COUNTRYSIDE DETOX

As you arrive at Skopje airport your guide will take you for a brief walking tour of the capital Skopje to visit its main landmarks: Mother Teresa memorial house, Alexander the Great fountain, and into the narrow streets of the Old town lined with art-craft shops, Byzantine time temples and Ottoman mosques and baths turned into art galleries. Afternoon drive to the homestead in the countryside where you will meet you hosts over a tasty welcome dinner in their gardens.

After a hearty village breakfast take a walk and a donkey cart around the village and visit the local people to get introduced in their slow countryside lifestyle. You will see how they still thread the tobacco leaves manually and how they extract honey the old fashioned way. On your way back to the house you can collect some fresh eggs right from the roost next door and goat cheese from a small goat farm nearby for your afternoon cooking classes: make Balkan “Gibanitza” in the original way - with hand-made dough layers.

A day for creative workshop where your lovely host Katerina will guide you through carpenter work. You will be creating a decorative wooden plate which is used by the local women in everyday cooking and kneading work. You will be cutting wooden parts, sanding, gluing, painting and decorating all day… and take your breaks by the pool. This little piece of furniture will be the souvenir from Macedonia that you will proudly take home.

Today you will learn how to find and collect herbs from nature, how to store them and use them in medicine (tea, tinctures, oils). You will learn all about lemon balm, thyme, St Johns wort and many more, and you will make yourself the herbal therapies for the following days of detox and aromatherapy! Later you can start using your new skills in dinner preparation, and make a healthy seeds spread to pair your fresh salad and Turlitava casserole.

Learn how to make your 100% natural cosmetics that you will take home with you! You will be using only natural ingredients in the preparation of your face cream, face & body scrub, deodorant, toothpaste and hair revival. You will learn how to experiment with the aromatic herbs in creation of your own scent in future. BBQ evening by the fire.

A spiritual detox day. After a morning meditation under the 600 years old maple tree, take a relaxing hike in the mountains to the springs of river Babuna, one of the cleanest rivers in the Balkans that comes out from the rocks as a beautiful waterfall. We’ll have our picnic lunch here and a “Water clean-up” meditation. On the way back visit the village where Bogomil’s movement started and hear the mystical story of their “Secret book”.

As much as you enjoy your countryside experience in Macedonia, we believe that leaving your positive impact on this place and its people will be inspirational and fulfilling both for you and the local inhabitants. Whether it is about protecting their natural sources, or about making this village a better place for living and receiving guests in future, they will certainly appreciate your positive energy. We have developed few volunteering activities for this last day that will depend on your physical condition and the period of stay. Farewell dinner by the pool.

After breakfast transfer to Skopje airport for flight home.

And few words about your lovely host Katarina: after she graduated biochemistry back in 1997, she worked over 20 years in international organizations on sustainable development and environmental protection. She also studied classical homeopathy and received the EDIKTA homeopathy certificate in 2013, and she is practicing Gnostic meditations for many years by now.
Her ultimate interest has always been nature protection and rural development, thus she bought an abandoned house in a village at the foothills of mountain range Dautica and decided to develop rural tourism there. She reconstructed the old house completely in the original style, and additionally she installed water supply and a solar collector, as well as a small swimming pool in the garden. Today she welcomes her guests with organic homemade food, grown and produced locally, and she teaches them to the varieties of use of natural plants in everyday life. Her workshops include courses on preparing healthy food combined with her knowledge of homeopathy, while her specialty is preparing of handmade cosmetic products from pure natural origin.