There are not many places to visit in Turkey in winter (beside Istanbul of course) and with COVID-19 it's way harder than before to travel inside Turkey,
I was looking for a nice place to spend a good vacation and one place that got my attention and was recommended to me a lot is Cappadocia,
Here are a couple of tips for you if you are looking to visit Cappadocia in winter and under COVID-19:
- The number of balloons in the air isn’t the same you see in photos
Many or even all people visit Cappadocia is to go on the hot air balloon ride and you usually get fascinated by the balloons in the air but in winter + COVID, there is 1/4 the number of balloons from busy days.
- Balloons get canceled often
if you don’t know, Cappadocia is really cold in the winter (temperature usually between 4°C and -5°C) there can be some snow from late December to late January and winds on a lot of days so balloons will get canceled more often.
- Restaurants are pick up only
With the COVID-19 situation, the Turkish government made very strong restrictions on restaurants and cafes or actually any place that people can set in and take-off their masks so the only way to get food is to pick up and take it back with you to your hotel, so you will lose some of the nice launch views there.
- Streets are empty and some shops are closed
The day I arrived I noticed something odd which is streets are so empty, I asked my hotel owner about that and she said tourism in winter and with COVID got really bad and a very small amount of people are here, that made the city looks kinda dead, to be honest, not to mention some shops and restaurants are closed because they are not getting any visitors.
- Tours are available but they are not many and a few numbers of people attend
- There aren’t any restrictions on tours duo to COVID beside wearing masks
While there are things that made the trip a bit less than awesome because of COVID and winter, there are also a few things that you can’t get in summery crowded times, like:
- The hotels were cheap, I booked a room from Airbnb for two and it cost us only 25$ for a night with a generous breakfast included, which on busy days you may get the same room but for maybe 50$ a day.
- Tours were semi-private since there is a very small number of tourists so where ever we go it's only us and the place is all for ourselves, for example, we went on a 2-hours horse ride and it was a private horse ride for the price of a regular horse ride.
- You can book a tour hours before its time or order a meal and you get it right away, which is in usual busy days (as I heard from my hotel’s owner) you have to book everything a couple of days before.
Does Cappadocia worth a visit after all?
Totally! I really enjoyed my time there, it was quite and can’t complain about all these almost private tours we had, its fine when its cold as long as you are wearing enough,
One thing that annoyed me a lot was not being able to set in restaurants, we didn’t really enjoy taking the food back and eating at the hotel + the weather was cold we couldn’t just set on a bench outside and eat.
