It was a pretty ordinary day. I was composing a new post for Steemit and then all of a sudden a thought appeared: "The next week is the last one of this summer. Do something about it".

After a while I realized that I'm booking a 5-day tour to Carpathians :)

And there you have it, I'm hitting the road to conquer the highest mountain in Ukraine, Hoverla with the height of 2061 meters. Basically it's the place where nature is giving a pleasure for all kinds of people, regardless of your preferences.

Some people are going here to enjoy beautiful landscapes of greens. Another - to achieve a new type of goal, to make photographs, to heal themselves etc.

There are also those who just simply love the place, and keep getting back because it's calling them in the depth of their heart.

In any case you can do here whatever your imagination will allow, trust me.

My journey

My journey begins from a long night of almost not sleeping and meeting a new friend, Vladimir. We had quite amazing conversations that I’m missing already.

After we arrived at our place a nice meal and an hour of rest was just what we needed. I used it fully obviously.

The road was missing us so we were back on our path.

Monday was pretty intense, yet interesting.

The first part of the day we were traveling through the Rakhiv – a little lovely place which is called “Hutsuls’ Paris” (Hutsuls are local people).

Our first stop was near this gorgeous waterfall, where Vladimir found one of the most fabulous girl I’ve ever seen, Diana.

As he told me, Diana was just standing patiently waiting for somebody’s help to take a picture of her. That was exactly what he did afterwards. Over time 3 of us became really close to each other and I even consider them my best friends, despite of the fact that I know them for only 5 days.

The second part of our day we spent in Solotvyno. It was astounding.

This place is located near the border with Romania; that’s why 90% of citizens are speaking Romanian language. Although most of the time those people are working abroad, they prefer to live here, in Ukraine. For them this kind of lifestyle is fascinating and pretty convenient, and they got used to it over the years.

Anyways, Solotvyno is a piece of a Dead Sea, not literally of course but it really close to its structure. A salt content of this lake reaches 35%, which explains why you cannot sink there, even if you really wanna to.

In fact, it was even hard to swim because water pushes you to the surface. On top of that you can stay in the water even if you cannot touch the bottom of this lake, which is even cooler :)

Tuesday was the day that I was waiting for, and it happened

I knew that it won’t be easy but no matter how hard it was, it was worth it.

The day started early, early enough that at 7.30 a.m. we were hitting the road. It was rather rough route so jumping in the car was a normal thing :)

Once we got out of the car, the most interesting part started – hiking.

It was long in terms of emotions, but in total it took us 4 hours to get to the top. Turned out our group was the fastest one; we outpaced everybody else for 1.5 hours.

How I found a new passion

By being surrounded with beautiful nature in Carpathians you have 2 choices. Choice A is to observe overall picture of mountains, trees and other living creatures. Choice B is to stop rushing and focus on little details.

I picked the second one, and was happy that I did. It allowed me to see what 99% of others missed. I was able to capture the beauty in its original state.

I found that activity really exciting and inspiring.

I took pictures of mountains, rocks, bark of trees, mushrooms, dew, grass, moss and others types of greens. I mean it went crazy. I was in the flow.

I thought that my battery if going to die but fortunately it didn’t.

We did it!

When you conquer the mountain, regardless of its size and length, you have a mix of emotions like delight, excitement, enthusiasm on one side, and tiredness and exhaustion on the other.

I love hiking, thus it was only a combination of good emotions. However those who were really tired told me that in times when they felt like they cannot move on, they looked back and observed. They observed unreal view that Hoverla offered them in exchange for their struggle, which is fair.

4 hours run out quite fast and we finally did it. We reached our final destination, and it was awesome.

It was really awesome actually but at the same time it was cold, it was freezing even. We were almost touching the clouds, which is the reason I suppose.

*I left the card just for fun. But who knows how much people is going to see it.

Wednesday: How I beat all of the men :)

Despite of the fact that I’m not a fan of museums, this one was interesting. It was museum of Hutsuls’ music. There were lots of different instruments that people are actually playing till this day.

One of them is trembita. It is this huge long piece of wood that Hutsuls used as a signaling device to announce deaths, funerals, weddings.

It can be played only by men, so we had a privilege to try it out.

From all of the men that tried this and a similar instrument, which is about 8, I was the only one that made a decent sound. It was really impressive for me and for others as well.

Felt in love with the waterfall

One of my favorite places was Yaremche. It is quite small settlement that has an astounding waterfall, one of the things that I love in nature. For me each of them is uniquely beautiful.

I have no idea what is so magical about this place but I felt in love with it. I have good memories related to it, which only expanded after this trip.

*All of the photos are original and were taken by Nikon D3100.

#macro #steemitphotochallenge #hiking #ukraine #writing

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