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Day 7: Sivas, Cappadocia and Urgup Sivas We drove from Amasya to Sivas. I slept for most of the bus trip, coughing and sneezing and really having a great time with my cold. I woke up when we arrived at Sivas for lunch. We went to lunch in a hotel dining room in the centre of the town. The hotel was a largish building, and the dining room was on the second floor. On the bottom floor was a very interesting antique shop. It was shut when we went in to lunch, but open on the way back. The stairs up to the dining room were broad. On the first floor, there was a large blue mosaic on the wall. It was very impressive looking. The toilets were also on that floor and that caused a few side-stops. When we did get to the dining room, it looked like they weren't open for business. Although it was midday, it was dark and closed-in with the curtains pulled and the lights dimmed. We must have been early. When we arrived, the staff appeared and candles were lit and we were seated and the food started coming. Course after course of different roasted meats. I was sitting beside Elizabeth, which proved to be very pleasant for me. Elizabeth doesn't eat meat, so I got all hers. She made do with the small salady things on the table and the bread. Double helpings for me. The others noticed this and it set a pattern for the rest of the trip. What they didn't want, they offered to me. No wonder I didn't lose any weight on the trip. Lunch was great. It was the best prepared and best tasting meat on the whole tour. Although Sivas has an ancient history and lots to see, we didn't stay to see any of it. We had to rush off to make Urgup before nightfall. Urgup After lunch, we continued the drive to Cappadocia. The scenery changed and we started to see a really weird landscape. It was all brown and bare with lots of strange weathered rock formations, and these strange formations called fairy towers. We would get to see a lot more of them the next day. They are a very heavily eroded rock formation. A hard layer of rock on top of a very soft layer. The soft layer erodes and what is left looks very phallic, a spire with a cap. Around dusk, we arrived at Urgup. It was going to be our base of operations for the next few days while we explored Cappadocia. We were booked into the Perissia Hotel. This was a fairly new hotel on a hillside on the outskirts of town. It was large and modern, looking like it was built of new, clean sandstone. It had a very large and posh foyer. When we arrived and were milling about, waiting for Jenny and Sebnem to organise the rooms and keys, waiters appeared with trays of complimentary sherry. Cappadocia is famous for its vineyard and wines, and this was our introduction to the local product. The quality of it prompted Jenny and Sedat to consider exporting Australian wine to Cappadocia to give them some competition so they might improve the local product. It wasn't bad, but not the style of wine that I was used to. We found that our rooms were out the back in the less posh buildings. Anne and I were on the ground floor, in a darkish boxed-in room. The first thing we noticed in the room was the sign on the telephone that asked "Have you phoned your lovers today?" Plural? Some of the other rooms had a variation on their telephone signs. They asked Have you phoned your lavers today?". More merriment when this was related. Jenny also discovered another joke that continued throughout the trip. In each room was a list to be filled in if you wanted any washing done. One of the items was ladies' ponties. From this point on, ponties were the official pronuciation. That night, we had dinner in the hotel. Above the foyer, there was a very large dining room, buffet style. They had a very large spread of food. Tremendous variety, plenty of quantity and as much as you could eat. I tucked in. We all sat together at two tables. After dinner, we could do whatever we wanted. Anne and I went back to our room, then Anne wandered off and chatted to some of the others, while I got on with washing. When we reacher Urgup, I hadn't done any washing. Anne had been doing bits and pieces wherever we stayed, but I hadn't. Laziness. Listlessness from my cold. Only staying one night in the hotels so far. Whatever the reason, I had reached the end, and I had to do some washing. Anne made sure I knew that I had to do some washing. The last time I had washed any clothes by hand was on my 17th birthday, when I was washing clothes in a little stream beside a small village on the north coast of Papua New Guinea. Since then, a washing machine had been my friend. Now I had to relearn the operation. Luckily the room had a large heater by the window that we could hang wet clothes all over. Unluckily, we found that this was controlled at the office and it was switched on for only a few hours each day. I washed. From this day on, I washed almost every day and I kept up. Margaret decided to be very brave. She had been told about a Turkish bath nearby. So she set off on foot and found the bath at another hotel further down the hill. Unfortunately, tourism has had an effect on the hamams outside Istanbul. The Turkish baths put the prices up for the tourists. Turkish men continue to go to the baths, but the women don't. So the women bath attendants disappear. So the baths for women disappear. This means that female tourists outside Istanbul either do without a bath or have to suffer the male bath attendants. So when Margaret got to the bath, she found that there were no female attendants. She decided to be brave and continue and had the bath with male attendants. This got lots of comments from everyone when she told us next day. There were comments of sexism from Elizabeth. I can understand her point of view, but I also understand that it's just the way it happened. It wasn't a deliberate policy of forcing women to use male bath attendants. This also earnt Margaret a nomination for the award for the person contributing the most to Oz-Turk relations. A few of the others, Erika and Elizabeth among them, were also in an adventurous mood, and headed back into town to look around and a do a bit of shopping. They took the bus in to town, had a good walk round, and then made their way back. Jewellry was the most common purchase.