Jermuk Waterfall never comes down as a single column. Where a small river reaches the edge of the Arpa gorge in southern Armenia, at the spa town of the same name, it slides seventy metres down sloping basalt. The rock combs the water apart into dozens of fine threads on the way down. Armenians call it the Mermaid's Hair. The whole fan reads from one place only: the viewpoint on the far side of the gorge. From there the whole cliff stands side-on, and you can follow one flow splitting into separate strands as it goes. The other way to meet it is from below: a stepped path drops from beside the road bridge, deeper into the gorge with every turn, until you stand at the foot. There the air turns cold and wet, the roar covers everything, and spray drifts off the rock onto your face. In late spring, swollen with snowmelt, the threads run fullest and loudest; in October the gorge turns red and gold.
The town above the gorge sits over 2,000 metres up, and it is built on the same water. In the middle of it a colonnaded hall some fifty metres long stands over the springs, and people walk in to drink rather than bathe, from taps running at different temperatures. Gevorg Tamanyan designed it in 1956; his father laid out Yerevan. The same spring is bottled under the town's name and sold across Armenia and beyond. Whether the waterfall is the tallest in the country is argued. Because it spreads and steps down the rock instead of plunging clear, some guides rank it as the tallest cascade while naming a taller plunge elsewhere, and its height is quoted at 68, 70 or 72 metres. There is a third way to meet the water here: a forest path leaves the town and climbs for about an hour to open-air thermal pools in the hills above the Arpa. The water comes out of the ground already warm enough for you to sit in, with nothing built around it but a changing shelter.