The Rocks Are the Stars at the Göreme Open Air Museum

Strolling through the other-worldly landscape at the open air museum

I know it's not everybody's idea of great time to go strolling amongst weird rock formations. But it is mine! Hence: my day at the Göreme Open Air Museum.

Walking from the "downtown" area of Göreme, which, as I said, is just a row of tourist-friendly restaurants, souvenir shops, cafes, hookah lounges, and carpet stores. It is there to serve the tourist horde who just wants to get in, take their hot air balloon ride, take a bunch of instagram-worthy photos, and move on to the next place where everyone is going. But there were no balloon ascents todays, so the hordes had to come out with a Plan B.  

But the number who walked the mile from the downtown to the open air museum. Maybe there were more, but I think I only saw two or three other people going by self-hoofing rather than tourist van. And that's OK. Other people on the sidewalk just would've slowed me down. And even at my advanced age, I remain a very fast walker.

The scenery was getting progressively weirder the closer I got to the park.

If the rock formations are this interesting where the looking is free, what would the open air museum look like?

Camels and donkeys available outside the museum area.

I don't know if, like the llamas you see in Ecuador and Peru, these are there only for photo ops -- which means you should tip to take a photo -- which I didn't do because I was looking down from a great height and, at the time, I didn't know how to get down there so I may been depriving some poor local man of his livelihood. Or the camels could be there for riding. Which I would not want to do. Which means taking a photo was OK.

I eventually did figure out how to get down there and saw lots of tourists taking picture and the man holding the camels' reins wasn't asking for tips, so I don't know why they were there.

The rocks, on the other hand, never demand a tip for a tourist to pose with them.

Neither do dogs.

And, again, still not inside the Open Air Museum.

But this is the way to get to the ticket booth.

Admission paid and now inside the pay-to-play part of the tour.

Do you prefer that rock tower as pictured above, sans tourists. Clean? Or merely lifeless? Or do you prefer this rock tower with tourists:

Alive but the sea of tourist humanity detracts from the simple elegance of nature's carving.

I shot this one from inside a cave area looking out into the sun.

The light effect was bizarre. Here's the dark interior of the cave.

This is a part of ancient church. You are not allowed to take photos inside the churches, despite the beautiful and well-maintained wall paintings of Biblical scenes and assorted saints. And maybe the ban on photography is the reason those wall paintings are so well-maintained.

More weird lighting effects:

Photography is allowed in this cave area because there is no wall art. Only rocks.

Well, and selfie-taking tourists.

Another church. Another set of beautiful wall paintings. Another place where interior photography is verboten.

This is the "Dark Church," or the "Karanlık Kilise," with the most magnificent interior art of all the cave churches in the open air museum. 

Shooting inside is bad. But shooting outward is OK. Tourists are not art that can be damaged through incessant photography. If that were the case, instagram would go out of business.

The Open Air Museum was great. Just not photogenic.

Actually, it is very photogenic. But the most photogenic part -- the large number of churches carved into the rocks several centuries ago --  cannot be photographed due to the risk to the priceless "cave paintings," which truly are works of art. The "Dark Church" was so awesome that there was a separate admission charge. You can see some of the art inside at this link: https://www.cappadociahistory.com/post/dark-church-karanl%C4%B1k-kilise

As for this rock formation, do you prefer to view it with a cherry tree in the foreground:

Or with wild blueberry bushes?

At this point, the skies were getting darker and the promised rain looked like it was about to fall. Time to skedaddle back to the safety of my cave hotel.

But not before noticing an early Christmas Tree in the Göreme downtown.

That was unexpected. But not the rains that started falling very hard (with hale!) once I got back to the hotel.

Göreme Is a Tourist Town ... And That's OK

What you see when you walk out the front gate of my cave hotel

Let's cut to the chase: Göreme is a tourist town. It exists to show off on the most beautiful, impressive, unique landscapes on Planet Earth to hordes of tourists who travel here from all over the world. And that's OK. There is so much beautiful space, and the tourist hordes travel in very concentrated little tourist bubbles, there is enough Göreme for everyone to enjoy, with only occasional, but brief, delays waiting for the horde to move on to the next instagram photo spot.

That is the view from the third floor of the cave hotel in which I am staying, the Göreme Cave Lodge. The rooms above the first floor are not actual caves, but are merely cave-like. Here's another angle from above:

Small enough to count as a "boutique" hotel.

I don't even have to leave the grounds of my small hotel to see the weird and wonderful landscape of Turkish Cappadocia.

Big giant mega-Turkish flag in downtown Göreme.

Göreme is a tourist town, meaning the downtown is filled with tourist-focused Turkish restaurants, souvenir shops (not all of which sell carpets), and coffee houses, with the side streets dominated by boutique hotels, all of which claim to have cave lodging but only a precious few count as actual, real caves instead of cave-like.

Regardless, the landscape is the star of the show.

I have tours booked for the next two days in Göreme. Tomorrow (Tuesday) is the Red Tour, focused on the hoodoos that in Cappadocia are called "fairy chimneys." The day after that (Wednesday) is the Green Tour, focused on the underground city, which is the main reason I am here in Göreme. But, today, I am a free man in Göreme. Unfettered and alive. So I decided to take in the Göreme Open Air Museum by myself, as opposed to getting a quick look-see with my tour group on tomorrow's Red Tour.

The coffee houses, doner kebap restaurants, and carpet shops are getting scarce, so I must be getting close.

I think those are grape vines, but I am not botanist. Or a horticulturist. I've never even tried to lead a horticulture.

I think you can do a horseriding tour through these rock formations, but I'm not much of a horse-rider. I think they even do camel tours, but I think those are more a stunt than an actual way to see the landscape. But if I were horsine (which is not an actual word although it is often used as if it were) (I'm just linguistically .. brace yourself for it ... horsing around), I would be tempted to do a horse riding tour through the Cappadocia landscape. But I'm not. So I won't. But, still, I will hoof it the rest of the way to the Göreme Open Air Museum. 

Cave Man Sleeping in Cave Next Four Nights

This is cave where Cave Man sleep..

I am Göreme, Turkey. This is the Cappadocia region in Central Anatolia, the Asian part of Turkey. Göreme is known on the tourist trail primarily for two things: hot air balloon rides (no thank you) and cave hotels. I am staying in a real, genuine cave hotel here in Göreme: the Göreme Cave Lodge. Four of its rooms are the real deal, cave-wise, and I snagged one of them.

The main airport for the Cappadocia region is in Nevşehir. 

It's a modern looking terminal, which doesn't match the fact that this is ancient region, with Cappadocia even getting name-checked in the Bible. It also is strange in that you walk down the stairs out of the airplane and, instead of going into the terminal, your luggage is put on a conveyor belt in a covered area outside. Unless you started your flight internationally. My bags did not go through customs in Istanbul when I transferred from the inbound Sarajevo flight to the outbound Nevşehir flight, which meant they got "inspected," i.e., put through a giant machine, in Nevşehir.

And here is where I am staying in Göreme.

It is one of the few places with actual cave rooms, which are carved directly from volcanic tuff. There are lots of "cave-like" room constructed from stones carved from volcanic tuff, which gives a cave-like atmosphere, but "constructed from carved stones" is not the same thing as "carved from stone."

You can see the difference in the hotel's interior exterior. Yes, I said interior exterior. The hotel is open air and, inside the hotel's wall are interior walls. These are the exterior walls within the hotel's interior, thus "interior exterior."

These walls are constructed of carved stones.

This is the view from the inside looking toward the entrance:

But my room, Room 6, is carved from stone, not constructed from carved stone. So this is a genuine cave:

A lot more sumptuous than you would have thought sleeping in a cave would be.

These rooms are supposed to exceptionally cool during the hot Cappadocia summer. But it's fall now, so "hot summer" is not one of my concerns.

This is the neighborhood. The city of Göreme looks quite interesting. Lots of very, very narrow streets, and steeps climbs and descents, that I have no idea how the over-sized extended 14-seat airport shuttle van was able to navigate.

Here is the view from the third floor of the hotel:

And here is the instagram spot:

Every hotel in town has to have one because it's what the public demands now in 2026. This is one of the places in town to see the hot air balloons ascend each morning (6:00 a.m. -ish) on the days they ascend. Tomorrow's ballooning has been cancelled due to weather, so that will be a sight for another day. I'm not planning on ascending in a hot air balloon while here, but I do want to watch the hundreds of hot air balloons take off one morning. But it won't be tomorrow morning.

Aerial Tram to the Most Infamous Bobsled Run in the World

The bobsled run looked differently during the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Olympics

The bobsled and luge track from the 1984 Sarajevo Olympics is probably the most infamous bobsled run in the world. It also is, perhaps, the only bobsled run that has become a major tourist attraction after its use in the Olympics. No one visits Lake Placid, or Salt Lake City, or Vancouver, or Nagano, Japan, to see an historic bobsled run. They do in Sarajevo. But not for reasons that have anything to do with the 1984 Olympics.

The best way to get to the bobsled run is to take the aerial tram. And if you can take an aerial tram to get somewhere, why wouldn't you?

The lower station for the aerial tram is a short walk from my hotel. So hoof it I did.

In less than 10 minutes, I arrived at the lower station.

The tram ride up was a bit of an adventure. About one-third the way up, the car stopped. It probably was stopped for less than two minutes (I didn't time it), but it felt longer. Then the car (and all cars) started backing up. I was heading back down the mountain. I thought: well, this at least is safer. But right before the car got back to the station, it stopped again, only briefly this time, and then started moving back up the mountain in the correct, intended direction.

More fun that a cable car ride should be!

Second time was the charm and soon I was at the summit of aerial tram line:  Mount Trebević.

Time to search for a bobsled track. You can't hide one very easily, I would think, but I did not know how far from the tram station the track was going to be. I just knew what I was told and that the aerial tram was the best way to get to the now-decommissioned bobsled course.

I don't know the purpose of this miniature train that looked like Barney Rubble's car from The Flintstones. But if you are going to make a train where each car looks like one of Barney Rubble's cars, do you need a purpose? Just a Barney and Betty, I would think.

In searching for the bobsled course, I saw the Olympics rings and thought I must be getting warmer.

Which is ironic because it was a little colder up on the mountain than it was down in the city. At least the very light rain had abated.

Views were nice. Typically views are nice on mountaintops on the edge of cities.

And soon, not far from the Olympics, as I surmised, I spied it:

A section of the graffiti-covered bobsled track.

This track is known now among the tourist set for the fact that it is almost completely covered in what the intelligentsia call "graffiti art." The real history is far more sordid and far more tragic.

 

This was a battleground during the Bosnian War of the 1990's.

This looks like a segment of a parallel track -- probably the luge track -- collapsed in decay or from the war.

This is a strange point where it looks like there was a switch between the bobsled and luge tracks.

However, given that each of the tracks were made from concrete, it doesn't seem like the tracks could be switched, so I do not know why this looks like an intersection.

This is now a place for a peaceful walk through a quiet forest. It was not anything like that 30 years ago.

This was the front line during the war. With its strategic high ground, this was a deadly sniper's nest during the war. Artillery and mortars were lobbed down on the city of Sarajevo from here. This area also was extensively mined, so even after the war ended, peaceful strolls through the forest were not feasible,

I am guessing that this area, being on the internal border within Bosnia of the Federation and the Republic Srpska, this high ground was controlled by the forces loyal to Slobodan Milošević.

(Ethnic wounds here have not healed here. The other day, when asking a question about the Bosnian War, I referred to one of the sides as being the "forces of Milošević," and the guide to whom I asked my question immediately said that he understood and appreciated my use of that particular phrasing rather than using an ethnic label.)

Let's rub some salt in the open wound by taking a selfie:

I finally reached what I am guessing was the end of the track:

The reason I am guessing that this was the end is because, at this point, the track starts going slightly upward. Bobsleds don't climb. They descend. So this must have been the end. Only problem? No signage as to how to get back. And my google maps was not working in the middle of the forest. So I did the only thing logical that I knew would be a sure way out.

Backtrack.

I ignored this bit of graffiti art on my dissent:

Then I overheard a guide telling the group he was leading that his bit of graffiti was done by a professional artist from Slovenia. It does look more professional than the other "graffiti art," which looks a lot more "graffiti" and a lot less "art."

The ascent up the track was more tiring than the walk down. Plus my tired legs were even more tired. Luckily, I soon saw the aerial tram overhead and I knew I was getting close to the summit.

Here is an old style aerial tram car that was probably a more "interesting ride".

No longer being lost in the woods -- and, more importantly that I am now seated instead of walking uphill -- I finally can smile.

 

In honor of the 1984 Sarajevo Olympics.

This is the end of the Sarajevo part of the vacation. I am too tired to go out walking to a nice restaurant for some Bosnian cevapci (uncased sausages made from either ground beef or a mixture of ground beef and lamb). Tomorrow I catch an airplane to whisk me off the Asian Turkey part of my vacation adventure.