Welcome to Day #29 of 100 Days of Travel. Today, I’m safely touring around the Macedonia countryside by car from Ohrid to Bitola. Instead of the highway, we are opting for a more leisurely route around Lake Prespa. Here a few highlights from this travel day. 

Heading south from Ohrid, we hit the high mountain pass for the best views of both Ohrid and Prespa Lakes. If you have an extra 4-5 hours, I strongly recommend the Magaro hike that I did earlier this week.

A goat traffic jam. Only in Macedonia.

Like everywhere else in the Balkans, Macedonia had an exceptionally weak winter coupled with a fairly dry summer. Lake Prespa definitely looks like it is feeling the impact of a below-average snowpack season. This dock I’m standing on should be in quite a bit of water.

Here’s a fun game. What’s this animal?

Fun facts: Lake Prespa is shared by Albania, Macedonia, and Greece. It’s 150 meters higher than Lake Ohrid and fills its sister lake via an underground river.

 

Future plan: Come back in the summer, rent bikes, and ride 10 kilometers out to Konjsko where you can catch a boat to the infamous “Snake Island”. It’s Macedonia’s only island and apparently, as the name would imply, full of snakes.

Next stop is the Hotel Europe, an abandoned hotel with a scary local legend…

Just kidding. There’s no legend. The hotel kitchen had a fire and it put Hotel Europa out of business.

Each region of Macedonia has a specialty and Prespa known for apples – lots and lots of apples. There are orchards literally everywhere.

We’re already running out of the daylight by the time we reach the east side of the lake, but still have enough time to check out the Brajchino “eco-village”. It’s charming enough to spend the night, but everything is closed for the season.

So hopefully you’ve seen a few interesting sights from this whirlwind trip around Lake Prespa. It’s definitely an interesting area. As it’s the fall, most services are closed for the season, so would recommend coming back here in the summer to explore the region. Oh, did you want to see the sunset? Great, because apparently I took 10,000 photos of it.