The moon is out and we are able to seem most of the areas by moonlight. We picked out a smaller non-life threatening rock and start to climb. We take turns holding the light and climbing. Some of the areas are in the shadows and it is hard to see the holds. Another problem is while climbing up sand flakes off and a lot of times lands in your eye. By the time we both get to the top of the structure we realize that it is actually a lot taller than our initial impressions. Furthermore we see a few lights on the bottom near were started and we can vaguely hear what sounds like voices. Then a light flickers on and big flashlight appears shining up towards our direction. It moves around searing for a target. Casey and I both duck into some cover. It turned out we were climbing on top of someone’s house. The commotion and falling rock/debris woke them up. It must have been scary hearing two large men climbing on top of your house. Thus we decided to climb down and around the backside of the rock.
We continued to climbing up and around the main valley next to the road. The sandstone is white and it should be easy to see two figure climbing, but I guess no is looking or cares. The trail up to the base of the valley is really sanding and it’s a struggle to get stable non-sinking footing while trying to climb up. After what going about half way up we seen a large cone shaped building with lots of windows and doors. It was a really spooky and eerie looking structure. For some reason this environment reminded of the time Faheem thought it was a good idea to waste his free movie tickets to go see “The Cave” and I was waiting for one of scary looking underground creatures to climb out of one of the many windows on all fours while sticking to the walls. The good thing about this rock is that there is a narrow “U” shaft on one side where we can kind of Jet-Li your way up. Jet-Li is now a verb; Casey and I use it to describe when you have to put each foot on the opposite sides to slowly push your way up. So we each take turns Jet-Li-ing up this spooking looking rock.
At the top half the room is washed away from the weather exposes a really good panorama view of Cappadocia. The wall is cross-sectioned and on the other side is another room with a better view. So we have to bear hug that cross section of the wall, one foot on each floor of each room. It was stupid and scary move but the view was well worth it. Even when you consider that we I went over the wall, it crumbled and fell all the way to the bottom. Luckily with my cat like reflects I had already fallen forward and into the room I was trying to get to.
Our last campaign ended in defeat or I guess what some would call self preservation. We had ventured all the way up the valley to its peak. We were overlooking the entire rockscape. To one side was probably a 10foot decline (that was too steep to stop yourself on) before it dropped another good 40 to 50 feet straight down and on the other-side was just a straight down drop of 50-60 feet. Both sides fell into complete darkness and we couldn’t see the bottom. But at the top was stretch of narrow peak that if you were able to run across without falling to either side, you would get all the way up to the top of the valley. The peak felt pretty sandy and like a lot of the houses would probably have crumpled under our weight. Plus we had been on the top of the valley earlier that previous day and it would have take ages to get back because you wouldn’t have been able to descent the same way back down. After thinking about it doing short test footings for about half an hour we decided to call it a night. Besides we had already stayed up way passed the 1am call the Turkish police time that we agreed on with Jess.
On the way down we stop by the grape vineyard and got some fresh grapes. They were amazingly sweet and really annoying because the rest of our walk back our hands were sticky.
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