Turkish Carpathians or lost somewhere behind the forest fogs 🌿🌲⛰️

I already told you about our chaotic trip to Ardeshen, and the biggest, truly high-level admiration starts from the moment you drive higher and higher on the mountain road along the Fırtına River valley. You have to drive for quite a long time, but the pearl you will see is absolutely worth it. I have never seen such a special and unusual landscape in my life. It was the first time for me, and it absolutely exceeded expectations.

While climbing higher and higher, we were passing this whole line of old bridges, probably the “brothers” of Timisvat Bridge, which is the most popular and the most crowded one, probably because it is the closest 🤣 and people simply might not make it to the more distant ones. But these are just jokes, not 100% information, but who am I without my jokes. The greatness of the forests, the greenery around, the scale and feeling of elevation have no limits. It is pure mountain air.

For the first time, the mountains of Turkey reminded me so much of the Carpathians, and from that I created a theory that no matter what country you are in, somewhere in some corner you can probably always find an echo of another country — traditions, habits, nature, and so on. And exactly in Ayder, where the star of my story, Gelitülü Şelalesi waterfall, is located, I fully saw a place that looked like our Carpathians — a place high in the mountains, surrounded by colorful wooden houses in the style of “a little house on chicken legs” like Baba Yaga’s 😄 My mom @olga.maslievich was amazed and said that she would like to rent such a hotel one day, but I wouldn’t want to live in one like that.

Still, looking at it from the outside is so interesting and exotic. And that’s why I will take the courage and the responsibility to give this place a name for the first time — Turkish Carpathians. I hope nobody has said this before 😄😃 But you know what interesting big difference I noticed between our older ladies and Turkish older ladies? They are more advanced when it comes to modern technology — they use touchscreen phones 😃. I even managed to capture such a moment in my own photos 😁
And here it is so cool — a whole line of these little houses with souvenirs and different little things stretches for several kilometers.

There were even knitted dolls hanging like a garland at the entrance of some yard, and for me this was such an attractive element that I even made a separate photo session for them. What is interesting is that even the small flowers and vegetation seemed very familiar to me, like in our regions. You know, maybe it’s because this area is more connected with the Black Sea region, and across the sea there is Odesa, so maybe that’s why the nature matches. But in reality, the Carpathians are in a very remote part of Ukraine, far away from Odesa, and Odesa’s flora is completely different.

Basically, I didn’t find the logic 🤣 And whatever. Also, the souvenir shops here sell different local pastries like Gözleme, as well as ice cream, waffles, and so on. Also, closer to the destination, there is a big open green meadow where people sit and relax — a place that is perfect for picnics.

And finally, point X — our incredible, breathtaking, unreal, incomparable, high waterfall Gelitülü. So, it is some kind of very unusual, extremely long type of water flow. On both sides there are beautiful pine trees, and in some places fog and clouds hang over them.

It comes directly from the top of the mountain, and it looks unreal and magical, just like the water itself, which falls down in a perfectly even stream. At this location there is a special viewing area — a glass balcony where people can take photos and look at the beautiful waterfall. Of course, I also took photos, and we all took photos. It was a beautiful and bright trip.

We went there in the middle of July, and keep in mind that during this time there are almost no free parking spaces, but there are paid ones. Although even those were quite busy. There was also this strange and unclear situation where we had to search for an ATM in this place, and it was located only in one spot, which was very difficult because we had to go several kilometers uphill to find it.

And one more thing: because there were no parking spaces, we had to park the car very far down, and then we had to walk uphill for a very long time. The climb is quite steep, and if you forget something and need to go back again, it’s not fun — especially for lazy people like us 🤣🤣