August 24 Capaddocia - Fethiye (via overnight bus)

This was quite possibly one of the longest days of the trip. We woke up at 4 am for a morning hot air balloon ride, which even these pics do very little justice and had ourselves our very own mini bus and tour guide drive us to ALL the Unesco World Heritage sites (there were many) before boarding and overnight bus to the coast on Army Draft night....





They needed extra weight to pack down the balloon into it's carrying case...


Yunus, our tour guide

A congregation of men dancing in the parking lot of the bus depot. We boarded our bus wondering why there was such a celebration on a thursday evening. After young lad after young lad filed onto our bus, some with red rimmed eyes and other's laughing and eating chips and gossiping loudly in turkish, we began to surmise that perhaps it was draft night for the army. Turkey's army is compulsory and I have no words to explain the kind of celebration, for lack of a better word, that ensued at every bus station we stopped at picking up boys along the way until our bus was packed full of eager patriots. It was touching at first, to see an entire village come to the bus stop to send off the boys but after a couple of them became enamored with my very cute sister it began to seem like a very long night was ahead of us. And so it was.