April 3, 2019April 3, 2019 crconley

Kapaonik

Serbia, Travel

Kapaonik is the largest mountain range in Serbia and has the highest peak in the country.  It is also home to the best and largest ski slopes in Serbia.  Since Ella did so well her first-time skiing, we wanted her to have one more chance before the end of the season, so we booked 5 days at the Ski Resort.  We chose Kraljevi Čardaci, which is a combination hotel and apartment complex.  You can book the apartments on hotel.com that include a refrigerator, dishes, pots and pans.  Each apartment is slightly different as they were sold as shells and you then finished out the apartment to your own taste.  We picked that property because it also had a water park. 

If you are in your 20s and 30s without kids, you are going to want to stay at the resort itself where all the bars and night life exist.  We just needed places to eat and activities to keep Ella busy when not skiing.   The hotel is about five miles from the ski runs and the main complex but has a shuttle bus that runs every hour to take you back and forth.

We signed Ella up for MM Ski Sport which had a four hour a day class, two hours in the morning, then they served lunch and then two more hours in the afternoon.  She really got very good in a quick amount of time and the instructors were encouraging her to stick with skiing because she has great potential.  I have no idea where she got her athletic ability.  It certainly did not come from me.  She then spent three hours in the pool every evening.  The hotel also had activities for children at night, but after we left Ella there the first night she did not want to go back as it was geared more towards younger children.

The hotel has two restaurants for evening meals and a beer bar restaurant.  This was a very cute space, though small, with lots of smoking later in the evening.  While they had a full menu, they claimed that a party the night before and used up all their food supplies and it would be two weeks before they are restocked again.  We chose to eat around the hotel at the bar and the restaurant and took a cab one evening to a place we saw on the way each day.  There is also a couple of more bars on the property.  I used the pool bar often as Ella went crazy on the water slides.  The hotel has Wi-Fi that seemed quite acceptable.

Like much of Serbia be mindful that they do not clean the snow and ice to the same degree that they do in the US.  While it eventually gets cleaned up in some spots there is typically a lot of hidden snow and black ice to make you think about where you are walking.  In a future post I will give you some recommendations on places to eat and of course drink while at Kapaonik.  If you come to Serbia in the winter this is a great place to ski at much lower cost than in the US.  They also have the usual summer ski resort activities for year-round fun.