Day four of our Turkey adventure began in blinding, head-splitting pain. This is what happens when people drink too much. If you were thinking about getting into drinking too much as a hobby, please be warned that blinding, head-splitting pain is one of the challenges.

Sarah came into the bedroom and told me that she was buying us plane tickets for our trip back from the Mediterranean coast. The plan was to leave Ankara and drive south to Cappadocia with Benton and Laura, where we would all spend that night. The next day (Wednesday), Sarah and I would split off and head down to Kalkan, a city on the Southern coast of Turkey. We’d spend Wednesday and Thursday nights on a romantic anniversary adventure, and then we’d fly back on Friday to spend the weekend with Laura and Benton before leaving. This was a brilliant plan that did not quite go as expected. More on that later.

We bid Nick a fond farewell and hit the road. Once again, we skipped breakfast. It continued to be a bad idea.

Sarah offered to drive. I was impressed. There was no way you were getting me out on those roads, even if my brain hadn’t been bleeding out of my ears from drink. In Turkey, the lines on the roads are just suggestions. In Turkey, car horns are as utilitarian as turn signals or windshield wipers. Honking does not mean, “stop being an asshole,” it means “I’m coming through regardless of what you’re doing, and if you do not avoid me, you will be hit.” This is what Sarah looked like driving in Turkey:

We stopped in a little town along the way to go to the bathroom. As we drove through the town, we got numerous stares from the locals. As Benton explained, this is because Sarah was driving, and outside of Istanbul and the larger cities, it is very rare to see a woman driving, especially when a man is in the car. I was the man who was such a pathetic bastard he made his delicate flower of a wife drive him around. They weren’t staring at Sarah, they were staring at me, thinking, “what kind of a man is that? No kind. No kind at all.” There are probably folk tales being told about me now in rural Turkey.

Here is a picture of the bathroom that we stopped at. Or rather, the plastic hole in the ground. You want to know what kind of a man I am, Turks? I’m a man that can pee standing up, that’s what kind! That is to say, the average kind.

So we drove for a few hours and got hungry. It was rainy and shitty, a nice complement to my overall mindset at the time. Then we got some lunch in a cave city.

BLAU! Didn’t expect to read that, did you? That’s right … we visited a city (Göreme) that was built into a mother freaking cave. And I’m not talking like a handful of houses here and there … this was an entire city built into a mountain. By orcs!

After lunch, we were considering going on a tour of the “open-air markets,” but it was still rainy and shitty …

… so we decided to just hang out and kill some time before retiring to our cave hotel later.

Yeah, you read that right. We stayed in a cave hotel. 

Here is the cave living room of our cave suite.

Here is the entrance to the cave stairs.

Here are the cave shotguns, left as a courtesy just in case the party got a little too groovy.

Climb up the cave stairs …

… to the cave master bedroom. We let Benton and Laura stay in the master bedroom, because they went to the trouble of booking the hotel and carting us around. And also, we are not total dicks.

This is the view from the cave master bedroom.

The master bedroom was connected to a cave bathroom. The shower drain was in the floor of the cave bathroom, so the entire bathroom was really a giant shower. 

Cave toilet roll holder.

View of the cave living room from the other side.

Down a staircase to the right was the front door. Down another staircase was our bedroom.

Sarah and Laura were so pumped about the cave hotel, they jumped for cave joy.

Benton did not find their antics amusing.

We threw our bags in our respective rooms and walked into town.

We ended up at a cave coffee shop where we drank tea and smoked a hookah.

A hookah contains some kind of apple-flavored tobacco. You don’t inhale it, you kind of suck on it, like a cigar. You take a few hits off the tube and pass it on. They provide you with a selection of tube covers for the safety-conscious, but I can’t imagine you’d ever use them unless you were hanging out with people who have open, bleeding sores on their lips.

Sarah found a cat friend. 

Smoking the hookah.

We went back to the hotel. Benton and I hung out and read while Sarah and Laura took a walk around the windy streets. When they returned, we all went back into town and had dinner at a cave restaurant.

Here’s what Göreme looks like at night.

The restaurant didn’t have a spot for us. Laura asked if we could hang out and have a drink there while we waited for a table to open up. They didn’t have a bar or anything, so we bought a bottle of wine and hung out in their waiting room.

By the time we got seated, we were all falling asleep.

Feeling well satisfied, we dragged ourselves back to the cave hotel and turned in for the night.