Day Trip East from Trabzon: Rize Tea Gardens, Fırtına Valley, Zil Kale and Ayder

While Trabzon holds the great historical monuments of the Black Sea, neighboring Rize province, starting just 65 kilometres (50 minutes by coastal highway) east of Trabzon Airport, holds the steepest emerald tea terraces in Turkey and the glaciated 3,937-metre granite peaks of the Kaçkar Mountains. A full-day excursion up the Fırtına Valley to Zil Kale and Ayder Plateau is the second most popular day trip from Trabzon after Uzungöl.

1. Rize Ziraat Tea Garden & Surmene Knife Workshops (On the Coastal Road)

As you drive east from Trabzon along the Black Sea coast, stop first after 30 minutes in Sürmene, where master blacksmiths have forged razor-sharp, hand-hammered steel Sürmene kitchen and pocket knives since the Byzantine era. Continuing into Rize, which produces 65 percent of all Turkish tea, drive five minutes up the hill behind town to the Ziraat Botanical Tea Garden (Ziraat Çay Bahçesi), where terraced rows of glossy green Camellia sinensis tea bushes cascade down the slope toward the Black Sea.

2. Fırtına Valley (Fırtına Vadisi) and the Ottoman Stone Arch Bridges

At Ardeşen (1 hour 15 mins east of Trabzon), turn south off the coast into Fırtına Valley ("Storm Valley"), one of the world's top 200 priority ecological conservation zones. For forty kilometres, the road climbs beside the roaring whitewater rapids of the Fırtına River, spanned by more than twenty graceful 18th- and 19th-century single-arch stone bridges (kemer köprüler), most famously the Şenyuva (Çinçiva) Bridge (1696) and Timisvat Bridge, built high andhumped without mortar so mountain floodwaters could rush harmlessly underneath while wooden houses and ziplines line the banks.

3. Zil Kale (The Eagle's-Nest Castle in the Clouds) & Palovit Waterfall

Follow the western branch of the Fırtına River (the Çat Valley road) 15 kilometres past Şenyuva into a sheer, rainforest-like box canyon. Rising atop a vertical 100-metre basalt pinnacle right in the middle of the misty gorge stands Zil Kale ("Bell Castle"), a 14th-century medieval fortress built to guard the mountain Silk Road trail to Georgia and Erzurum. Climb the stone keep for a 360-degree view down the emerald canyon, then drive 15 minutes further through primeval boxwood forests to the thundering 15-metre drop of Palovit Waterfall.

4. Ayder Plateau (Ayder Yaylası, 1,350 Metres)

Taking the eastern branch of the valley brings you to Ayder Yaylası, famous for its wooden chalets, the long white bridal-veil cascade of Gelin Tülü Waterfall dropping down the alpine meadow opposite, and natural 50°C thermal hot-spring baths (Ayder Kaplıcaları).