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The daily breakfast of yogurt with honey and black coffee, plus cereal. Of course the buffet at the Ozkaymak Hotel in Konya offered other choices, but this is the only food I can ingest so early in the morning. Aaaaaa morning sunlight. Never had so much vitamin D, and I live in the tropics.

First stop: the Mevlana Museum, shrine to the 13th century Persian poet and mystic Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Balkhi, known throughout the world as Rumi. (In his lifetime part of Turkey was under the Seljuk Sultanate.) Rumi advocated absolute tolerance and positive reasoning, qualities we tend not to associate with religion today.

No photography is allowed inside the main building, but the outer rooms display artifacts from the daily lives of Sufi mystics, including the Whirling Dervishes.

Rumi said: “Forget safety. Live where you fear to live. Destroy your reputation. Be notorious.”

Outside Konya is the Sultanhani Caravanserai. A caravanserai is an inn for traveling groups and their horses, camels, donkeys, (caged) lions, livestock and assorted baggage. Note the very high clearance—if you’re traveling with elephants, as merchants did on the Silk Road, they’re welcome, too.

Thanks to Turkey’s immense highways and our excellent driver Sabatin, we got to Cappadocia (Kapadokya) ahead of schedule. Kapadokya was the capital of the Hittites. There’s Old School; they’re Old Testament. Genesis.

It was as if I had arrived on Arrakis without the services of a Navigator. Dune without the sand. Or the sandworms, although some of the weird rock formations rearing up from the ground could be Shai-Hulud. (The emperor of the Ottomans was called the Padishah Sultan.)

The entrance to the underground city of Kaymakli was lined with shops guarded by my usual welcoming committee.

The Turkish take care of their cats and dogs. According to Fulya, strays are rounded up and spayed/neutered. As the facilities cannot accommodate all the animals, they are released and given food and shelter by the local residents.

Clearly an arrangement that works for the cats and dogs.

Kaymakli the underground city is a network of tunnels, and as you go below temperatures can be subzero. I’d borrowed a friend’s The North Face goose down jacket, which is the greatest winter gear known to me. People climb Mt Everest in these things, they weigh next to nothing and can be compressed into 8 x 5 packs you can throw in your luggage.

The tunnels are narrow, and often you have to walk in a crouch. It’s like doing squats, except that you could slip and pitch headlong into the next “room”. After 10 minutes of walking on your haunches you work up a sweat. Conclusion: the residents of Kaymakli had quads of steel. Which was useful, as many of them were early Christians on the run from persecution.

The living spaces gouged out of the soft volcanic rock are arranged around ventilation shafts so people could live comfortably while avoiding detection. To close the entrances they rolled giant millstones across the openings. No one could get in; the only way to dislodge the residents was to flood the tunnels, which would take too much water.

Just before dark we checked into our final hotel in Turkey, the 5-star Dinler Park in Urgup. This cat thought he owned the joint.