Our alarm went off at 4:30 this morning! After snoozing it once or twice we got up and put on our warmest clothes before being picked up and taken on a very bumpy van ride. Lucky Darren was feeling quite a bit better! (Although still sick) We arrived on site, where a bunch of massive hot air balloons were being blown up! We got given tea and biscuits while we watched them being inflated in the pre-dawn light. And it sure was cold! We could see balloons being inflated in all the fields around us, and watched as some of them started taking off! The ones in our field started to use their fire after a certain amount of inflation, and quickly came off the ground after that! We were led over to our balloon (Cihangiroglu Balloons) and got a ladder to get into the basket! There were five sections of the basket, with four for passengers, and the middle for the pilot and the gas tanks, and we were joined by the two people from our van and a group of about 15 or so people from an Asian tour group. Looking around, and looking at the basket, it was hard to believe that the balloon could lift the thing, but eventually we did start to lift off the ground and hover for a bit while the pilot passed one of the gas tanks back over to his ground crew, then he hit the gas (which helped keep me warm!) and we started lifting up into the sunrise! We were near the end of the massive group of balloons, so we had a pretty cool view of all the balloons drifting over the mountains. There were probably a hundred or more, it was so cool! We casually followed them, and watched as one from Royal Balloons went really close to some rocks and waited until the last minute to get over the mountain! We were flying pretty close to some of the rocks at this stage too, and got close enough to make a poor donkey stamp his feet in distress! We drifted slowly over some amazing rock formations and beautiful valleys, it was very pretty. The last bit wasn't too exciting, just a lot of flat paddocks, but it was still surrounded by pretty mountains. The whole ride took about an hour. We hovered a while there, then made our way over to a paddock that had a ute with a trailer, and we started drifting down, to try to land on the trailer. It mustn't have gone to plan, because the pilot hit the gas again and took us back up and the ute pulled the trailer into another paddock and we tried again. We awkwardly landed on the trailer, but were still hovering a bit much so it started slipping away again, and one of the guys hung on to the basket as it lifted off the ground a bit, which was funny! Next time they got it on the trailer though, and started securing it. They took the balloon down by pulling at ropes attached to the top before getting it low enough to be able to tackle the base of it and tie it up, then jumping on the balloon part, walking over it and pushing it to get most of the air out! We got helped out of our baskets, then went over to where the pilot and one of the workers shook up a couple of bottles of champagne and poured some champagne breakfast for everyone! We got a certificate with our names on it (though we had to write our own names!) then went back to the van and got taken back to the hostel. We jumped back into bed for a quick half hour snooze before getting back up and heading to the tourist agency for our next tour of Cappadocia! Darren was still not quite right, and wasn't looking forward to the idea of another overnight bus that night, so we extended our stay for one more night with the company then waited for the van. Our first stop was a photo stop with panoramic views over the Göreme region, where our tour guide, Sarkan, gave us some information on the area. Sarkan was very cool, and we could instantly tell we were in for a better tour today than yesterday! It's amazing the difference a great guide makes! After some photo-taking time, we drove out a while to the Derinkuyu (DarrenKya!) Underground City. This was very cool. We got taken down into the 11th century city, which had been carved into the rocks under the ground. We went down some very skinny tunnels, some you had to bend right over double for, through lots of cool rooms. We saw cooking pits, and possibly death trap pits, rolling stone doors with holes for arrows, huge deep wells and ventilation holes to the outside, communication holes to other levels of the city, a grave room where no bones have been found (probably a morgue), stables and a church, all built into this rock! It was crazy and absolutely amazing. If you're in the region, don't miss this! After a while exploring the old city, we went back up to ground level and came out into what seemed to be crazy bright sunlight! We had a toilet stop and headed back to the van, where the guide seemed to have lost the Koreans of the group! They turned up after a while and we made our way to the next stop, Yaprakhisar, or the Selime Monastery. This was a huge area of carved rock, from the 6th-8th century which used to all be secretly hidden in the rocks before all the erosion exposed it. We got some time here to climb up the rocks and explore inside the monastery, through the living and cooking rooms, through some amazingly carved school rooms, with two stories and massive carved pillars, then through to the church, where you could still see some paintings through the blackened rock from cooking fires. It was very cool. This area was also the inspiration for a Star Wars scene, but they couldn't get government permission to film there, so they actually filmed it in Tunisia. That's kinda cool. After exploring there, we got back in the van and drove up the road to the restaurant we were stopping at for lunch. We got some yummy mezes again to start, then got to choose our mains from some examples they had set out to show everyone. We chatted with some of the crew from our group, and got some sour cherry juice called 'Daren', and got some mandarins for dessert. They were all very green, and looked unripe, but apparently this type of mandarin is supposed to be like that, because they were sweet and delicious. From there we drove another half hour or so to Ihlara Valley, where we were going for a gentle hike for about 4km. We went down the steps on the side of the cliff and came to a cave church called Ağaçaitı Kilisesi. The carvings in here were even more amazing than the ones yesterday, but a lot of them were falling off and falling apart, apparently mostly from the use of camera flashes! So now flash is forbidden in there, though photos are not. From there we walked the rest of the way down to the Melendiz River, which we followed along. It was a very pretty end-of-autumn scene along there, with all the leaves on the ground and the trees almost bare. Darren asked the guide what season it was at the moment, to which he replied "Autumn". And Darren said "oh, Ottoman." Hilarious. We stopped at a little tea house about half way, were we hung out with the Turkish couple from our group, and the many ducks, in a little hut on the water. It was very nice. As we kept walking along the trail we were chatting with a couple from Alaska and finding pictures in the rock faces, when we decided we should probably walk faster as the rest of the group had gotten a bit ahead of us and we couldn't see them anymore. Then we came to a crossroads... Up to the cave church, or straight to the valley we were meeting at... The Alaskan guy ran up the stairs to see if they were up there, and Darren ran ahead to see if they were up there, and the girl and I kept walking at a leisurely pace. Darren found them first, so we kept going straight. We caught up at the end of the road where the van was waiting for us, and got back on the van for the hour-ish drive back towards Göreme to our final stop, Pigeon Valley. I had a bit of a snooze on the van, then when we got there, Sarkan gave us some information about the pigeons and their importance in the area, symbolically to both Muslims and Christians, as well as their poop being used as a fertilizer and in plaster to make the frescoes strong for the churches. While we were here we ran into the Macedonian/Syrian couple from the bus here, who were in another group, and had a quick chat with them while we looked at all the pigeon holes (and even the three-story pigeon apartment) in the sides of the cliffs. We got back on the van and headed back to Göreme when I realised I didn't have my phone!! I couldn't find it, and when we told the bus, one of the Korean girls found it under their seat! So lucky! Must have dropped it while I was sleeping!! Oops! So we made it back and said goodbye to Sarkan and the rest of the group then Darren and I headed over to the ATM for some cash, before going for a walk to find some dinner. We picked a place that had a fire and I got a stuffed eggplant and Darren got a pizza, and we chatted with the owner who made us up a couple of special teas. After dinner, when we had warmed up a bit, we headed back to the hostel and cuddled into the warm blankets to watch some YouTube videos, but the wifi wasn't working! So Darren went up to reset the wifi, which also made the lifts turn off and on, but got it working, so we watched some funny videos for a while before going to sleep.