You step from the hotel into a wind-scrubbed dawn and the driver greets you in careful Spanish; the road ahead opens into a landscape that feels both lunar and lived-in. Basalt ridges, soft tuff spires and the region’s famous “fairy chimneys rise like carved teeth,” and a Spanish-speaking guide sketches the day’s route over warming tea. This is the Red Tour: a compact, six-hour circuit through Devrent’s surreal shapes, Paşabağı’s three-headed pinnacles, the pottery town of Avanos and the Byzantine cave churches of Göreme Open Air Museum, finishing with the panoramic sweep from Esentepe and the crag top of Uçhisar.