One of our favourite places to go is Lake Gradce. It is about 7,5 km from our house and Johan has been known to cycle that but with the last 5km being a blind incline its not for the faint hearted.

I take the car.

We drove up there on a pleasant spring afternoon, we left our car at one of the restaurants and walked the 2 km to the waterfall. This is a steep incline and I recommend taking enough refreshments with you as by the time you get to the top you will need it.

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Its a pleasant walk and on the way you often get to see tortoises meandering up the road… slow but sure wins the race.

We had visited the waterfall a few times and Johan had heard that it is possible, from the waterfall to walk around the other side of the lake back to where our car was parked. It was late afternoon, not too warm and we had our walking shoes on so decided to try it out.

Now in good North Macedonian fashion there are no signposts but it was possible to follow what looked like a foothpath and we happened to notice that everywhere there was red and white tape hanging from trees. We had a quick internet search and it seems there is a Lake Gradce cross country run which had recently taken place and thus the ‘signposts’. We decided to follow this trail.

It is an amazing walk, around 7km it takes you high up into the wooded shady mountains, the footpaths are easy to follow and although we didn’t follow the whole cross country route (which was much longer) we had some amazing views looking down toward the lake and looking up to the mountains above us.

I am not as brave as I look and there were a few times that I started wondering which berries we could eat on the way and if there was enough water to keep us going all night! Johan was very stoic and assured me that all the time the lake was on our right hand side nothing could go wrong!

He was of course right. (ugh, don’t you hate it when you have to admit that!)

Finally the dam came into view and we were on the home run.

Before sunset and in time for a refreshing beer at the lakeside cafe.