cold tuff rooms, apricot flower in the hollows, dawn ridges
Reserve a seven night Cappadocia walking trip in April
The reservation holds a cave room for seven nights in a village guesthouse under the cliffs, four guided walks with a leader who lives in that village, and the road transfer up from Kayseri, at $2,411 per person on two sharing. April is the six weeks when the valley floors are green and the walking sits near 64 degrees at noon, which is true of no other month here. Starts run weekly through the month.
7 nights, from $2,411 per person.
People book a seven night Cappadocia walking trip in April for a reason that has little to do with the rock, which stands there in every month of the year. It is that the valley floors are briefly green. From roughly the twenty fifth of March until the second week of May the irrigated plots under the cliffs carry grass, and the apricot and almond in the hollows come into flower, most of it inside the ten days either side of the eighth. By the middle of June that same ground is straw, and by late July the middle of the day sits at 90 degrees and walking has to be over by eleven in the morning. That is the whole case for the month, and it is why the week is sold in April and in nothing else.
What gets held is one room for seven nights in a village guesthouse cut into the tuff, two beds, and a walking leader who lives about twenty minutes away, on four of the eight days. You do not change hotels once. The company running the week is a small operator based in the village itself, with six vehicles and eleven guides, and Third Coast Dispatch Bookings LLC owns none of it: not a bed, not a minibus, not an hour of anybody's time. This office takes the dates you give it, checks them against the starts the operator is actually running, and puts your name on the room.
Nothing is paid at this end. Once the week is confirmed the operating company invoices you directly, on its own account, and the office never handles the money. The long leg stays yours as well: no air ticket of any kind is sold at this address, and the flight into Turkiye and the short domestic leg that follows are for you to arrange around the start date. Send two dates you could actually leave on rather than a month, and the figure written against those days comes back inside two to four working days.
When it goes
Weekly starts through April
any week in one month: weekly starts through the month, and no other month works
What is reserved
A seven night Cappadocia walking trip in April
7 nights, from $2,411 per person. Send a booking request
One room held for seven nights, two beds, no change of hotel; the group moves by minibus on three days, walks on four, and the leader is held for those four days only.
Everything you walk on was in the air first, ash from Erciyes at 12,851 feet and Hasan Dagi at 10,672 feet, welded into a tuff soft enough to cut with a hand tool and stiff enough to hold a ceiling. Where a lid of harder basalt happened to sit on the ash, the softer material under it wore back into columns up to a hundred feet from base to cap; where there was no lid, the walls are plain and pale and full of doorways. Pigeon Valley alone carries several hundred dovecotes cut into the cliff face, entrance holes whitewashed so the birds could find them, the manure going out onto the vineyards until the last men working them gave it up in the 1960s. The plateau stands at 3,400 feet, so an April night drops to 39 degrees while the middle of the day reaches 64, and Erciyes holds snow on its north face into the second week of June. Daylight in mid April runs from about 06:00 to 19:35, and the part people came for is the first fifty minutes, when the tuff goes grey to apricot and is back to plain white by eight.
seven nights in a cave room in a nine room family guesthouse, two sharing; breakfast on the terrace every morning, bread from the village oven; the road transfer from Kayseri, 45 miles, about seventy minutes; four guided walks with an English speaking leader from the village; a packed lunch on the two long walk days; entry to the rock cut churches at the open air museum; entry to one underground city; the minibus and driver for the gorge day and the Soganli day; three evening meals at the guesthouse at 19:30; drinking water carried in the vehicle on every walking day; a morning at a potter's wheel on the river at Avanos; a written number for the operating company that is answered in the village.
the round trip flight from the middle of the United States into Turkiye and the short domestic leg that follows, which you book yourself, $980 to $1,540 in April; lunches on the days without a packed lunch, $8 to $16 a head; the four evening meals not taken at the guesthouse, $14 to $30; drinks with dinner, $3 to $9 a glass; any balloon seat, which this office does not reserve and does not price; tips to the leader and the driver, $40 to $70 across the week for two; entry to a second underground city, $18 to $26; a morning on horseback out of the village, $45 to $75; laundry at the guesthouse, $9 to $14 a load; anything bought in the potters' street, which is yours to settle at the counter.
The four walks run 2.7 to 7 miles with 560 to 850 feet of climb, all of it on tuff that turns to grey clay for a day after rain and fills the tread of a boot in fifty yards, and two of the four have unfenced drops of thirty feet within a stride of the path. The underground city means about 200 yards of stooping at four and a half feet of headroom with people coming the other way. Cave rooms are cut into rock: uneven stone steps, no lift in the building, and two rooms with no window at all. The village is quiet after ten at night, the nearest cinema is fifty miles off, and nothing here is open late.
Ash from two volcanoes, and what people cut out of it
The soft rock is the reason anything here looks the way it does, and it is also the reason people lived inside it. Tuff cuts at about the rate of hard chalk, and a family with hand tools could open a two room house in a season and add to it in the next one. Whole streets went in sideways rather than upward, so what you see from the valley floor is a cliff with thirty doorways in it and no building attached to any of them. In the underground cities the same material let people go the other way, down eight levels at Derinkuyu to about 200 feet, with ventilation shafts cut the full height and round stone doors that close from the inside only. The rooms you sleep in behave the way the rest of it behaves: they sit near 61 degrees whatever April is doing outside, they smell faintly of dust and lime, and sound carries through the wall from the room next door. Between about 05:50 and 07:00 the sky over the valleys carries sixty to a hundred and fifty balloons, which you watch from the terrace with a cup in your hand; this office reserves no seat on any of them.
The four walks, and what the ground does under you
The first walk is short and comes on the second morning: down from the rock at Uchisar through Pigeon Valley into the village, 2.7 miles, 560 feet of descent, ninety minutes on the move and however long you stand still looking at dovecotes. The second is the Rose and Red valleys from Cavusin, 5.6 miles with 850 feet of climb spread over three pulls, timed to put you on the west facing rim at about 18:40, which in the third week of April is fifty minutes before the sun goes off the rock. The third costs the most road: 95 km to the Ihlara gorge, an hour and forty in the minibus, then 382 steps down into a cut 330 feet deep, then 4.5 miles along the Melendiz with the water loud on your left the whole way and painted churches opening off the path at head height. The fourth runs south to Soganli, 60 km and an hour and fifteen, where the valley is farmed rather than visited, the walking is 7 miles of tractor track and footpath with 700 feet in it, and lunch is whatever the one kitchen in the village has made that day. Two of the four have unfenced drops within a stride of the path. On the three days without a walk the minibus is there for the museum, the underground city and the potters at Avanos, and the leader is not, because the leader is held for four days and no more.
What April does here, week by week
almond opens in the hollows below Cavusin, nights still at 34 degrees, mud on the valley paths
apricot in the sheltered plots, days 58 to 62, the Melendiz running hard and loud in the gorge
the flower peak, roughly the 6th to the 14th, when the hollows read white from the rim
grass at its greenest on the valley floors, days near 66, four or five wet mornings in an ordinary year
petals gone, green holding, the warmest walking of the month at about 68
tulips and poppies on the open plateau, then heat building past 75 in the final ten days
floors already yellow, the last snow off Erciyes around the 10th, walking finished by eleven
90 degrees by two in the afternoon, which would push the start to 05:30, so the week is not sold then
Who runs the week, and who sends you the bill
The guesthouse is a family business of nine rooms, and dinner there is at 19:30 with no second sitting, so the three included evening meals are the three evenings the group is back before seven; on the other four you eat in the village, where two kitchens serve until about 21:30 and the third closes at nine. The minibus and its driver belong to the operating company, the leader is on its payroll, and the entry tickets are bought at the gate on the morning by that company. Third Coast Dispatch Bookings LLC is the office that puts your name against a start date, confirms what the operator has actually committed to, and takes it up with the operator when something moves. The bill comes from the operator, in the operator's own name, and the operator holds every licence involved in running the week. On entry paperwork this office does not advise at all.
Most of the people who take this week live within about an hour of Kansas City, and the operator has nobody at all in Missouri, which is why every question goes through this address rather than out there. You can reach Third Coast Dispatch at 600 SW Jefferson St, Suite 302, Lee's Summit, MO 64063, by phone on +1 (816) 525-2846, or in writing at bookings@thirdcoastdispatch.com. If a name is spelled wrong on a held booking, or your return date moves, send it to corrections@thirdcoastdispatch.com rather than to the village, because the record kept here is the one the operator reads back. Give this office two dates you could leave on and it will tell you which of the April starts are open and what the room looks like on each of them.
Ask the office to hold a departure
Open 24/7, this form will take a booking request whenever you write it. Nowhere on it is a card number requested and nothing is charged, because no money is ever owed to this office. Whatever reaches the form is opened in the order it landed, and an answer goes back inside one working day.
Nowhere on this page is a card number requested, and none is kept by this office anywhere. Writing costs you nothing and ties you to nothing. Asking is not the same as holding: your date belongs to whoever asks next until the operating company has confirmed it on paper and you have read what it requires of you.