Current music:

The beautiful sound of our garden.

Yawns...
(This is a very long post... feel free to scroll down, if you just want to see pretty pictures -- or if this is your friends page, no doubt loads of blogs about Lee being the bestest Joseph...)

This whole waking up at 7am thing is starting to get to me.

My body's still on Turkish time it would seem, and as I woke up at about 8am for a week... it decides to keep on waking up early, even if I haven't really slept much the night before.

So now I'm pretty exhausted, but oh so delighted with how things are turning out.

Enough cryptics for now!

TURKEY WAS VERY COOL. I've definitely had more than enough ancient history to tide me over for a while though, that's for sure. I love 2000 year old unconquerable mountain-top cities as much as the next person... but I think next time I do some tourism, it'll be a little more refined, involving all-weather paths and chair-lifts to the tops of mountains.

So, my last stop in Turkey was Cappadocia, a region in central Anatolia, Asia-Minor. Basically, a kajillion years ago a bunch of volcanoes erupted, sending tons of ash up into the air. At the same time, there was tons of lava flow. So first the lava solidifed, then the ash fell, and finally some more lava splurged out and created basalt caps in some regions. The settling ash was kind of cool, because it fell at different rates and caused strata of different colours. You get some rocks that have layers of red, yellow and black -- iron oxide, sulphur and normal ash. The basalt on top also causes the 'penis effect', which I will now illustrate:

Penis Valley


They actually renamed it 'Love Valley' recently, for tourism reasons apparently. Men have (and still do) taken their wives there, to improve fertility... apparently...

So, because the shafts are made of soft rock/ash, eroson wears away at them very easily, while the heads made of basalt have a slower rate of erosion. And thus the penises.

The above view was taken... from the hot-air balloon! This involved waking up at 3:30am, for a 4am pickup to be taken to the depot thingee. We then had to drive around and find a launch site, and finally got into the air just after dawn. The basket seemed to be filled with a hushed awe as we lifted off. So, so graceful! I guess it's something to do with how natural the effect of hot air rising is. We were ascending at about 10ft a second for a while, which isn't that fast, but still pretty fast... and before we know it, we're 2000 feet off the ground. Then a moment later, we're in a valley. Our pilot is considered one of the best and most experienced pilots in the world, and definitely took every chance to convince us of that. We'd pick leaves off trees; ascend out of valleys, so close to the wall that I could push us away from it; sit on trees, just enough to bend the branches a little, but not break them...

I think this photo shows the kind of situation we'd end up in (although this is a very wide valley compared to some of the ones we ended up in...)

Red Valley


We rose over that little thingee on the left. And the next minute we're at this kind of altitude:

High Over Cappadocia


Anyway, it was a very pleasant experience. Highly recommended. You can see a few more cool photos here: http://photos.mrseb.co.uk/?moverse=digital/Turkey/2007/Cappadocia_Kapadokya

After that, we toured around a bit, saw some other pretty sights, like 'Imagination Valley', which is basically those penises, but ones that have eroded into interesting shapes -- like camels, or frogs, or... whatever your imagination draws for you! Also some cool houses carved out of the same rock. Some of the cities were 1500 years old... mostly early Christian stuff, and then later Muslim. We saw tons, and tons of churches.

This post is spiralling out of control.

I'll leave you with one of my favourite landscapes, from Istanbul, at Topkapi Palace, overlooking the Asian half of Istanbul and their beloved suspension bridge.

The Bosphorus, as seen from Topkapi Palace


Most of the 'good' photos from Turkey are here: http://photos.mrseb.co.uk/?moverse=digital/Turkey/2007/

There's some more snaps to come I think... humourous stuff, self portraits, more penises, etc.

Next up, hopefully Israel... after a month of hard grind to catch up with work, and make a little cash.