A Day in Safranbolu

Waking up in the morning, hmmmm, hopefully it won't rain, but it's a very nice view out from our lodging.  We hope to walk about town today, starting with crossing over to the ridge on the horizon for a panoramic view.

"The Old Town preserves many historic buildings, with 1008 registered historical artifacts. These are: 1 private museum, 25 mosques, 5 tombs, 8 historical fountains, 5 Turkish baths, 3 caravanserais (roadside inns), 1 historical clock tower, 1 sundial and hundreds of houses and mansions. The Old Town is situated in a deep ravine in a fairly dry area in the rain shadow of the mountains. The New Town can be found on the plateau about two kilometers west of the Old Town.
The name of the town derives from "saffron" and the Greek word polis (πόλις) meaning "city", since Safranbolu was a trading place and a center for growing saffron.  Today, saffron is still grown at the village of Davutobası to the east of Safranbolu, with a road distance of 22 kilometres.
Safranbolu was added to the list of UNESCO World Heritage sites in 1994 due to its well-preserved Ottoman era houses and architecture."

The hike down, across, and back up begins...

Gerri noticed on the google maps an aircraft installation, this old German Dornier bush craft, and so we went diverted a bit to go off and find it.

Now at the panoramic view point, a terrace looking down over the town...

We're now looking opposite the way we looked out from our lodging room window - somewhere our hotel is staring back at us.

Ah, there it is...our room is the left top window, and the breakfast space is in the modern windowed, covered terrace to the right.

We now head back down into the Old Town, and stumble across some locals making merry...he's like Telly Savalas in drag.

Now time to try some of that saffron tea - it was pleasant, but low key...

...followed by a round of Turkish coffee - that's some strong coffee.

We then circled around the lower streets to see the old and largely quite well-preserved structures.

It's a no kidding, stepping into the past experience.

Here's a good view of the deep channeled stream running through town.  It's amazing how the builders use every available sliver of real estate to fill up the town spaces.

We've gone into the metal smithing market area here - the shop owner to the left invited us in for him to show us his wares - he understood (with the help of Google translate) that we're unable to make purchases as there is no room in a backpack to carry loot for 5 months.  The blacksmith, with his young apprentice, was also eager to bring us in to talk about this and that, and get a feel for his craft - he even had us do some hammering on the hot glowing iron.

Lot's of cobbly strolling was had...

Here's a sculpture of the saffron flower, the town's namesake, with one of the mosques in the background:

And we even found the sundial (with a little help from a local)...it's still overcast, so we aren't able to "see" the time :(

It was now getting late and we were hungry so we started our nightly ritual of trying to figure out what restaurant to eat at.  We picked on, sat at a table, then decided against it.  We then walked down the hill and found a nice looking place, so I had the yogurt soup (it tastes better than it sounds) and Tim had a kabab plate.  We also shared a side of Cicik (Turkish Tzatziki Sauce) with bread.

After dinner we headed back to the room.  Tomorrow we have a long day of driving to get to Cappadocia...7 hours of driving with 315 miles to go.  The good news is that we have a stop at the 4 hour point, so it shouldn't be too bad.  Until then...