Lake Synevyr is the largest natural lake in the Ukrainian Carpathians, and what holds it in is not a moraine but a landslide. You drive over the rubble of it on the way in. Water backed up behind the fallen rock, and the stream drains it again a few hundred metres west, so the level rises and falls with the weather. The islet in the middle is not an island. It is the crest of a drowned ridge, which shows when the lake runs low and sinks out of sight in the spring melt. From the waterline the whole thing reads as a dark pond walled in by spruce, and only the platform up the slope gives you the oval with that crest inside it.
Flat wooden rafts push out from the bank for a short trip on the still water. They are modelled on the bokory, the timber rafts that Carpathian loggers rode downriver before roads reached these valleys. They built wooden dams up the streams, opened the gates and rode the flood down on rafts of their own cut timber. Out from shore the water turns dark blue and stays clear, the lake drops to about twenty-four metres, and the spruce wall closes in around you. On the peninsula stand thirteen metres of carved figures, Syn and Vyr, the count's daughter and the shepherd of the legend that named the lake. Up close the grain gives away the strangest part: the wood is African mahogany, hauled to a Carpathian spruce valley in 1984. The shoreline ring is evergreen, so October is a contrast rather than a blaze, with beech and maple going gold between black conifers. One more thing here is left over from another life. Inside the park is Ukraine's largest brown bear centre: about thirty animals taken off circuses, roadside restaurants and smugglers, in twelve hectares of forest enclosures. None of them go back to the wild, because most of them could not survive it, so what you are looking at is a retirement rather than a zoo.