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There were far more flights into Kayseri than into the small airport, so we took the hour on the main road to Göreme rather than spend a day on connections. The drive is straightforward even after a long flight, and we had the car from the moment we landed.

Our balloon pickup was just before five, and with a car we simply followed the trucks out to the launch field instead of waiting in a hotel lobby. The parking there is packed earth with no markings at all, so take it slowly in the dark.

We came in February and the back road down from Uçhisar still had ice on it at eight in the morning. It is fine if you expect it, but at over a thousand metres this is not the Mediterranean coast, and we stopped planning drives after dark.

Ihlara is around eighty five kilometres away and the road takes longer than the map promises. We left at eight and were back in Ürgüp for dinner, but do not try to bolt an underground city onto the same day.

I had read that everything in Turkey is a manual and booked an automatic expecting to pay for the privilege, then found most of what was listed here was automatic anyway. We took a Renault Clio near the bottom of the price range and it carried the two of us around the valleys for nine days.

The lanes in Göreme are narrow, most of them climb, and the hotel parking turned out to be a yard two streets below us. Take the smallest car you can live with rather than the biggest you can afford.

We filtered on one thing only, that nothing would be blocked on the card, and roughly a third of the listings still qualified. Collection in Nevşehir took about fifteen minutes and the hold never appeared on the statement.

We drive over most autumns and now hire locally for the days we spend in the valleys instead of grinding our own car over the tracks. After rain the dirt road towards the Red Valley viewpoint was mud, we turned back, and that is the one thing an ordinary hire car here will not do for you.