Oh, to be back in the safe bosom of Syria!

We had taken a bus from Beirut back to Damascus, then after a day we bused north to Aleppo before finally crossing the border into southeast Turkey. Our border crossing took quite a while and included five separate checks by the Syrians and a record-breaking six checks by the Turks. There was customs, and there was immigration, and there was a special guy endorsing US visas, and there were the army checks, and a few more that looked like some shady paramilitary officials. One checkpoint even made our drivers unscrew the giant panels from the side of our bus.

Sitting and doing nothing on a bus all day has a strange way of tiring you out so after a quick dinner we crawled back to our hotel and fell sound asleep. The next morning we got up early and did it all again: bus along the coast to Adana, then a bus change and up over the mountains to Nigde, another bus change (now a small local one) for a few hours across a windy high plain to Nevsehir, and finally a minibus our last 10 kilometers to Goreme. Our home for the next few days.

Goreme (pronounced gore-ah-may) is dead-center in the middle of Turkey in an area known as Cappadocia. Cappadocia is surrounded by volcanic mountains and eons ago one of them erupted, filling the valleys with a thick coat of ash. This ash hardened into rock then eroded into fanciful formations that look like a Disney creation, or maybe something out of a fairy tale. Entire valleys are crowded with chimney-like formations, upside cones of smooth rock, sort of like a pointy cream-colored upside-down witches hat. They look like those lumpy peaks kids make on the beach by dribbling wet sand through their fingers. Another common site are natural pillars. The tall narrow columns are capped by a puck of harder granite that protects the softer rock below.

Long ago villagers discovered a unique property of the rock. It is soft until exposed to air, when it hardens. This made it a perfect material for carving homes, and over time every valley and hillside in the area become covered with doorways leading to large, multi-room caves.

Using Goreme as our base of operations, Sarah and I set out each morning to explore. The possibilities were endless. We just picked a valley at random and headed into it, taking frequent side-trails to scramble up into the cliff-side dwellings. Most of the caves were two rooms. Often a long low table and bench was carved right into the rock, rising up from the floor along the length of the room. There were holes for storing wine and grain, bedrooms, kitchens. Some featured decorations but most were simple, clean square structures. More than a few had large openings -- picture windows -- that looked out over the valleys below.

Turkish history is peppered with invasion after invasion; the problem with being at the crossroads of the continents is that an awfully lot of people want to cross that road. So as long as 4000 years ago some local villagers who got tired of watching their women being carted off as slaves and concubines to the invading armies took the ingenious step of building entire underground cities. They reproduced their above-ground villages in the soft rock below. These mammoth structures included stables, churches, nurseries, wineries, you name it. The rooms were connected by stairways and tunnels, and all the entry points were carefully guarded by huge round stones that could be rolled across the corridors. It is estimated that a village of 6000 people could live unsupported an isolated for 6 months. We have seen a lot of tunnel systems on this trip -- from the Viet Cong tunnels near Saigon to the burial chambers of the Egyptian kings -- but nothing we have seen compares in size and scope to these.

More recently (if 1400 years ago counts as recent) the isolated valleys of Cappadocia become a refuge for persecuted Christians. In addition to carving dwellings away from the prying eyes of invading Arabs, the Christian communities near Goreme built dozens of elaborate chapels. Their entrances are unassuming, just a series of small doorways dotting the hills, but inside they are amazing.

Most follow the traditional Byzantine design of a cross-shaped hall with 5 domes. There are pillars and apses and alters all the usual ingredients of your standard church, but it is all carved from stone. If it weren't for the lack of windows, you could easily forget you were in a cave. As in the Egyptian tombs the particular delight here is the bright color. The walls and domes are covered with brilliant frescoes. Some are rudimentary and were created by in-house monk artist wanna-be's, but others chapels housed beautiful flowing designs that were painted by professional artists. Caves, like History, are supposed to be dark and drab but these colorful chapels deny their humble surroundings.

After a few days it was time to move on. From our position in central Turkey we could either head east into the relatively untraveled and mountainous regions that border Iran, Georgia, and Armenia, or we could travel to the standard tourist route along the coast of southern and western Turkey. East promised small ethnic villages and more adventure, but it also meant endless bus-rides on bad roads, and we wouldn't be able to travel after dark because of Kurdish rebel activity. It is hard to decide to skip and entire half of the country, but for once we did the sensible thing bid the East goodbye. We booked an overnight bus south the Meditteranean coast at Olimpos.

In our few days in Turkey I had already come to learn that travel here is intricately tied to long busrides. The train and domestic air routes are relatively undeveloped and most effort has gone into an extensive bus network that reaches every corner of the country. The good news is that most of the buses are big luxury cruisers, the kind of thing that would have had me drooling with envy in China. They come with flight attendants that wear bow-tie's and serve you little packaged cakes and tea, and every once in a while they come down the aisle and sprinkle lemon-flavored cologne on everyone's hands. If that's not luxury, what is?

The down side is that Turkey is a big country, a really big country, and although its roads are in good condition most of the country is covered with mountains so routes are slow and circuitous. Bus rides have been a big part of travel in all the countries we've been to (after all, we have come all the way from southern Egypt down near Sudan via bus), and despite the fact the Turkish buses were the nicest we've seen yet it is only here that bus rides are really starting to wear on me. Maybe it is the lack of options, it's knowing that a 10-hour bus ride is the only way out of a place. Maybe it's the fact that many routes are only served by overnight buses, which is what we found ourselves on a few nights ago.

Overnight bus rides are certainly in the same category of pleasure as Vietnamese Pedicures or Jordanian cheek-hair-pluckings, but I must admit it wasn't quite as bad as I had expected. I caught a few hours sleep, and when I was awake I managed to enter a semi-comatose state where time passed quickly. We arrived near our final destination at 8:00 AM. The bus dumped us off on the side of the highway in the middle of nowhere. We sat there under a clear blue sky milling around foggy from lack of sleep and before long a minivan came to shuttle us the last 10k down to our pension.

Our position by the highway was high on a ridge a few kilometers from the sea. We could see the Mediterannean (I spell that differently every time, and none of them look right) below us, framed by foothills and mountain peaks. The minivan switch-backed down the ridge then followed the bottom of a steep valley toward the shore.

This area is national park, so unlike most of the coast we've seen this trip it is relatively undeveloped. The steep pine-covered hills reach right to the sea. As I understand it the government outlawed "permanent buildings" within the national park, but clever entrepreunuers (just try and spell that one better than I did) skirted the law by building treehouses. These treehouse colonies grew and grew, and now there are 8 or 9 different clusters of them spread along the valley floor a few hundred meters inland from the coast. In addition to the rustic and draughty treehouses most now offer regular accommodation, and Sarah and I opted for the latter.

From our pension it was a short walk down to the beach. Our trail passed through the remains of Olimpos, an ancient port town. The usual waves of empires swept through Olimpos, but the most prominent ruins still here are from a 3rd century Roman settlement. I must say that after three solid months of touring the remains of ancient cities I am getting a little "ruined-out," but the Olimops ruins are different. Most of what we've seen lately have been cities in the desert, big Roman towns impressive in size and design but somewhat sterile, just hot dry rocks baking in the desert sun like the picked-over bones of a long-dead camel. Here at Olimops, though, the ruins have been reclaimed by the forest and the topography of the landscape didn't allow the long straight collonnaded streets that we are so used to seeing. The baths and temples and all the other typical elements of a Roman town are dimpled along the river and tucked in behind small hillocks. The towering valley walls, the small creek down below, and the pleasant tramp through the cool forest all added up to an entirely different experience.

We spent the next two days laying on the beach, making short sorties into the ruins, and lazing under the shade of grape vines and orange trees at our pension.

One night we joined a small group on a hike to one of the strangest sites we've ever seen. Armed with flashlights we began climbing just after dark. The hike wasn't long but it was steep and it was hard to keep site of the path. Before long we saw a strange glow on the hillside above and as we drew closer it looked like the slope was covered with 10 or 12 small campfires.

The Chimaera, as they are known, are a cluster of flames that burn from gas leaking out of the rocky slope. The fires have been burning as long as recorded history. If you put them out by smothering them with rock or dirt they instantly re-ignite. Most were small with flames rising just a foot off the ground, but on careful examination in the darkness of night we saw dozens more that were just tiny skirts of pale blue flame clinging to small cracks in the rock.