Prologue to our trip to Türkiye (Turkey)
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Nature’s beauty is truly phenomenal and is best exemplified by this region in Türkiye called Cappadocia- a magical destination that we visited during Christmas, 2019. That’s just before the pandemic hit all of us. I vividly remember planning our Christmas trip sitting in our balcony on a Saturday morning (June 2019), discussing on where our next travel destination should be. We had a few places shortlisted, out of which we decided to travel to Türkiye. (Our initial plan was to travel to Türkiye for 2 weeks, though we later modified the travel itinerary to include Egypt as well). Out of all the places we visited together to date, Cappadocia definitely is our personal favourite.
How to get to Cappadocia?
The majority of our expenses in our trip was our flight tickets as flights from Singapore to Türkiye are usually expensive but we did manage to get a great deal. We travelled from Singapore via Dubai in Emirates. After a 6hrs layover, we reached Istanbul and took a domestic flight (Turkish Airlines) to Nevşehir, Cappadocia.
Booking.comTravel Tips:
1.Booking your flights and accommodations months earlier can help you reduce your expense.
2: Long distance round trip flights in Emirates(also most airlines) are way cheaper that short distance one way journeys.
3. We have been using Agoda and Booking.com for our Hotel bookings for quite some time now. In case you are in search of apps that would offer great competitive prices as well as an easy to use platform to manage your hotel bookings, we’d highly recommend Agoda and Booking.com. Both these apps have a “free cancellation” option available on all their accommodations that really helped us plan and book our travel months in advance.(Please note, their “Cheapest deal for the day” offers are non refundable, these will be helpful for those who are looking for last min booking).
4. For flight bookings we use cheapflights.com.sg
Check availability of Accommodations in Agoda or Booking.com. We also loved using Airbnb. You can check out both these websites to book your stay based on whatever suitably best fits your budget.
Where to stay?
When in the land of fairy chimneys, stay in cave hotels. Cappadocia is so full of them. There are around 200 cave hotels in total around the region of Cappadocia. We do recommend spending at least 4 to 5 days in Cappadocia. To be honest, even though we stayed here for 6 days in total, we still felt the stay was short.
There is so much to explore and experience, we’re sure you’ll have an amazing stay here in Cappadocia. We chose two cave hotels during our stay. Lunar Cappadocia Hotel and Mithra Cave Hotel. We loved them both and highly recommended choosing them. Our rooms were beautiful and well maintained. We loved the breathtaking view from our room in Lunar Cappadocia Hotel as well as Mithra Cave Hotel. The breakfast was delicious and the staff at both these places were amazing and really helpful. Here, are a few photos of our stay.
All these cave hotels are nearby, more like adjacent buildings, so regardless of where you stay seeing the hot air balloons shouldn’t be an issue. So you can choose them accordingly based on whatever fits your budget. Staying in these cave hotels was an amazing experience.
Best time to visit Cappadocia!
If you have a look at all the blogs and websites, they usually suggest spring season ( April to June) & during the transition from fall to winter (September and October) as the best time to visit. Though we chose to travel to Türkiye during December and we loved the winter vibe. Winter travel to Türkiye is enchanting, we highly do recommend it, provided you can handle the land’s cold winters. During our stay at Cappadocia, the temperature varied from 0 to 8°C. We were lucky as we could catch snow showers. That was our first time experiencing snow showers and we loved it. There is always something absolutely magical when it comes to Snow and Ocean – these two are our personal favourites in Nature. Cappadocia is beautiful throughout the year so you can plan your trip in any season according to whatever suits you best.
However, please note that the hot air balloon can get cancelled depending on the weather and wind speed. Unfortunately during our trip, the hot air balloons were cancelled due to weather, but that said we still had an amazing time at Cappadocia coz the place has so much more to offer than just hot air balloons.
We had combined Türkiye and Egypt for our travel (14 days travel). To begin with however, we’ll focus on blogs to Türkiye first and then will tell you all about Egypt later.
This was our itinerary for 7 days in Türkiye:
Day 1: Reached Lunar Cappodocia Hotel. After enjoying a delicious buffet of Turkish breakfast, our day started with the Red Tour – this tour included exploring Goreme Open air musuem, Devrent Valley, the Fairy Chimney Valley and Uchisar Castle
Day 2: Green tour- This was our personal favourite. This tour included the following places- Kaymakli/ Derinkuyu (Underground City), Hike through the scenic beauty of the Ihlara Valley, Selime Monastry, Nar Crater lake and Avanos Pottery Village. We went to Kaymakli Underground city, this would depend on the tour group’s itinerary that decides which underground city you’ll be exploring that day.
Day 3: Moved to Mithra Cave Hotel. Goreme is a place filled with cave hotels. There are so many great cave hotels at Cappodocia, each one providing a unique stay experience that you’ll definitely be spoilt for choice. Hence, we recommend splitting your stay at different cave hotels, so you can experience stay at more than one cave hotel. On our third day, we explored Pasabag- the place with the most striking Fairy Chimneys and Took the ATV ride ( 4-5 hrs).
Day 4:
Climbed the Ortahisar Castle. Cappadocia is a great place to explore by walk. Each street more beautiful than the other, one can never have enough of Cappodocia. So, that’s what we did in the evening after our tours during the day, our evenings were kept aside to explore the different restaurants and streets shops of Goreme.
Day 5: We had our flight to Istanbul by evening, so we went exploring Goreme one last time where we saw our first snow showers. Had a little photoshoot at the Galerie Ikman Carpet store and shopped for turkish tea cups and more. On the day of departure we really wished we had more time to stay at Cappodocia as we were so in love with the place. If you are planning your travel to Türkiye, do plan it in such a way that you allot more time to staying at Cappodocia, you’ll not regret it!
Day 6: Reached Istanbul
To explore Istanbul, we had booked guided tours via VIATOR. You need not worry about picking the right guided tours, because most of them are really well organized with great guides. On our first day at Istanbul, we explored Hagia Sofia Mosque, Blue Mosque and Basilica cisterns. Most of our travels include using the public transport, so we used MRT/ Local metro card- Istanbulkart, a prepaid and rechargeable card to explore the city. Explored Galatta Tower at night.
Day 7:
Guided tour to Topkapi Palace, Dolmabahce Palace, explored cafes and bookstores and by evening we had our flight to Egypt.
Stay tuned, for there are more blogs coming up soon on our travel to Türkiye and Egypt. We’ll be including travel tips that helped us plan our travel. We write these blogs hoping it’ll help others like us plan their travels and enjoy learning more about the places they travel to. We usually explore places at our leisure and so our itineraries are never jam-packed.
PS: In case you decide to travel to Cappadocia during winter, we just wanted to let you know, the cave hotels are well equipped with a great heating system to suit the cold weather. So, travelling during the winters shouldn’t be a problem.
Happy Travelling!
Achu & Unni
