Day 13 - Friday - Ürgüp to Ankara, via Hasi Bektas>

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A 6 am start - another long old travel day. And as we near the end of the holiday, there's less to see along the way too. It really feels like the end of the holiday is drawing near now - none of the selected highlights, such as Cappadocia, ballooning or the gulet boat are ahead of us. From now on it's just the open road until we return to our start point of Istanbul.

Today was a dull day to celebrate a birthday on, but that's precisely what Manda did - well not celebrate exactly, but rather sit on a bus for her birthday.

Our day was broken up with the occassional comfort stops and the longer midday stop. Our first stop took place much earlier because of our early start. By 9:30 we were at Hasi Bektas, the site of another revered monastery. The monastery is named after the founder of the Bektashi Dervish order, Hasi Bektas no less, and contains his tomb and that of the secondary founder Balim Sultan.

In a similar fashion to the monastery at Konya, this was a location of great importance to the local Turkish visitors. Dress among the locals is very modest - very traditional. However, the site of the tombs was less busy than at Konya, and at one point our group were the only people inside the building. At busier times, visitors can expect to see the locals kissing the tombs, crying and generally being overcome with the emotion of it all, but there was none of that for us.

We carried on motoring along until we got to Ankara where our first stop would be at the Museum of Anatolian Civilisations.