Trekking Göreme

One of the perks of travelling slow and going to many places is the ability we have to change our plans and suddenly take a day to just walk around.

But walking around cities isn't exactly what we prefer to do so whenever we can, we put on our trekking shoes and hit the hills to explore a bit.

With Uçhisar castle not so far from Göreme, we decided we wanted to get our behinds out of the urban environment and go for a walk along the snow covered valleys.

Sure, it was a bit chilly outside but with the sun intermittently making appearances, we were super happy to be wandering along.

The trail which left Göreme and wound its way through the Love valley and the White valley was fairly easy at first and gave us many amazing views of the fairy chimneys in their phallic glory (and now you know why they call it Love valley). Moving through the snowy trails we quickly stopped feeling the cold and with surroundings as beautiful as the ones we were seeing, it was hard to not be having a good time.

This was an apparently popular trail which we found online which, after the Love and White valleys, wound itself to Uçhisar and then looped back to Göreme through the Pigeon valley in a total of about 11km usually done in about 3 hours. It seemed easy enough...

That was until we seemed to have lost the trail...

Somewhere, somehow, what seemed to be an easy and obvious trail seemed to slowly be disappearing and we no longer knew if we were following human of animal footprints along the way.

Sure, we could hear that Uçhisar was not far in the distance and was surely just behind the next valley but the trail persisted in getting smaller and more awkward. At this point we sometimes had to fight the vegetation and almost had to crawl through bushes. We were a bit concerned but then again, we kept finding bike tracks which sure indicated this was the road to somewhere. Right?

A happy place

This all led to us reaching a point where the only way was through a narrow and ice covered little route up the side of a hill. At first we managed fairly fine but things were getting increasingly slippery the further up we went and, sure enough, we reached a place that was as genuinely slippery as it was dangerously up the side of the mountain.

Others might have turned back immediately but I decided to give it a go. That was stupid!

This was a mostly unmarked place where we had seen nobody for at least an hour and had a steep drop of maybe 30m onto rocks. I should not have tried to go up and this was very apparent as my shoes started sliding and I had to lay flat and hug the side of the mountain in order to no slide off.

A at this point was having a panic attack just behind me as she realized that I was in real danger.

Luckily I was smart enough not to be tempted to go up those last 10 meters of the trail as even if I magically didn't slide myself off the mountain, A might have done so by following me.

With our hearts racing, we turned back and retraced the road we had gotten there on.

Sure, it ended up being a 16km trek up and down a single path but at least we got a story and a lesson out of it.

You often hear stories about tourists overestimating their capabilities and getting lost in all sorts of places and you always think that they are absolute idiots. On that day we were the idiots. Things seemed to be so easy that we completely forgot about the fact that we didn't know the trek well, that there were almost no signals and even less people around. We got complacent and it could have cost us.

We definitely learned our lesson and I hope you learn from us!

Trek carefully!