Heading further south into the former Soviet ‘Iron Curtain’ region, I was entering unfamiliar places and for the first time in my trip, I found myself with very little knowledge of the countries that lay ahead of me. Before leaving London I had meticulously planned out the first few weeks, with the exception of a few uncertain night’s accommodation. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and the Czech Republic all had different currencies – throw Sweden into the mix and that meant I was playing with no less than 7 different currencies in the space of 1 month (including the British £). It was fun – the kind of fun I expected most of Europe was like before nearly half of the continent converted to the Euro € – but it might have been a bit more fun if I wasn’t moving at such lightening pace. Every couple of days I’d have to figure out a mini budget; what’s the exchange rate, how many £’s does that equal and how expensive is the country overall? In other words, will I need to eat 1€ cheeseburgers at McDonalds, and shop at Lidl supermarkets to get by on budget… or can I splurge a little? I also knew very little about the history, the people and their culture. The most insight I had was by meeting the occasional Lithuanian or Polish expat living in London. But I was off to a good start in Estonia, so my spirits were high, though Tallinn was going to be hard to beat.
I was forced to catch a Eurolines bus from Tallinn to Riga, due to my unplanned extra night at the Community House. I was elated to discover that bus travel in the region extremely cheap, though taking a bicycle with me did present a few restrictions. All the coach lines I spoke to suggested that taking a bicycle would not be a problem but for two things; 1) you need to pack it with the front wheel removed, and 2) you need to convince the bus driver because he has the final say in whether or not there is going to be enough room in the luggage compartment below the bus. Fortunately I had a very helpful bus driver who opened up a separate luggage compartment just for my bicycle, and I got away with travelling about 300km for just 10.90€. Sweet!
It was a pity that I couldn’t cycle the countryside however. From what I saw outside of the bus, it was full of vivid, lush, green forest, with deep blue rivers winding through fields and around farmhouses. The trees were similar to the fir trees of Scandinavia, however they weren’t as tall or as bushy, yet still the countryside was quite special.
Just after lunch, I arrived in Riga. Sometimes you get a vibe for a city as soon as you step off the bus, so to speak. Riga to me, screamed “look after your stuff”. And I was right in thinking that. Amsterdam was the only other place so far where I have felt a little uneasy leaving my bike somewhere unattended – even fully chained up. When I eventually met my host, Karlis, he advised similar. Bike theft was a definite problem in Riga, as was nightclub violence in the Old Town (not the tourists so much as the locals, just like in Sydney). Fortunately, Karlis has special access to a secure car park inside a college building he used to study at. He parked his car, and I locked my bike up inside a secure compound. It was just 100m from the main Old Town square, and right next door to the US Embassy. Because of this, it was the safest place in town, nothing ever got stolen there due to the US CCTV cameras!
Before Karlis arrived, I did some exploring around the town. With an entire afternoon free, I had plenty of time to take in some of the cultural and visit a few tourist attractions. It was a bright sunny day again, so I began my tour with an aim of taking as many photos whilst I had the great weather. I started out, accidentally stumbling across a prominent square at the heart of the Old Town, which featured the Museum of Occupation. It was a strange looking building, something like a cross between a Borg ship off Star Trek and a rectangular rubix cube with the coloured stickers pulled off. The museum was free, but I made a nice donation since the bloke behind the desk kindly offered to put my bike and bags back inside the building so that it wasn’t on the street. So far so good, the Latvian locals are getting a thumbs up!
The museum describes how Latvia was occupied during the 20th Century, outlining the events that led to the outbreak of WWII, and how it affected all the Baltic countries. Basically an alliance between the Soviets and the Nazis saw Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland all making concessions, but in the end, the two powerful nations were only interested in invasion, which they brought on when their political demands started being knocked back – in other words the bullies stopped playing nice. The Germans invaded, but when the Russians switched sides during the war, they then ‘liberated’ Latvia. But all the while, they never intended on giving back the power to a sovereign Latvian governmnet. Instead they ran the country like a Soviet state, introducing insane communist measures and affecting people’s way of life in every sense. Propaganda pushed the soviet communist agenda, the types of literature one could read was restricted, people weren’t allowed to own a radio, they shut down organisations such as the boy scouts and girl guides, gradually replaced the officers of the Latvian army and government ministers with Soviet soldiers and ministers, and so it goes on. I was amazed at the changes to people’s lives over such a short period. And all this time, a Latvian resistance movement was operating, fighting to liberate the country and re-establish a free Latvia. Eventually they got their way, as when the Soviet Union started to collapse from the 1980’s, they got their wish of independence.
When I was joined by Karlis, we climbed up the church spire – the highest one in the Old Town – to get a good view of the city. Karlis explained to me exactly what had and hadn’t survived the war. Interestingly, one of the central market buildings (and I had a suspicion it might have been a hanger from the outset) used to be where the Nazis stored the blimps during the war.
What to do in the evening in Riga? I’d heard plenty of horror stories about tourists being ripped off in the nightclubs. Basically the scam involves a couple of hot girls preying on a guy, who is probably horribly drunk already, and they end up giving him all the signals. The next thing you know, he is buying them drinks in a bar, trying his luck, and when the bill for the drink comes, that bottle of bubbly you just purchased will set your VISA card back a couple of thousand dollars. Anyone who doesn’t ask for the price of drinks upfront runs the risk of this happening, and if you refuse to pay, you quickly find yourself getting heavied by a couple of bouncers. And there’s nothing you can do about it, because the cops are also apparently in on the scam, and the girls get a cut of the bill for bringing you to the bar in the first place. It’s basically a robbery, and Karlis pointed out the four establishments that were in on the act, and to avoid them. But then he also told me that if I wanted to, he was going out to a house party for one of his good friends tonight, and I was more than welcome to come along. Well, do bears shit in the woods? Is the Pope probably a paedophile, and is Cronulla the best beach in the world? I can come back to Riga anytime and hit the clubs and bars. I can do that in any city and they are arguably the same, but it’s not every night you get invited to a Latvian house party.
We picked up one of Karlis’ friends on the way back to his house, also called Karlis. This was getting easier by the minute. On the way through we stopped at a large supermarket to stock up on booze. It was the cheapest booze I’ve had yet – cheaper than Estonia. They had a 5 pack of a variety of Latvian pivo ½ litre bottles for 2.5 lats. That’s about $4.00 AUD. We bought three of them, and a bottle of some kind of Latvian cheap brandy/whisky. We also got a present as it was his friend’s Naming Day, the reason we were having a party in the first place and celebrating. At first I confused this with birthday, but not so. His friend’s name was Peter, and on one day every year, all the Peters in Latvia get to celebrate their name. And every name gets a day, and on most days there are several names sharing the day. If I hung around long enough, there’d probably be a Matthew day also. They still celebrated birthdays too, so basically the Latvian’s were double dipping their birthdays, milking an extra day for a pressie, and using any excuse for a party. Can’t blame them really.
Karlis’ younger brother Gustaf – who was a spitting image of my own younger brother Andrew – drove us to the party, which was a fair way out of town and not at a house like I expected. About 20 people – all old school friends – had gathered on a field, running a massive extension cord to a site some 200m away, which was powering a hefty set of speakers and an iPod. They had setup a bonfire and cooking stove beside the shores of an artificial lake that had been created a few years back when they built a hydro-electric dam. It had flooded a town and you could still see the abandoned church building sitting perched on an island out in the middle of the lake. We got there just as twilight was settling in and it was a magnificent setting.
The present that Karlis bought for Peterson was a bottle of Black Label Johnny Walker whiskey, and I loved the boys sense of humour when they removed the bottle from the box and replaced it with what is apparently the cheapest, nastiest Latvian spirit you can get hold of. It got some good laughs when he opened the box, and the bottle was cracked open. We stood around in a circle passing the bottle along, each taking healthy swigs, and I was pleased that it didn’t actually taste overly foul like they’d made out. Before long everyone was well and truly pissed and it was time for everyone to go for a swim in the lake, in the dark. A good think Karlis had warned me about this, as I’d had a chance to slip on my Cronulla speedos before we left the house. And I was delighted to find that the water was quite refreshing but not as cold as I thought it would be.
We dried off standing by the fire, as the first of many racks of a delicious pork meat was BBQ’d over the flames. It was mixed up in some kind of onion marinade, there were no bones and they were absolutely delicious! And then suddenly it was 2am, the party was winding up and Gustaf had arrived to drive us home.
It wasn’t quite sparrow’s fart, but it was still too bloody early. I woke up after about 4 hours sleep, with that strange feeling you get when you don’t immediately recognise where you are, nor can you recall exactly how you ended up in bed. But at least I’d remembered to set my alarm before I went out drinking. Curled up in bed, the last thing I wanted to do was get up, and then it came to me; I was supposed to be heading into Riga to arrange a bus to Poland.
Arriving in town, I was faced with a slightly difficult situation; I’d left booking the night bus to Warsaw a bit too late and it had sold out, leaving me with only one other possible bus line that could get me to Warsaw anytime in the next 48 hours. Unfortunately, they made no guarantees about being able to transport bicycles, and instead of purchasing an advanced ticket, my best option was to just turn up at 10:40am – when three Ecolines coaches all departed at the same time, heading towards Warsaw – and try my luck. Trains were not an option due to the shite rail infrastructure in Latvia and Lithuania. Before you got to Poland, the gauge in the lines changed, meaning that carriages couldn’t necessarily go across borders because the rail tracks were different sizes. Getting across the border required a lot of patience, some cycling between cities and going a long way in the wrong direction to get back on track. Bus was the best option.
The official stance from the Ecolines booking office was that each of the three coaches had ten free seats, leaving a total of thirty spare seats to Warsaw. This however was not the case when I arrived, or the luggage compartment was too full, or the driver couldn’t be bothered taking my bicycle or whatever. The first coach I tried only had three spare seats and couldn’t fit my bike. The second one said maybe, but I had to wait until everyone else had already loaded before I could then ask the driver. The third bus looked so packed I didn’t even bother asking. So I hung around the young girl with the clipboard – the only person who also spoke English – until the last of the passengers had boarded and then we negotiated with the driver. I had to pay him directly 20€ for the carting of the bicycle, but the ticket was quite cheap – only about €13. Considering I was getting about 800km further down the road, overall this was a very reasonable price!
MY general plan from here is to check out Warsaw for a while, then head to Krackow. I may even be travelling non-stop for a couple of days, I haven’t decided yet. My itinerary is up in the air a bit, since I missed the night bus, and now I am no longer going through Katowice. Even though it’s closer to Aucshwitz and the concentration camps, I figure that I can always to the day trip to there from Krakow with an organised tour group. And Lonely Planet guide reckons that Krakow is the place to be, so I’m heeding that advice and will stay hopefully two nights. Well, that’s the plan so far.
Anyway, next stop is Poland!
