The Place for Proposing

Today I am in Cappadocia, a landscape in the heart of Turkey, where there is a very famous bucket list experience: a hot air balloon flight over Cappadocia. An experience that’s so good, it has helped many people get married.

And I’ll tell you a quick tale. One of my friends, who is not always the most savvy traveller, was taking his longtime girlfriend on a special trip to Turkey, where he was planning to propose. And he went to Gatwick airport to take the flight to Turkey and found out that actually he had plane tickets from London Stansted, not from London Gatwick.

Anybody who’s flown over London and changed airports knows that they’re about four hours apart in rush hour traffic. So they missed the flight to Turkey and his girlfriend called her mother and said, “That’s it. I’ve had enough of this guy. You know, what’s taking me away on it. It’s always something. There’s always something. And he’s taken me to the wrong airport, this is about enough.”

And a week later, she’s calling her mom, “I’m going to marry him.” And that partly must be the charm of their relationship, and also the charm of my friend — Michael Ricards, I’ll name him — who she’s marrying, but also the charm of this landscape. ‘Cause he proposed in a hot air balloon flying over Cappadocia.

A Lunar Landscape

And Cappadocia is this place where these strange tubular creations pop out of the ground, these strange fairy chimneys, each of them completely unique yet in harmony with each other. Some are 40 meters high, like flagpoles are waiting and assignment Others look like they’ve been squashed by a giant who walked over. Many have been converted to caves where actually for many hundreds of years, people lived, especially Christians who were escaping persecution in the first few centuries after Christ.

So, this soft basalt rock has been formed over 30 million years, and it creates this landscape — it looks like you’re on the moon. It really looks like you are on the moon. When you’re on the ground, you can cycle around, you can go on a quad bike, you can drive, guys will take you driving. And it’s a very big place.

This landscape is 50 kilometers by 80 kilometers across. It’s a big place to explore. And when you’re there on the ground, you go into these caves and you go in and you feel this energy and you think, look how many people must have lived in this cave. You see Byzantine art on the wall. You see biblical portrayals. You see, in the same area, you see rock climbing clips where a new type of person has gone to explore the landscape.

And then, the real highlight is this balloon flight. Because when you’re on the ground, you can get a sense of this beauty. You can get a sense of how unusual everything is, how strange it is, and the force of nature that’s carved this landscape — but you can’t get a sense of how big it is.

Moments of Solitude, Beauty and Romance

And when you’re in the balloon, when you are soaring across Cappadocia, you see this landscape unfold and you see that it just goes on in every direction. As far as you can see, you see thousands upon thousands of these fairy chimneys. And it’s really a moment of solitude, a moment of beauty and also a moment of romance, where my friend got down on one knee and she said “yes”. And it was very well coordinated that all the other balloons gave a nice little pump on the gas in celebration that she said “yes”.

An experience that is also possible now. Turkey is one of few countries that has been pretty open about allowing visitors in, without the kind of backward restrictions that we see in some places where it’s just closed borders. Turkey has been very liberal about that. And the balloons are not really flying. So you can probably have a balloon flight over Cappadocia and be the only balloon in the sky. When you’re there also check out the opportunity to go horseback riding, check out some of the cooking classes that are available, where you can learn about the traditional cuisine. A couple of great hotels I can recommend there are the Museum Hotel, which is located inside a cave, but it’s also got a swimming pool. I’d say four and a half stars, fabulous place, but fully in keeping with the landscape. Also the Argos Hotel in Cappadocia.

And when you go, book your balloon flight for the first morning you are there. Sometimes the wind isn’t okay, so you’re not able to do it and so you can postpone it for the next day or the next day. So make sure that you’ve got it booked in for the first morning, for the first sunrise. So you have your balloon flight over Cappadocia, you enjoy that solitude, enjoy that romance, and enjoy one of the most remarkable landscapes I have ever seen.

I think anyone who goes there will agree that Cappadocia is one of the most remarkable landscapes you can ever imagine. And when you fly above it and see the scale of it — it’s really, really an empowering travel experience.