, so he hires workers to do those jobs now. Unemployment for men is 40%, for women 72%. He also hires for harvesting and pruning.

He sells his grapes to a local private processing facility and can get some bottled grape juice from his grapes. He served a brunch and had some of his grape juice for us to try. It was different but really good.

Farming 2 hectares is not enough to support a family. He also works for the village. He’s married and has three daughters, two have graduated from university, one is still in grade school. The middle daughter is still looking for work.

I didn’t see anyone out working in the fields, wheat is already planted. Tractors and equipment are owned by the farmers and seem to be well taken care of. I didn’t see any sitting out, they must all be stored inside. Most are old, like this one from the late 60’s or early 70’s.

The equipment used behind the tractor does sit out. It may be made locally and be much less expensive to purchase. There are high taxes on imported products.

The area also raises some wheat and potatoes. We briefly visited a private company owned potato storage facility that was dug into the tufa. It can hold 25,000 tons of potatoes.

Driving around we do see sheep and goats out on pasture land, always with a shepard, as they are not fenced in.

We next went to the village and got a brief tour of a local mosque that was built in a cave. We stopped a tea house, ostensibly to interact with some of the village men, but they were pretty reticent, a few came out and played Okey, a game played with a Rummikub board, and some different rules. Rule differences: to end the game you must meld all your tiles. You draw and discard to your neighbor. A different tile is chosen as the joker during game setup.

Because it was Eid, the mayor of the village was spending the day in his office receiving visitors. He saw us out, and sent someone over to invite us to visit. We asked him what his top priorities for infrastructure improvements in the village was. He wants to bring natural gas to the village. Then he wants to build some apartment towers, since when the kids get married there are no houses for them, so they move away to the bigger city. I suspect they move for the job more than the house.

We went to another local family’s house for lunch. Because it was Eid, the extended family was together. Our host’s sister and her family was there as well. The brother-in-law bakes Turkish Delight for a living, but with only our guide to translate between English and Turkish it was difficult to learn much more. I tried to use a translate app that I had preloaded a Turkish to English translations on, but it still seems to want to connect to the network and didn’t work very well. Lunch was simple but good.

We stopped a few overlooks to see the formations.

We stopped at a pottery shop. They showed us how they make the Hittite wine jar in four parts, the foot, spout, handle and body.