Day 188 Sat 21 April 2007 Goreme to Konya, Turkey

We check out of the beautiful Kelebek Hotel and discover we have our first puncture in 30,000kms, which fortunately is sufficiently slow to allow us to drive to a repair man who fixes it in 5mins and then its south towards Nigde where we visit the splendid C7 - C11 Eski Gumusler Monastery again cut into the rock and accessed thru a narrow passageway which opens to a central courtyard . The monastery has a large fresco’ed chapel, lots of graves some with bones and lots of passageways, tunnels and stairs in the rock along with wine cisterns, refectories, storerooms and sleeping quarters.

Then its a long boring drive across the plains to Konya, a thriving city of 3/4millon and the home of Celaleddin Rumi, one of the worlds great mystic philosophers and the founder in 1240 of the Mevlani sect of whirling dervishes. We visit a couple of mosques and the central park in the warm afternoon spring sunshine and have dinner on a rooftop overlooking the Mevlani Museum.