Balloon watching

Wake up time: 5am. As we are in Cappadocia, we really wanted to watch the hot air balloons. And as they start before sunrise, we had to hike up to the viewpoint early as well. So we climbed up to a cliff right next to the town center. The village was still lieing in the dark, but we could watch the minibuses driving around picking up customers and transporting the baskets for the balloons.
And suddenly, we heard the sound of the air getting blown into the balloons. It got brighter and all around us, we started seeing more and more balloons standing up. And one after the other left the ground. In the end, we counted about 70 colourful hot air balloons around us - what a fantastic view!
After this start, we had a quiet day. We cycled to Avanos in order to get new chains for the bikes. The first bikeshop only had very cheap ones that are not suitable for our type of touring, so we tried to find another one with the help of some locals. The second shop had one good quality chain - and an Afghani mechanic who spoke some very basic English and was called to translate. As they had never worked on a Rohloff setup before, they were totally confused and didn't know how to change the chain. So Herbert had to show them. In the end, it worked out and everyone was happy.
We checked out the town center, which was actually quite nice, and had some lunch. Interesting to see that prices are about 20-30% of the Göreme prices only because it's not touristy. Back at the hostel, we went for a swim in the pool and Herbert did some bike maintenance. Then we went for a walk around town again and hiked to the cliff again, this time to get a sunset view of the rock formations here.Read more