4-Day Turkey » Cappadocia, Pamukkale & Ephesus

A short flight into central Anatolia, and a landscape that does not look like Earth. Cappadocia is what happened when three volcanoes buried the region in ash, the ash hardened into soft tuff, and ten million years of wind and water carved it into pinnacles, cones and 'fairy chimneys'. People have been cutting homes, churches and entire underground cities into it since the Hittites. You sleep in a cave hotel — actual rock, properly heated.

Overnight: 4-star hotel.

The full day in the valleys. Göreme Open-Air Museum is a UNESCO site: a monastic complex of rock-cut chapels whose Byzantine frescoes have survived a thousand years underground, the colours still startling. You walk through Pasabag — the fairy chimneys of the monks — and Devrent, where the rock has weathered into shapes people insist are animals. Uçhisar Castle is a single enormous rock riddled with tunnels and rooms, and the highest point in Cappadocia. If you are flying in a balloon, it launches at dawn tomorrow — this is the place people come for.

Overnight: 4-star hotel.

West across the Anatolian plateau to Pamukkale — the 'cotton castle'. Calcium-rich hot springs have been running down this hillside for thousands of years, depositing white travertine in terraces and pools until the whole slope looks like a frozen waterfall. You walk on it barefoot, in warm water. Above it lies Hierapolis, the Roman spa city the Emperor's court came to bathe in, with a theatre that seats twelve thousand.

Overnight: 4-star hotel.

Ephesus is the best-preserved classical city in the eastern Mediterranean and one of the great archaeological sites anywhere. You walk marble streets rutted by chariot wheels, past the Library of Celsus — its two-storey façade rebuilt from its own fallen stones — the 25,000-seat Great Theatre where St Paul preached, and the terraced houses with their mosaics still on the floors. The Temple of Artemis here was one of the Seven Wonders; a single column is left of it.