The photographs are all taken in the same five weeks. Water lilies from the shore out to the reed bed, flat green, a wooden boat cutting a black line through it. That surface is real, and it is a June thing, which is why people who book eight nights on Lake Skadar in March or in late September arrive holding the picture and find something else entirely: open grey water, a shoreline standing in the willows, and birds in numbers the lily photographs never manage to show.
The lake also changes size, which nothing prepares people for. In late winter, fed by rain off Rumija and the mountains behind Shkodër, it covers something near 205 square miles and stands a quarter of a mile inland of where it will sit in August, when it is closer to 143. Mean depth is about 16 feet. It is not a mountain lake and does not behave like one. It is a karst basin, and a good part of its water arrives from underneath, through vertical springs the villages call oka, some of which drop close to 200 feet, well below the level of the Adriatic 20 miles away over the ridge.
Then there is the border, which is the other thing people misread. Roughly two thirds of the water is Montenegrin and the rest Albanian, and there is nothing at all on the surface to tell you where you are. Boats do not cross. The party crosses by road at Hani i Hotit, about two hours from Virpazar to Shkodër with the wait included, longer on an August Sunday. This office does not advise on entry documents, does not inspect them, and cannot tell you what any particular traveler must carry. That is between you and two governments, and it wants settling before the request is sent rather than after.
- What the week is
- Eight nights: three in a guesthouse at Virpazar, two in a stone house at Godinje, three in family rooms at Shirokë on the Albanian shore, with a driver moving the party and the bags between them, so nothing is carried further than a staircase.
- What sets it apart
- Podgorica airport is 19 miles from Virpazar, about 35 minutes by road, and trains on the Bar line stop in the village itself, four minutes from the first bed. The ground is karst limestone: laid stone paths, worn round, slick after rain. Beds are family guesthouses of four to nine rooms with private bathrooms, not hotels. The office runs the week from late February to mid June and again from early September to early November, at $1,860 per person.
- What the figure covers
- Eight nights in family guesthouses with private bathrooms; every breakfast and three dinners cooked in the houses; two full days on a chartered wooden boat with the boatman who owns it; a licensed local guide on four of the eight days; the vehicle and driver for every transfer, the border crossing and the airport or station pickup included; national park entry on the Montenegrin shore; a cellar visit and tasting at a family vineyard in Crmnica; and a written schedule sent before departure carrying each host's name and telephone number.
- What it leaves to you
- International travel to Montenegro or Albania; travel insurance of any kind, which this office neither arranges nor advises on; lunches, roughly $9 to $16 a head in the villages; the five dinners not listed above, $14 to $28; drinks with any meal; the single occupancy figure of $340 for the eight nights; the optional kayak day at $55 per person; the road toll through the Sozina tunnel if the coast day is taken, about $4 each way; and tips, which no host here will ask you for.
- Who this one is wrong for
- Do not book this if stairs are the problem. Godinje is a slope of laid stone with steps between every house, no rails, and no vehicle access past the top lane, so the two nights there mean 60 steps up twice a day carrying yourself. The boat is boarded off a stone quay with a fixed drop of about 18 inches and there is no pontoon and no lift. Anyone who needs a flat, even surface underfoot will spend the week waiting in the vehicle.
Karst underfoot, and what a boat day is actually made of
The ground is limestone and it is sharp. Along the Montenegrin south shore, between Virpazar and Ostros, the old paths are laid stone worn round by donkeys, running between chestnut, olive, and vine terraces that in many places nobody has cut back in thirty years. Wet stone here behaves like wet tile. Distances are short and the gradients are not: from the lake road at Murići up to the old houses at Livari is about 700 feet of climb inside a mile and a quarter, and there is no handrail on any of it. The one viewpoint everybody wants, the horseshoe bend above Rijeka Crnojevića, is reached by car and then 200 yards on the level, so it is available to the whole party whatever their legs are doing.
The boat is an open wooden hull around 22 feet, outboard on the transom, canvas awning on four poles, bench seating down both sides. No rail, no cabin, no toilet, and no shade at all in the half hour when the awning comes down. A day is four to five hours out of Virpazar or Rijeka Crnojevića, most of it slow, with long stretches where the motor is off and the boatman poles into a channel through the reeds so that the party can hear what is in there. Take water, a hat with a brim, and dark glasses: the glare coming off a flat lake at eleven in the morning is worse than the sun overhead.
About 280 bird species have been recorded on this water and the January counts of wintering waterbirds run into the tens of thousands. The Dalmatian pelican, which carries a wingspan near 10 feet, holds a small breeding colony here, a few dozen pairs, on floating platforms inside a zone the boats keep out of. You may see them at 300 yards through the boatman's binoculars. You may see none. Nobody can promise a sighting and the office will not pretend otherwise when you ask.
The three people this week tends to get booked for
The first will not get on a long flight, or will not fly at all. This lake answers that better than almost anywhere the office sells: there is an overnight boat from the Italian Adriatic coast into Bar, and the rail line from central Europe runs down through the mountains and stops in Virpazar, a few minutes from the first guesthouse. A party can reach this bed from Vienna without leaving the ground. The second is someone whose free weeks fall in February, March, October or early November, which are the months when this lake is at its most worth seeing and its emptiest of everyone else.
The third has never put a trip like this together and does not want to be the person deciding at a border post in a language nobody in the car reads. Every leg here is met: a named driver at the airport or the station, a named host at each of the three houses, a named boatman on each water day, and a schedule with all of it written down and sent before you leave.
Six cells, one for each obstacle, filled where this trip answers. Read the words below rather than the strip; the strip is a shorthand.
- The dates are fixed and short
- does not. Eight nights plus two travel days will not fold into a fixed working week, and the overland arrival most people choose here adds another day at each end. What does
- Somebody will not fly, or not far
- answers it. Everything else that answers it
- The party moves at two speeds
- does not. Two days are level and seated in a boat, but the village nights are not: Godinje and the Šestani paths are stone slopes with steps, and a party that walks at two speeds will spend those days apart. What does
- Nobody has done this before
- answers it. Everything else that answers it
- The free weeks are out of season
- answers it. Everything else that answers it
The year on this water, and what each part of it asks of you
- Late February to mid March
- Wintering ducks still rafted on the open water, pelicans already on the nesting platforms. Days of 46F to 57F with rain three days in seven. Boots, not sandals. The figure sits at its floor.
- Late March to the end of April
- Migration passing through, the hills green, the lake still high in the willows. Afternoons near 68F, cold at seven in the morning. The Crmnica cellars are open and hold nobody but you.
- May to mid June
- The lily fields fill the northern bays and hold for roughly five weeks. Afternoons 75F to 84F, and the water is warm enough to swim in by the first days of June. Rooms run about $40 a night higher.
- Mid June to the end of August
- The Podgorica basin bakes at 95F to 104F for days on end, the water pulls back off the shoreline, the mosquitoes start at six, and day buses fill Virpazar. The office does not run this week in August.
- Early September to mid October
- Harvest in the Crmnica vineyards, cellars busy and loud, the lake at its warmest for swimming near 75F, afternoons 79F to 88F, and the light lying flat and long across the water from five.
- Late October to late November
- Wet, and this is one of the rainiest corners of Europe: 10 inches can arrive in a week. Herons and cormorants everywhere, boats out between fronts only, the Ostros road unpleasant after dark.
- December to mid February
- The lake climbs over its own edge, shore roads go under, and half the guesthouses close up for the winter. The office does not sell this window at all.
Two things people come back annoyed about
Virpazar is the hub and it behaves like one. In July and August the causeway carries buses, men sell boat trips off the parapet from nine in the morning, and the main road between Podgorica and Bar runs on the slope above the village with trucks on it through the night. The guesthouse is 200 yards from that road. It is not still at three in the morning in high summer, and anyone who books the shoulder months instead will find twelve people at breakfast in the entire village and wonder what the complaint was about. That gap between the two Virpazars is the single largest thing your choice of month decides.
The second is the boat, and it is a money question. This lake is shallow, so a wind that would be nothing on deep water raises a short steep chop here inside twenty minutes, and the boatman will cancel. Where there is a spare day the water day moves onto it. Where there is not, the day is lost and the money for it stays with the household, because the boat was held out of other work and the fuel was already bought. The $1,860 buys those two days as a commitment to two families, not as a line that comes back. Bring cash as well: Montenegro settles in euros, Albania in lek, and between Godinje and Shirokë there is not one reliable machine on the route.
Quiet Quarterly Bookings LLC is a booking office in Rochester, New York. It is not an airline, a hotel, a boat operator or a tour operator. It takes your request, places the reservation with the households and licensed operators who actually run the week, and is paid its commission by them after you are home. It takes no payment from travelers at any point and holds no card number.
The request form runs 24/7 and never closes. Whatever arrives is read by a person before the end of that working day, and a written figure priced against your particular dates, carrying the guesthouse names and the boatman's name in it, takes two to four working days.