Fairy chimneys, Cappadocia (10)

Dig this: Cappadocia, man, it’s a wild dreamland in the middle of Turkey, a busted-open sea of stone waves and honeycomb hills, all sculpted by fire and rain and time-millions of years, volcanoes blowing their tops, ash falling like the end of the world, then rain and wind carving it all down to soft white tuff, these wild, ribbed ridges rising under the blue Anatolian sky.

You roll into Göreme National Park and you’re in the heart of it, a UNESCO wonder since ‘85, almost a hundred square kilometres of rock and memory, where people lived inside the stone, carving homes, churches, whole villages right into the cliffs. The fairy chimneys stand like sentinels, some crowned with basalt hats, others hollowed out into sanctuaries painted with Byzantine saints, their colours still burning after a thousand years.

Underground, it gets crazier-whole cities, tunnels winding eight stories deep, places like Kaymaklı and Derinkuyu, where early Christians hid from Roman and Arab armies, pressing wine and oil, keeping animals, living in the dark and waiting for the sun. Above ground, the valleys twist and shine, every corner a new shape, every cave a story.

You stand there with dust on your boots, the wind in your face, and you know you’re in a place where the road never ends-just keeps diving into the rock, into history, into the wild blue forever.