Canoeing and kayaking vacation in Montenegro, Lake Skadar

Planet

We want our vacations to be high impact in experience but low impact on the environment! Once you’re at the villa, transport will be mostly on foot, kayak or bike, with car transfers provided to starting points for excursions or restaurants if needed.

Lake Skadar is a National Park and a Ramsar Wetland of International Importance and your visit and National Park fees will help sustain sensitive tourism and protection for this area. As such, our tour guides will encourage you to behave in an eco-friendly manner at all times by supporting the Leave No Trace principles –traveling where possible along marked water channels, disposing of waste properly, leaving what you find (unless it’s other people’s rubbish!), respecting wildlife and being considerate of other visitors and the local community.

We are committed to local conservation projects and have contributed actively as well as financially to local initiatives, most notably a CZIP (Montenegrin RSPB) project to help repair and maintain nesting rafts for the local, endangered Dalmatian Pelican colony. As the leading sustainable tour operator in the country, it is up to us to lead by example, protecting the National Parks from over-development and ensuring their beauty can be enjoyed by the next generation.

We are also working with German eco-tourism NGO GIZ and the World Bank funded 'Albania and Montenegro Lake Skadar Joint Eco-systems Project' to identify formal ways for our customers to volunteer and directly benefit the environment during their stay.

People

We have built strong links with local communities at Lake Skadar and support their maintenance of threatened traditions – from bee-keeping, fishing and carp-smoking to the making of wine, cheese, olive-oil and flavoured brandies. By visiting home-producers and buying their wares, you will build pride, contribute to the local economy and encourage the development of eco-tourism in an area where tourism needs examples of how to develop sustainably. You’ll meet local people like Hassan Muratovic and his wife Nada at remote Murici beach and learn about their ethnic Albanian culture and traditional way of fishing.

English isn’t widely spoken round the lake, but your guides will be able to translate to make each interaction create a valuable cultural exchange between you and your host community. Your visit really counts in a remote, beautiful and unknown Balkan destination which is still suffering from decades of impoverishment caused by urban migration and the 1990s Yugoslavian war.