Friday, December 10, 2010

A chai stand

 The locals set up tea stands everywhere the tourists goes. There are tea stands along the hiking trails, outside rock cut churches. It makes sense, one would linger at a stand, catch up with other groups from the same country or other countries, have a drink of cold water or a hot tea or some apple tea. We would spend a lot of time doing just that because our guide wants to be in good stead with the locals. It makes good business sense to patronise these local stands. Here is a family with some young kids, the man is brewing tea while the women works on the grape harvest.


 This happens to be a viewing spot and every day the tour buses would deposit a bunch of visitors a this spot. It's an ideal location for a tea stand. Here no permit is needed, no one ask any questions.
 Here comes a bus load of visitors. Most are bused in from the coast, they spend 6 hours getting to Goreme, a few hours looking around, then more hours at a carpet shop and off they go, back to the coast, where maybe their cruise ship is or a bus to another destination. Then they'll say, 'oh yes, we've been to Cappadocia.' That's the typical trip to Cappadocia. Cappadocia is a vast area and one can spend weeks here and not see everything.

We have a rented car and after finally found a gas station that had gas to sell, we stopped here for a tea and we went off to the side to hike through the Deverent valley to see some hidden rock cut church. Things work very differently in the interior. Maybe in Istanbul, one can make a little sense of things but the further one gets from Istanbul, the more authentic is the experience.

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