Cappadocia in a Desert Dress

On Tuesday 17th February we woke up in our gorgeous King Suite with Spa Bath (room 303) at the Latona Stone Palace in Cappadocia. This area of Turkey is particularly famous for hot air balloon flights (our hotel had lots of amazing photos on their profile showing the morning balloons!) and, following our birthday trip to Marrakech where we also didn't manage a ballon flight, I'd really been hoping to be able to take a hot air balloon ride here in Cappadocia. Sadly, the weather was completely against us and we saw no hot air balloons at all from our breakfast in the hotel's rooftop restaurant!

After breakfast, we went for a wet and windy walk and had lunch in McDonalds (so classy!) before getting picked up to go horse riding for an hour. This was booked on GetYourGuide for £25.84. There are various excursions to do in the area on the various GetYourGuide and Airbnb Experiences type apps - and this really reminded me of our super touristy recent tour day in Marrakech. But also, sometimes, a super touristy tour is quite simply tried and tested for a reason - which was certainly our experience here. I was pretty nervous, but our guide (who walked and lead the horses for us) was really generous and understanding with me. Tiger, in contrast, loved every minute and wasn't the least bit nervous. We were on our own with our guide but we also saw other bigger groups and people on quad bikes in the distance!

After our horse riding we headed back to the hotel and then out again for a crazy GetYourGuide photoshoot with me in a so-called bright red parachute dress! Unfortunately, the dust had gotten in my eyes a bit from the horse riding but I think I just about got away with it with the photos.

We were picked up from our hotel by the photographer and his team at 4pm as we were aiming to shoot at sunset. We had the photographer, his wife and an assistant so it really felt like I was a fashion model - including the slightly un-glamorous part of getting changing in a pop up toilet tent!

During the shoot, Tiger got in on the behind the scenes action too of pulling out and rippling the dress for these amazing results. It was so much fun and only £83 (this price is for a group of 2) so despite the fact we didn't manage to get up in a hot air balloon this really made our day in Cappadocia.

Back safe and sound in our hotel, we filled our spa bath up and sang our hearts out to KPop Demon Hunters songs playing from the tv in our room. I do wonder if Tiger's memories will remember singing in a fancy bath, the horse-riding or me in a crazy dress the most. Part of me suspects that our night in the spa bath will be firmly etched in her memories!

On Wednesday 18th February, we set off on our travels again, this time with AJET with whom we had a flight for 4103 TRY (£67). We had to get on the 09:30 - 11:00 flight from ASR (Kayseri) to SAW (Sabiha Gokcen International Airport) so our day started pretty early with our airport transfer bus picking us up from our hotel at 06:15! Our end destination was Denizli, but you can't fly there directly with any airline - you have to transit through Istanbul (either SAW or IST airports) so this Wednesday was quite a long day of traveling for us.

After flight number one, in our five hours of transit time we went out to the Viaport Asia Outlet shopping mall by taxi (about 10 minutes and about 200 TRY / £3.30). Here, we found the cinema but then quickly realised that all the movies were in Turkish so that wouldn't have worked for us! However, right next to the cinema there was a bowling alley with various gaming machines so, as the only guests (!) on a random Wednesday, we spent time in there before heading back to the airport.

I should also say that it was freezing and wet and we only had one pair of shoes each so we also wrapped up as much as we could in every single bit of clothing we had in our tiny backpacks! The actual Viaport shopping mall was ok, it had some restaurants and was a reasonable place to kill time but I otherwise wouldn't mark it out as a must go to place in Istanbul!

The onward flight from Istanbul (SAW) to Denizli (DNZ) was at 16:55 - 18:00 so we took a taxi back, checked back in and were back on our way. After the flight, we were very quickly out of Denizli airport and into our transfer by 18:15.

The transfer had been arranged by our hotel, the Venus Suite Hotel (£44, and booked via Booking) which we were safely checked into and off to bed by just after 7pm. The weather actually also looked a bit dismal upon our arrival but the absolutely fabulous news was that the weather was looking simply perfect the next day for a sunrise hot air balloon flight!