Kapadokya Ranch, November 15, 2021, Steppe FM
It's already been two weeks since we arrived at Kapadokya Ranch. We are in the heart of Turkey, lost between three villages of Cappadocia. Nico, Hélène and their six year old son Pablo welcome us here in exchange of help on the farm.
The place is incredible. We stay in a bungalow in the middle of horses, which walk quietly between the outcrops of volcanic tuff. A hundred meters further on we come across a goat house with fifteen animals, and next to it a hen house for the geese and chickens. Finally there is the terrace that leads directly to the house of Hélène and Nico. The house is dug in a huge rock. You can enter through the saddlery, a tree-shaped room carved in the rock where dozens of saddles are kept. Further on, we arrive in the living room-kitchen: a huge room where the pillars are mixed with the ceiling to form a liana intertwining. The house has two other floors. At the top there is another door where you can go directly outside thanks to the topography of the land. In short, this cave-house is fantastic, we feel like we are in a half-elf half-dwarf housing in an imaginary universe.
Nico and Hélène are two travelers on horseback. Nico settled in Cappadocia more than 15 years ago and Hélène joined him a few years later after working as an equestrian guide in Mongolia and Afghanistan. We can say that between Nico, Hélène and their 22 horses we are rather well surrounded to continue the preparation of our future expedition on horseback.
We arrived in November, the end of the working season for the horses. So, during our first week here, we had to unshod all the horses. We had been lucky enough to have done it before, but only once, and that was more than a year ago in Toulon with the farrier Jean-Marie. Every morning, while the horses were eating, we were able to train. At the beginning we took more than an hour and a half per horse, taking many breaks to rest our legs which must maintain the hoof of the horse while remaining in the position of the chair. We would end up sweating, with trembling legs. Fortunately, each day we were making progress. By the end of the week we were able to unshod and trim (i.e., flatten and clean the hoof) in about 20 minutes.
Alongside this, there is all the daily work of the farm that we do with their employee Rifat: feeding and taking care of the horses, goats, poultry, dogs and cats. In the afternoon we have to take the horses to graze a few kilometers away and go to look for them at nightfall. And then there are always new projects: digging a pond for the geese, camouflaging and protecting the tunnel greenhouses, which are used to store straw, grain and hay, with a mixture of clay, straw and dried manure...
Although the days are full, we sometimes find time for an afternoon to visit this fabulous region. For the moment we have visited four valleys: Nico drops us off by car a few kilometers from the Ranch and we return through the valleys and the canyons dug by the erosion. These hikes are great. In addition to the fabulous spectacle of nature, the different shades of rock, the unthinkable shapes of the eroded cliffs and the complete absence of tourists there are the numerous troglodyte dwellings. Most of these places are abandoned, so with a headlamp you can dive inside the rock, crawl under tons of stone, climb ladders dug into the wall and finally get up in the vast rooms of a dovecote overlooking the valley below.
At the ranch there is also a whole social life. We meet new people, friends of Hélène and Nico. We often meet our Turkish friends with whom we made the logistics of the hike for long evenings drinking the wine they produce and playing music, we discuss travels and horses with Hélène and Nico and play with little Pablo. The meals that we all prepare more or less in turn are generally very good, most of the products (vegetables, cheese, meat...) come directly from the farm.
In short, after two weeks of life here, we are far from being bored, there are always thousands of things to do and since a few days Hélène, Nico and Pablo left on vacations... So we have, with Rifat, the responsibility of the farm and the horses to train us to ride! [to be continued]
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