We’re in Latvia.
We awoke yesterday to find that Mother Nature had smiled on us: it wasn’t raining. Precipitation had battered our guesthouse for most of the night, so this really was a very pleasant surprise.
After breakfast, we hired bikes and rode out along the waterfront in the direction of Juodkrantė, another small town some 33 km further up the Curonian Spit.
I had hired a child trailer for my bike, much to Eloïse’s glee, and was thus towing both children behind me. It’s a good job I’ve lost some weight recently, because my human cargo and trailer more than redressed the balance.
With stops to pee and check our route, it took a good three hours to reach Juodkrantė. It was a really nice route, which I wish we could have taken a little more leisurely.
The route climaxed with a stiff climb from the Curonian Lagoon, up through the woods, and then yielded a rewarding descent into the town.
We’d opted for the lazy one-way bike hire option, so we dropped off our bikes and caught the bus back to Nida. It cost only 12 Lt for the lot of us and the hourly bus came as soon as we’d dumped the bikes, so that was a nice stroke of luck.
It was now after 14:00 and we really needed to get on the road, but, after our bike ride, we were in even greater need of a good meal and a few drinks, so we stopped off for lunch at Kavinė Pašiūrė, the restaurant where we’d had dinner the first evening. The food was good, but a muzack version of Baby’s Got Blue Eyes was playing in an endless loop, which must surely be an inscrutable form of Latvian humour.
With bodily sustenance taken care of, we headed back to the car and finally got under way. Speed traps lined the road along the spit back to the ferry to Klaipėda, but the flashing headlights of oncoming motorists alerted us to imminent danger. We were cruising barely over the limit, anyway.
A quick ferry ride later, we were heading to our next excursion, secreted inside the Žemaitija National Park. The location we were looking for was the Plokštinė Nuclear Missile Launch Site, a rather odd thing to find inside a park dedicated to the region’s flora and fauna, but situated in one, just the same.
The Soviet-era nuclear missile base was a bit tricky to find. Not only was it well out of our way to begin with, we took a wrong turn, had to turn back and eventually reached the site after 18:00, the time of the last tour of the day. Rather than simply leave, I decided to gamble wasting even more time and hope that I could somehow wangle us our tour in spite of the lateness of the hour.
When the tour guide emerged with the previous group, we told her our tale of woe of locating the site and she was kind enough to invite us down for an accelerated, but personal version of the tour. Great!
I can only say that it was an incredible experience to stand in one of the actual 30 m silo shafts that once housed a nuclear missile with a megatonne warhead. It’s a chilling thought that these missiles were aimed at targets in western Europe just over three decades ago. The whole country only prised itself loose from the iron fist of the USSR just twenty years ago. When I was growing up, this was part of the USSR!
We visited many of the rooms inside the once top-secret complex. Fading Cyrillic text still adorns the walls and one can almost hear the ghostly footsteps of Soviet soldiers marching along the eerie corridors.
Our guide informed us that the soldiers who worked here were shipped in from other Soviet republics and had no idea where in the USSR they had been stationed, such was the secrecy surrounding the site. Local Lithuanians suspected the presence of a military base at the site, but even they didn’t know for sure, because no civilians were allowed anywhere near it.
After what was one of the most memorable tours I’ve ever been on, we sped back along the A11 towards the coast, where we stopped for a quick dinner on the outskirts of Palanga, before heading north.
A long drive against the steadily fading sun was how we would spend the rest of the evening. We soon crossed the border into Latvia, but there was still much driving to be done before we would reach our bed for the night.
We finally drove into Kuldīga as the clock struck midnight. After checking in, two very tired children were immediately put to bed, ourselves following mere minutes later.
Today has been much more relaxed, ambling about town, visiting Europe’s widest waterfall and a man made tunnel system. Glorious sunshine has been our escort wherever we have roamed.
There are far fewer foreign tourists here; virtually none, actually. This town is quite a way off the beaten track and I haven’t even seen Lithuanian cars driving around. I’ve heard a couple of German voices today, plus a Dutch one. Even Latvian tourists are thin on the ground here.
I must mention that we had a lovely dinner at a restaurant called Pagrabiņš. Dessert, especially, was really nice, although you wouldn’t immediately suspect that if you knew that it was made from rye bread. Nevertheless, rupjmaizes kārtojums is something I highly recommend.
The menu offered lots of dishes whose names had clearly lost some nuance during the journey from Latvian to English. Dishes with impenetrable names like Poke In Foam adorned the menu. Who could know that this was actually bull’s testicles?
I almost plumped for the Tresses For Husbandwomen, but decided at the last minute to try the Bravery Chicken.
Tomorrow, we head for the Latvian capital, Rīga.