Cappadocia is a high plateau in central Turkey where two volcanoes, Erciyes and Hasan, once covered the land in ash, and where the wind and rain have since carved that soft rock into a landscape of cones, towers and ridges. The locals call the pointed pillars fairy chimneys, and some of them stand twenty metres tall, topped with a cap of harder stone. The rock is easy to dig, and for thousands of years people have cut homes, churches, storerooms and pigeon lofts into it, so that whole hillsides are riddled with doorways and windows, and some of the valleys look inhabited by ghosts.
Göreme, a village of a few thousand people, is the usual base, a cluster of cave houses and small hotels in a valley of pink and cream rock. Early Christians arrived in the first centuries and, during the long years of Arab raids and later iconoclasm, carved chapels with painted ceilings into the cliffs. Many of the frescoes still survive in the Göreme open-air museum nearby, and the colours of the saints' robes, in red, blue and ochre, are a surprise inside the dim stone rooms. Further afield, villages like Uçhisar, with its huge castle rock, and Avanos, famous for pottery made from the red clay of the Kızılırmak river, make good stops.
At dawn the sky fills with hot-air balloons, dozens or hundreds of them rising from the valleys in the first light, and it is one of the sights that justifies the early alarm. For motorcyclists the area is a delight, with well-surfaced roads that wind between valleys, rise over low ridges and drop through villages, and long views across a landscape of strange shapes. Traffic is moderate, though tour buses and quad bikes are common near the main sights. In summer the heat is dry and strong, with cool nights, and in winter the plateau gets snow and sharp frost, which makes the roads icy in the early morning.
Göreme and nearby towns such as Ürgüp and Avanos have fuel, cafes and workshops, so planning is easy. Pottery kebab, a stew sealed in a clay pot that the waiter cracks open at your table, is the local dish, and the local wines from Ürgüp are surprisingly good.