WARNING: part of this trail is on the emergency lane of a highway.
I heard above the existence of a cave next to the Skopje – Tetovo highway a couple of years ago from a taxi driver, but never knew its location. This year I noticed the cave on the map of OpenStreetMap and tried to find it.
The cave is about 30 km or 35 min drive from Skopje, note that this is a toll road! The hiking trail itself is a bit over 4 km in total (includes both directions) with 150 m climbing if you start at the “safe parking” spot.
Because I was not sure if parking next to the highway would be save – or allowed – I took the first exit after the cave (Skopje-Tetovo direction), parked at the road to the village Cerovo and tried to find the cave from there.
It turned out to be impossible (or at least very dangerous) to reach the cave by directly going downhill because it is quite a steep cliff. I tried to find my way down several times but did not succeed, these attempts have been removed from the GPS trail.
Then I decided to try to reach the highway, which worked out. Retrospectively, there is a possibility to park at the indicated location on the emergency lane of the highway. The emergency lane is quite wide here, almost as if it is a parking? If it is really allowed to park here, I don’t know, but a fact is that a couple of kilometers earlier people were selling vegetables on the emergency lane, so who knows. Welcome in Macedonia! You can recognize this “parking” by the two billboard on the hill above it on the right (see the Google Maps picture).
From the “parking” on the emergency lane it is only about 400 m walking on the emergency lane next to the highway. Again, this possibly is not allowed and not the safest place on earth, but the emergency lane is wide enough to walk without any problems.
The cave itself is large and high, but not deep at all and a bit of a disappointment after all the trouble I went through to get there.
You can view and download the GPS track of this short hike here: https://www.wikiloc.com/hiking-trails/cave-next-to-highway-from-skopje-to-tetovo-118309623
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