There are also many wild places, far from the madding crowds and the best are probably in the mountains. We walked in the Ala Dağlar and Kaçkar Mountains, which offer two very different landscapes; the Ala Dağlar, with their jagged orange-grey karst cliffs and peaks, and barren scree slopes have a stark arid beauty, while the Kaçkars, lushly green with the Black Sea rains but also with dark rock peaks, glaciers and frozen alpine lakes have a more classic alpine beauty.
We walked early in the season, from the St Paul Trail in late May to the Kaçkars in early July, always a week or so ahead of the holiday crowd. We met only a few people on the track, which is the way we like it, especially when those we met provided that pleasant trekking camaraderie needed when solitude begins to verge on isolation. Perhaps we were just a bit too early as the late snows in the Ala Dağlar had not yet melted and we could not do the crossing - still the western side was glorious.

Apart from having a quieter track, the big advantage of walking early was that the wildflowers were in full bloom, and how superb they were!
Walking in the mountains here can be hard - we were surprised when going back over the tracks to see that three of our biggest single days ever (in terms of climbing and descending) were on this trip. They certainly challenged the ankle that I broke 6 months earlier, but titanium steel is sturdy stuff. You will leave fit if you weren't when you arrived.