3-10-20 - Coronavirus considerations in Cappadocia
/Our 4:40 am iPhone alarms beat the local Muslim prayer calls. Today, we are flying from Istanbul to Cappadocia. It’s a domestic flight but still leaving at 7:15am so we are up before the sun. We arrive at the airport which is busy for that time of morning. Turkey still has no reported cases so there is nary a mask, gloves or hand sanitizer to be seen on anyone else besides us.
Istanbul’s new airport has security checkpoints as soon as you enter the airport which requires you to screen your checked bags. We load the bags through and the Coronavirus suitcase immediately gets flagged. They are pointing at the bag asking (presumably) in Turkish which bio-terrorist tried to get this bag through. Kyle sheepishly raises his hand and is led off to a “special” area.
They place the suitcase on a table, unzip it and their jaws drop. Now, remember we have 7 people to protect and are exposed on a daily basis so this is not hoarding. Kyle has everything insanely organized into packing cubes. One for store bought hand sanitizer, one for homemade hand sanitizer (isopropyl alcohol and aloe vera gel), one for face masks, one for surgical gloves, one for disinfectant wipes, one for vitamin C and multi-vitamins, one for Zinc and pre-cold lazingers, one for medicine, one for mini alcohol swab pads and throw in two bottles of isopropyl alcohol, mini spray cans of alcohol and two cans of Lysol and we suppose it’s not surprising that Kyle finds himself in the “special” area.
The security guards proceed to take every single packing cube out and dump out its contents and sort through them. Kyle’s a little rusty on his Turkish so any attempts to explain that the suitcase contents are meant to prevent the Coronavirus not secretly smuggle it into Turkey and spread it are futile. When the entire contents of the suitcase are dumped and strewn across the table, the Turkish TSA is satisfied and walks away leaving Kyle to re-assemble the suitcase item by item.
This time, no-one asks us what countries we’ve been to as they are apparently more worried about our Coronavirus suitcase than whether we’ve been to Wuhan or Milan lately. So we board the plane and are off to Cappadocia.
We arrive in Cappadocia early and have to wait a while for our pre-arranged taxi who is also running late. We drive about 45 minutes to the town of Goreme in the Cappadocia region. It’s hard to describe Cappadocia because it presents such as unique geological landscape that is unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. If someone told us that we were on the surface of Mars, we wouldn’t have registered any surprised looks.
Cappadocia lies in central Turkey that lies on a plateau pierced by volcanic peaks that erupted 9 million years ago during the late Miocene epoch. Nine million years of wind and erosion have formed hundreds of spectacular pillars and minaret-like forms. Locals carved houses, churches and monasteries out of the soft volcanic rocks and deposits.
We are staying in the Sultan Cave Suites and as the name implies, the hotel and rooms are actual caves carved out of rocks. The have a restaurant with an outdoor deck overlooking the surrounding rock landscapes from high atop a cliff. Absolutely amazing view.
We stretch out a two hour lunch where the kids are particularly talkative. It helps when the WiFi is non-existent as the signal apparently does not travel through volcanic rocks very well. The kids drift off to their rooms to take naps given our 4:40am wake-up call which leaves Leanne and Kyle to ponder considerations for our trip amidst the Coronavirus outbreak.
Today is March 10th and the world doesn’t seem to have woken up to the impending calamity on the horizon. There are 118,948 reported cases worldwide and with China flat-lining at 80,778, that leaves 38,170 cases for the rest of the world combined. But countries are starting to the take action.
We’ve experienced the first disruption of the trip. Turkey is the start of a month planned in Middle East countries. The plan is to go from Turkey to Egypt to United Arab Emirates to Oman to Qatar to Cyrus to Israel to Jordan and then to Greece and Italy on to the rest of South Western Europe. Israel and Jordan are the heart of the trip where we were going spend 10 days doing a Catholic pilgrimage tour.
Over the past two days, we received news of Coronavirus developments that portend a grim harbinger of things to come. On March 8th, the Egyptian Ministry of Health announced 45 confirmed cases of virus on an Egyptian cruise ship on the Nile river going to Luxor. Guess what we had planned in Egypt? Yup, not a hard guess, we were scheduled to take a cruise on the Nile from Aswan to Luxor. No bueno, definitely, no bueno.
The next day, Oman and Qatar announced that they would deny entrance to any foreign nationals that had been in Egypt in the previous 14 days. Of course that means we wouldn’t be able to go either of those countries.
Also yesterday, Italy announced a nationwide quarantine restricting the movement of all 60 million people and ordering the closure of all non-essential shops and businesses. From friend from Dartmouth, Lynn, has lived in Italy and has many friends and relatives there. I had originally asked her help in planning where to stay in our Italian stops. Two days ago she sent me an e-mail about what a mess it was over there.
So we knew Italy was tentative at best before the announcement of the nationwide quarantine. The Coliseum in Rome was scheduled to be our 7th Wonder of the Modern World with Petra in Jordan being the 6th Wonder thus completing our goal of seeing all 7 Wonders. Since it was Northern Italy that was the epicenter, we guess we held out hope that we could sneak into Rome, see the Coliseum and get the hell out of Italy. But this news puts the final nail in Italy’s coffin as it relates to our trip.
Another big blow to the trip comes when Kyle received an e-mail from the Department of State that Israel was imposing a mandatory 14 day quarantine rule on anyone entering the country. Further, foreign nationals must be able to prove they have the means to self-quarantine and hotels may refuse to honor reservations for individuals in quarantine.
This e-mail is akin to dropping a grenade in the middle of our Middle East segment and watching it blow sky high. There is clearly no point in going to Israel and sitting around for 14 days even if the hotel would let us. We had booked a three day driving trip to Jordan from Jerusalem so no Israel means no Jordan under the current plan. With Israel, Jordan, Oman and Qatar off the table, the Middle East segment collapses like a badly constructed Jenga tower.
The rash of news leaves us with three questions with which to wrestle. First, do we go to Egypt? Second, What do we replace the Middle East segment of the trip with? Third, do we still try to get to Jordan to see Petra which would be our 6th Wonder of the Modern World?
We spend the afternoon wrestling with these questions. Unbeknownst to us, tomorrow (March 11th), the World Health Organization will declare the Coronavirus outbreak a worldwide Pandemic. This effectively means they expect the virus to spread to all countries on the globe and the numbers to continue to get worse.
The Egypt decision is a real struggle. Africa will be our 7th and final continent which was the single biggest goal and mission of the trip. There are only 5 cases in the country outside the one cruise ship, which is in quarantine, in a country with more than 100 million people. There are more than 200 cruise ships on the Nile and our cruise boat only has 200 people. So we’re not talking about the Princess cruise ships with 4,000 people.
If we go to Egypt for the week, that also gives Kyle time to find a replacement for the Middle East segment. If we axe Egypt, we will have nowhere to go in 2 days’ time. So we make the tentative decision to go to Egypt knowing we have two more days to finalize it.
For the replacement to the Middle East, Kyle comes up with South Eastern Europe. Croatia was one of the group’s absolute favorite countries and there are virtually no reported cases in any of the countries. All the countries are driving distance from each other so we wouldn’t have to go through a single airport or flight after arriving. It would be a private tour so we wouldn’t be exposed to other passengers.
Kyle is mapping out a route that includes Albania, Macedonia, Kosovo, Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, Moldova, Montenegro, Serbia, Slovakia and Czechia. So we get in touch with a tour company in Tirana, Albania to see if they can make the trip work. The decision on Jordan gets punted until we see if the Eastern Europe segment will come to pass.
Yes, I know you’re thinking that we’re absolutely nuts but that’s with the benefit of hindsight. At the time, Kyle is just not willing to blown up the trip he’d worked for the past year and half to perfect. Somehow, 9 months and 6 continents just doesn’t sound nearly as attractive as a year and all 7 continents.
