Jul 14, 20203 min read

Hello Cappadocia!

Our original plan was to fly from Istanbul in to Ankara and stay two nights, but after several locals asked “why would you go to Ankara?”, we decided to just fly into Kayseri and add extra time onto our stay in Cappadocia.

We asked for a late checkout from the Doubletree and used the extra time to check out more of the Kadiköy area, as well as find the bus that might take us to the Sabiha Gokcen International Airport (SAW).

We found the Havabus service (like a public coach) that runs from near the hotel to SAW Airport for just $5 for the two of us. There was a little anxiety as no one spoke any real English and while the airport name was on the bus, we could tell if that was where it always went. After we got on and rode for 15 minutes, it seemed like we’d made the right choice *whew*. The ride to the airport was about one hour with just a couple stops.

After getting off the bus, there was a security checkpoint just to get into any part of airport, plus the normal security again after checking in.

We found that there was a Priority Lounge with free food & drinks, so hung out there for a couple hours and charged phones/watched a Netflix movie.

The plane flight was just a bit over an hour and was only ~60% full so was an easy hop. The “in-flight service” consisted of a water like this

When we landed in Kayseri, we deplaned onto the tarmac and didn‘t see any clear direction (that we understood) about where to get our baggage. We followed one group toward baggage claim, but realized that they must have been travelers with connecting flights. After walking back out onto the tarmac we found another baggage claim area and our bags showed up pretty quickly. We had arranged a “shuttle” to pick us up in Kayseri and drive us to the hotel in Göreme, so were relieved to see him outside baggage claim holding a card with our name on it. For the next hour after that we questioned our decision to hire this shuttle.

The “shuttle” was a small van (allegedly 5 person, but apparently only child size) that the driver proceeded to load five adults into. The drive was probably a fair representation of Turkish driving skills, which looked to consist of driving twice the posted speed limit, using all lanes at any time and without signals, attempting to not use brakes when there are obstacles and exercising the horn as a verbose communication tool. Tammy quickly resorted to having headphones in and eyes closed, except for when she opened the and yelled an expletive as we almost barreled into two cars stopped to turn different directions.

Ultimately we arrived safely (and I can only assume early) at our hotel in Göreme - Eren Bey Cave Hotel.

It was ~10:30p at this point so we were happy to just check in and look back on the day...until they said “we don’t show a reservation for you” :-(. Turns out in our revised itinerary we’d done some “fuzzy math” in figuring out the new plan and were a day off in getting to Göreme.

The hotel was great in helping accommodate our mistake and put us in this room for our first night - which was huge and gorgeous!

Living Room