This is the sixth edition of Postcards from Lobster Bob. Lobster Bob is in Cappadocia, in central Anatolia, on the high volcanic plateau of central Turkey. The track is Land. The type is Wonder.
The vehicle is La Mula LAM-001-VE, the Land Jeep he has been losing arguments with since 2013. She has crossed Turkey four times. The last crossing took six hours of climbing followed by no climbing at all. La Mula brought him to the edge of Cappadocia. She did not bring him to the centre of it. The centre of it is forty metres below ground.
What follows is the postcard from four levels down.
Hola Mijo! Lobster Bob here...
La Mula LAM-001-VE took me into the Anatolian plateau from the south on a road that climbed for six hours and then stopped climbing. The land levelled out. The wind picked up. The fairy chimneys started appearing in ones and twos, and then in clusters, and then in their full count.
I have been in landscapes that looked engineered before. This one was. Not by us.
I parked La Mula at the edge of Göreme and walked into the village on foot. That is the correct way to arrive somewhere your machine has no business going. The chimneys are taller than the houses. Some of them have houses inside them. Some of them have churches inside them. The frescoes on the walls of those churches are from the sixth century. The soot from candles lit a thousand years ago is still on the ceilings. Someone never wiped it off. I do not blame them.
I stood inside one of those churches for a long time and said nothing. I am not a religious man. I was in the presence of something that had outlasted every empire that ever tried to use this plateau. The something was not the empires.
That was the surface. The next morning was the underneath.
The appointment was the underground city at Derinkuyu. The guide was a Turkish woman called Selin. She had been doing this work since before I had learned the names of half the destinations on my own map. She told me the city descends six levels into the rock. Twenty thousand people once lived in it with their animals, their food stores, their schools, and their wine presses. The round stone doors at each level were rolled into place from the inside.
I asked her how the people decided when to come back up. She said someone always stayed at the top to listen. When the listening said it was safe, the doors were rolled back. Sometimes that took weeks. Sometimes longer.
We went down.
Level one was a stable. Level two was the kitchens. Level three was the schoolroom. The ceilings got lower. The air got thicker. The lights were strung along the rock by extension cable. The cable was the only thing in there younger than a thousand years.
By level four I had stopped speaking. The walls were close. The roof was close. The air was warm in a way that was not weather. Selin was somewhere ahead of me and her torch was getting further away. I could hear my own breathing and the small sound of someone behind me drinking water from a bottle.
I turned around.
I told Selin at the top that I had to file something. She nodded the nod of someone who has seen this before.
The people who built this city lived down there for weeks at a time when the threat above was real. They raised children in it. They taught lessons in it. They pressed wine in it. I went four levels in and decided that was the correct number for me. I was carrying nothing they were carrying. No family. No animals. No history of what happened the last time they did not get to the doors quickly enough.
The school-yard fact for this edition is this. The fairy chimneys above ground at Cappadocia were not built by people. Volcanoes built them. Mount Erciyes and the other peaks across central Anatolia erupted millions of years ago and laid down ash hundreds of metres deep. The ash hardened into soft rock. Harder rock fell on top of it. The wind and water carved away the soft rock underneath and left columns of stone with caps balanced on top.
The people came afterwards. They saw what the wind had done, and they moved in. Then they went down.
I climbed back up to ground level and walked back to La Mula. She was where I had left her. She did not ask how it had gone. She knew. The chimneys went back to being chimneys. The city kept going six levels down without me in it.
The World is Your Classroom. Humility is Your Compass.
Passport ready, mijo? The world is not going to wait forever.
Lobster Bob, Founder & Scenic Tour Operator
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