You’ll be picked up at your hotel in İstanbul and transferred to the airport for a morning flight to Cappadocia, where you’ll be met by your guide and driver. Begin your full-day tour at the Goreme Open Air Museum.

The Open Air Museum resembles a vast monastic complex of scores of refectory monasteries placed side-by-side, each with its own fantastic church.

This is the first site visited by most travelers in Cappadocia, standing as it does in the very center of the region with easy access from all directions. It features the finest of the rock-cut churches and beautiful frescoes with colors that still retain their original freshness.

Esentepe village offers an amazing collection of natural and cultural marvels. In a stroll through the village you’ll see many of the uniquely shaped fairy chimney rocks that were naturally crafted by the elements.

The magnificent landscape around Göreme was created by solidified lava streams, ash, and tuff stone, all dating from the Neocene period. Thousands of years of continual erosion has given the area the look of a lunar landscape. The fairy chimneys feature great color variety, with hues from white to yellow, pink, grey, and black.

Pasabag Valley, or Monks Valley, is located on the road to Zelve. Marvel at the remarkable earth pillars here, in the middle of a vineyard. A chapel dedicated to St. Simeon and a hermit’s shelter were built into one of the fairy chimneys with 3 heads.

Just a 10-minute drive from Göreme the Devrent, or Imagination, Valley appears as a rock-formed zoo. As you walk along the trail you’ll see a landscape filled with snakes, camels, seals, and dolphins and whatever else your mind chooses to make of the twisting, curving rocks. There are also small fairy chimneys here – the rock pillars that are so distinctive of Cappadocia.

Avanos is situated on the banks of the Kizilirmak, the Red River, about 5 miles from Goreme. The Kizilirmak is the longest river in Turkey and supplies the clay for the local pottery.

It is by this river that the red clay is found that supplies the raw ingredient for Avanos’s claim to fame. Pottery has been produced in the Avanos area for centuries and some of the techniques still used date back to Hittite times, around 2000 B.C.

At the end of the tour you’ll be transferred to the Cappadocia airport for an evening flight to Istanbul. When you arrive in Istanbul you’ll be transferred to your hotel in the city.