Urchisar

After breakfast we walked up Pigeon Valley to Urchisar. This took us through a dramatic landscape, with the sides of the valley eroded in fascinating patterns. There's a fairly dense network of paths and any flat areas on the valley floors have been planted, mostly with potatoes.

We shared a mezze plate for lunch, then I climbed Urchisar castle for some 360 degree views.

Gabi got the bus back to Goreme, while I tried to find the entrance to Love Valley and failed, so I walked back along the road and then down from Panorama Point. On the way I visited a rock house, where the woman had entertained Helen Clark: her son's brother-in-law had married a New Zealander — and was related to Mustafa, the owner of our hotel.

We visited the carpet shop recommended by Mustafa, Sultan Carpet, which had a lot of lovely carpets (and was fixed price, so no concerns about haggling). Gabi bought a Kurdish rug and we talked to the two partners running the shop. Ali was American-educated, while Shamsi had a doctorate in finance from Sabanci University and worked part-time for one of the Sabanci banks. We argued politics with Shamsi, covering the Kurdish "problem", the Armenian "genocide", and the EU, among other topics — he seemed a fairly hardline Kemalist, unhappy about the possibility of Turkey joining the EU because it would impinge on the military's control.

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