Tales from Anatolia

Taking a couple of days in a weird and wonderful area of Anatolia called Cappadocia, where the wind has eroded a dusty landscape of volcanic spikes and pinnacles in the rock, and people in past times resorted to living in elaborate rock cut caves and even whole underground cities. I don't know whether this strange landscape does anything to encourage odd behaviour in the local people at all, but I'd certainly never encountered anyone out walking their pigeons in the early hours of the morning until arriving here. Today I got up at some god forsaken hour in order to go up in a balloon to look at the dawn landscape, and consequently found myself drinking champagne at 7am in the morning having successfully completed an exhilarating ride.

Friends will be relieved to learn that I've now bagged my requisite quota of medieval churches with frescoes for the trip having dragged my fellow travellers around a whole host of them in Cappadocia. This leaves more time to concentrate on some of the lighter sides of life. Fortunately, we have a good and lively crowd on Tonka, comprising three Kiwis, three Icelandic girls, a Norwegian chap, a couple of Americans, two other Brits and an Aussie.

In Istanbul I was enticed into a slightly surreal evening of Turkish night clubbing with the lure of a bellydancing show. The dancer, who doubled as the barmaid and thus created a bit of a backlog at the bar during her act, seemed to be very proficient at swinging her hips to the music, but wasn't exactly giving it much in the belly department given she lacked one to wobble. The local lads meanwhile seemed mostly enamoured of boy band style synchronised dancing to a techno beat. It was all rather odd. Shopping in the Bizarre is a lot of fun however, and the requirement to get fully involved with the cooking and other elements of the running of the trip create plenty of opportunities to get in lots of practice at the old bartering. My favourite purchase so far is a shocking pink mosque alarm clock which gives off a muezzin alarm call at high volume. Having a lot of fun planting it in other people's tents at the moment.