In May my sister and husband came to visit us from the UK. They had seen photo’s and heard a lot about North Macedonia but never visited. Flights from the UK to Skopje are not frequent and are generally quite expensive. As it was they drove up to London Luton airport for their flight.

We had heard from Johans’ brother that he had visited Blatec and walked along a nature reserve to a waterfall so we decided to go and explore this area as we had not been there. Its a bit further afield than Walks around Kocani and Walking round Lake Gradce but definitely worth the visit.

We drove out of Kochani past Vinica and followed the road towards Blatec, a charming winding road, past a mix of old houses and houses that had been renovated with well tended gardens. The flowers and tree’s were beginning to bloom and in the surrounding fields there were large patches of poppies, the red flowers creating a vivid contrast against the rich green backdrop of the fields and mountains.

There were no signs to the waterfall and google maps had a hard time finding where we wanted to go.

Johan had asked his brother where it exactly was and his reply: turn right by the donkey! We found this pretty hilarious until whilst driving along we saw this: 

Well no sooner said than done, we turned right. And lo and behold we came to a stream, parked our car and started walking.

We walked up past the stream, which flowed noisily first on our right hand side and then crossed over to the left hand side.

We walked for a short distance of about 3 km and then came back down again. It was good weather to walk and being early in the spring there were no mosquito’s, I’m not sure how that will be in the summer months. We are hoping to have time to go back and explore further as we have no idea how far you can walk or what the views will be as you get higher up.

Hopefully the donkey will still be there to show us the way!