Tour of Highlights of Cappadocia with Lunch

This was a wonderful experience. Our guide Rana was very knowledgeable and looked after us very well. The driver was also excellent. Our appreciation for Cappadocia region was enhanced by this full day tour.

Every thing went well and according to the plan... the underground city is amazing!!! Our tour guide Rana was very cool Too

This amazing historic city is rich in geological and human history. The toure guy Ali was very knowledgeable, we enjoyed evey moment of this tour.

We only had one day in Cappadocia so time is of the essence and we are so glad that we were able to go to both the Goreme Open Air Museum AND the Underground City on one day with this tour, along with other iconic spots of course like the Monks Valley etc. Before booking this, I have done comparison with other tours at length and I believe the only site we have missed from the usual Red tour was the Imagination Valley. But personally I'd prefer to see the Underground City than a few odd shaped rocks so I was really pleased with my choice. The guide was very informative and friendly. Lunch was good. Highly recommend this tour!

Ali is such a great guide, and this tour is specifically designed for small groups. If you haven't researched much yet, Cappadocia has two main tour routes covered universally by almost every company - the Blue and the Red. These contain specific sites and monuments. Ali has managed to take the best of both and create an absolutely marvelous overall tour, covering so much in just one day, and still being done in time to explore on your own! There are a few tourist traps involved in a pottery 'museum' and optionally a Tukish rug co-op, but overall a very great experience!

We had an absolutely lovely day with our tour guide Ali. He was clearly very knowledgeable about Turkey, and could go into specifics about every little thing that we asked. Ali was also very smart about navigating through the crowds, and made sure that we could get through the express routes. The tour itself was incredible. The views from the look out points are incomparable to anything else on earth. The evidence of Turkey's ancient civilizations is captivating and would be an anthropologists dream. I highly recommend the visit, and the tour!

I booked this tour because I wanted to get a quick overview of Cappadocia early during my trip. Lots of websites and local travel bureaus offer Red Tours and Green Tours and even Blue Tours, but this tour promised the highlights - and it delivered. My guide was Ali. He drove me and a young couple around Cappadocia in a modern car - no bus or minibus on this tour! In terms of the itinerary, it turns out the tour combines all of the Red Tour with the biggest highlight of the Green Tour, so Ali has really cherry-picked the best of the best things to see. He is extremely knowledgeable, friendly, and he made sure we always had lots of time at each stop to explore, take photos, and enjoy the scenery. He answered any question thrown at him in detail. In terms of the sights - the Goreme Open Air Museum is the first stop. It's fascinating, but I must admit I found the scenery and the atmosphere much more important than the details of the churches and the saints. I'm an avowed non-believer. Lots of things to learn, including about the difference between frescoes and seccoes, local history and customs, and more. Afterwards, the Greek cave village was similarly stunning, with a more recent history of significant interest. The fairy chimneys were everything I'd hoped for and more a lovely half hour walking around in a landscape that looks unique and magical and perhaps a bit phallic, while the imagination valley was a brief but pleasant diversion. Lunch took place at a huge buffet restaurant, evidently popular with locals and tour groups alike. The all-you-can-eat food was first class, service was professional, and it was clear that this place was no tourist trap. The pottery museum and shop was surprisingly interesting. Lots of craftsmanship on display, but it's the way the museum halls have been dug into the landscape that stunned me most of all - if archeologists dig up this place in a thousand years, they will conclude it is an underground temple for the worship of pottery. Ali handed us over to a museum guide, who did a fair job of highlighting modern pottery, craftsmanship, and whetting appetites for buying things, without ever straying from delivering a sales pitch into hard selling. I felt no pressure to buy, but nonetheless did buy some pieces in the end. For Western tourists like me, it's a relief that everything had prices marked and there was no expectation or possibility of haggling - and the prices were nothing if not fair. Finally, the underground city. This is where the tour didn't quite go to plan: despite having visited caves and tombs and underground places in various countries, the underground cities of Cappadocia turned out to be a bit too claustrophobic for me. I can duck, but one tunnel could only be completed on hands and knees I'm a large fellow, which was not comfortable and quite alarming. Ali picked up on my difficulty and asked whether I wanted to continue. In the end, I felt that any more such tunnels would be one step too far out of my comfort zone, and I really did not want to risk panicking further inside. The route through the underground city is linear and one-way and takes you deeper and deeper. Ali was an absolute star at helping me return to the surface against the flow - he'd dash through all the bottlenecks, and tell me when it was clear for me to come through. So, yeah. Underground city: beautiful, atmospheric, mysterious, fascinating, and not really ideal for big, tall and claustrophobic people. Significantly more challenging than catacombs in Malta, volcanic lava tunnels on various islands, former mines in Austria... that said, I loved the bits I did get to see, and I would absolutely recommend visiting the city with a guide especially if you are a solo traveller like myself. If you're visiting Cappadocia, this tour will be a fantastic way to see the highlights, in a small group, with fantastic and helpful guides. Highly recommended.