Caliban – Opinion and Righteous Anger

That was the slogan I saw today on a T-shirt bearing the acronym W.I.F.E. Another sign, if any were needed, that we’re in a beach town. Still, I haven’t yet seen a T-shirt glorifying the pastime of excessive drinking, so the area must be better than most.

And it is. I’ve changed my mind about Pärnu. I like it. It’s Saturday today and the town felt as if it had ratcheted down a gear or two. The oppressive humidity broke and the mercury in the thermometer sank a few degrees, resulting in nigh on perfect circumstances for a visit to the beach.

And a fabulous beach it is, too, living up to and surpassing our highest hopes: not too crowded; clean; a gently-receding and therefore shallow shoreline; good toilet facilities; powdery, golden sand; water a comfortable temperature. Who’d have thought a beach this good was lurking along an inlet from the Baltic Sea?

Of course, as I wrote yesterday, to the Estonians, Finns and Swedes, it’s anything but a secret. Outside of those ethnic groups, however, it seems much less well known. I still haven’t heard any other languages here, although many menus are also written in Russian and English, so there’s a clue.

We spent the entire morning on the beach. The children enjoyed themselves no end, both in the water and on the sand. Surprisingly, we eventually left at Eloïse’s behest, as she was getting very tired. Lucas was already fast asleep in the buggy by that point.

After lunch, we walked around town again, this time encountering wide, leafy green boulevards, quietly charming parks and the occasional prestigious mansion.

Café Picadilly provided a terrific cup of coffee and a reasonably good slice of cake, which was just what was needed to plug the post-lunch, pre-dinner gap.

After playing with the children in a nearby park, we went to pick up our laundry, now fresh and clean again. It’s often tricky finding somewhere practical to do laundry when you’re on the road. Hotels offer the service, of course, but you might as well buy new clothes for the prices most of those liberty-taking bastards charge.

Lucas is very close to walking now. He climbs to his feet, unassisted by us or any nearby objects. He then stands for a good twenty seconds or so, teeters on his toes, legs too far apart, before either flopping back onto his bum or diving forward, onto his hands, and crawling away. One day soon, he’s going to put one foot in front of the other and his days of crawling will be behind him.

He’s also developing a better understanding of language and an even more congenial sense of humour. If we ask him for kisses, he now purses his lips and cranes his head in our direction. When we lean forward to kiss him, he responds in kind, kisses in the manner of a goldfish and then giggles with glee.

In the last few days, he’s also taken to babbling in a very consistent-sounding gobbledygook. It’s an incredibly endearing sound when he does it and we’re trying to capture its sound in a short video clip.

Dinner this evening was, as predicted, of very high quality, although not the best meal of the trip so far for me. Dinner in Nida the second evening and in Sigulda the first are still my favourite meals so far.

Breakfast, too, at this hotel, is delicious. I thought the pancakes, in particular, were perfectly cooked, with delicious apricot and bilberry jams to spread on them.

We leave Pärnu tomorrow and head west to Estonia’s largest island, Saaremaa. We’ll be staying in the town of Kuressaare for a couple of nights.

Saaremaa is about the size of Luxembourg, so we’ll see only a small amount of it, but it’s always nice to get out onto an island, as, so often, they’re palpably different to the mainland, not just in terms of the geography, but also socially, giving a distinctly different impression of the country within whose political borders they lie.

To get to Saaremaa, we have to take a ferry from Virtsu on the mainland to the island of Muhu. Muhu is connected, in turn, to Saaremaa by a causeway, so we need only one ferry tomorrow.

We’ve now got the next ten or so nights firmly planned with accommodation already booked. Plotting out the days and weeks ahead, it appears that we will have time to make the anticipated excursion across the Gulf of Finland to Helsinki. I booked our round-trip ferry crossing this evening, plus the last available room in our hotel of choice, so I’m pleased to have secured that leg of the trip.

I hope the weather stays good tomorrow.

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We left Sigulda in the pouring rain this morning, but reunited with the sun as we reached the coast and turned northwards towards Estonia.

The sun was a faithful companion all the way to our destination, as if a meteorological metaphor for the fact that Lucas also remained sound asleep until we were in our hotel’s car-park.

The drive took about 2.25 hours and was very relaxing, carrying us through seemingly endless forests, a glimpse of the sea occasionally teasing us through the trees.

So, here we are in Pärnu. Estonia doesn’t immediately strike me as a lot different to either Latvia or Lithuania, with the obvious exception of the language. Latvian and Lithuanian have some commonalities, even if speakers of the two languages are not mutually intelligible, but Estonian is an entirely different kettle of fish.

Still, my first stab at the language today went well, as I enquired what time a laundrette would open on Saturday.

Pärnu is not really my kind of place. It’s quite pretty, but has given itself over entirely to tourism. The Finns and the Swedes are, indeed, here in droves, as are Estonians from all over this small country. I haven’t yet heard any German or Dutch voices, but it must surely only be a matter of time.

We looked around town today and ate at a local pizza place. The food, whilst delicious, carved a path through me like a luge along an Olympic ice chute, but took just long enough for us to have left the restaurant and no longer be in its vicinity. As we walked through town, I had to charge like greased lightning into a nearby restaurant to avert an unthinkable calamity. It was a close shave, I can tell you.

With the day’s excitement out of the way, we continued our walk around town. There’s not much going on here, apart from what you usually find in a coastal beach resort. It’s all got an Estonian twist, of course, but is otherwise unremarkable.

The beach, though, is still an unknown quantity at this point. We’re saving that for tomorrow.

Dinner was Estonian Tex-Mex at Mõnus Margarita. Well, you’ve got to give these things a go, haven’t you? The food was disappointingly (yes, a disappointment, which proves I’m an optimist) poor, but a terrific play corner, featuring a large pen filled with the kind of plastic balls that you can dive into and drift across, kept our two children out of our hair for at least some of the meal.

The weather was roasting hot today, or at least seemed it, with the awful humidity that accompanied the heat. I was hoping that evening thunderstorms would dispel the oppression, but they haven’t materialised.

Our hotel is nice, but overpriced. It does, however, boast an award-winning chef, at whose restaurant we have made a reservation for tomorrow evening. We should therefore be in for a good meal, at least. I wouldn’t be surprised if breakfast turns out to be something special, too.

Well, let’s hope tomorrow’s beach turns out to be something to write home about. There must be some reason all those people come here. Otherwise, it’s as good a place as any to do some laundry.

This morning, we drove up the road to Līgatne in order to visit a former Soviet bunker located nine metres beneath a rehabilitation centre.

The bunker was designed to enable the orchestration of a nuclear war to continue underground in the event of life above ground having become untenable. It was such a closely guarded secret that knowledge of its existence only became public in 2003, twelve years after Latvia’s becoming an independent nation once again.

The stench of the subterranean stale air was overpowering, but the tour was fascinating, nonetheless. Amongst other things, we were shown telephones that had once provided a hotline to the Kremlin, ancient Russian computers, a radioactivity decontamination room, and the kitchen where the staff ate. For kicks, I tried on a gas-mask for size.

No-one who worked in the rehabilitation centre upstairs knew of the existence of the bunker below their facility. How this secret was kept is anyone’s guess.

Our guide told us that local residents, some of whom had been employed in the bunker (it was a civilian facility), are still afraid to talk about their experiences there. This means that, even now, many questions about the operation of the bunker remain unanswered. Hardly surprising, when you consider that these people lived in an era when fear that your neighbour or even your spouse might actually be a KGB agent struck terror into the hearts of many.

It was another chilling reminder of how recently Cold War activities were suspended.

Afterwards, we went to the nearby town of Cēsis, where we had a wander around. After watching Eloïse play in some fountains, we headed back towards the car, stopping off at a place called Aroma for a notably bad lunch. Medium rare pork: ugh!

Back in Sigulda, we went on a hike that took us past a couple of castle ruins, on a cable-car across a valley, and eventually down to the Gūtmaņa Cave.

A girl passing by on a golf-cart-style sightseeing buggy spotted us at the bus-stop and gave us a ride back to our hotel for a couple of lats.

We decided on the easy option of dining at our hotel’s restaurant, which happily turned out to serve excellent food. A nice addition to the meal was that we got talking to a Dutch couple who are making a tour of the Baltics very similar to our own. I wouldn’t be surprised if we ran into them again.

Tonight’s our last night in Latvia for a while, because our destination for tomorrow is Pärnu on the west coast of Estonia. The drive will theoretically take us about two and a half hours.

Pärnu is supposedly a top summer beach destination for Finns and Swedes, who jostle with the Estonians for hotel rooms and a prime spot on the sand. I believe it, too, because we had plenty of trouble finding a hotel room in the town.

I’m looking forward to seeing how Estonia differs from Latvia and Lithuania. It’s the only country we won’t be leaving and re-entering (unless we decide later to make an excursion by boat to Helsinki) as we continue our clockwise tour of the Baltic region, because we’ll enter along the west coast and drive in semi-circular fashion over to the east of the country, before re-entering Latvia.

It’s hard to believe that we’ve already been on the road eleven days. It’s all gone so quickly. At the same time, though, we’ve packed in quite a lot, making the first couple of days in Lithuania seem more like three weeks ago now.

We clocked only about 75 km today on the way from Rīga to Sigulda. Sigulda’s actually only about 53 km from Rīga; the rest was local driving in the vicinity of our destination.

The drive was still ample for Eloïse to enjoy three complete run-throughs of her recently acquired Pippeloentje CD. We didn’t get to listen to anything but ithe umpteenth rendition of Eloïse singing along to this version of Annie M.G. Schmidt’s work set to music.

Anyway, we finished off in Rīga with a trip to the top of the spire of St. Peter’s Church for fantastic panoramic views over the city. This was an absolute must-see. We had wanted to do it yesterday, but the church is closed on Mondays.

With that taken care of, we drove out of Rīga through the newer districts to the north and arrived in Sigulda about an hour later.

Sigulda’s a small town with about 10,000 inhabitants, so the pace of life feels nice and slow; just what we’re looking for.

After checking in and eating lunch next door, we visited the castle just up the road in Turaida. To be honest, it was a bit of a disappointment, as I had envisaged a grand, intact castle in the Czech fashion. What we got instead was a bit disjointed, more of an exhibition/museum spread across several disparate, reconstructed towers. The emphasis was on the items that had been excavated in the area, with the castle itself being of only secondary importance.

Oh well. Sigulda’s nice enough, anyway, and dinner was the best meal we’ve had in Latvia thus far.

We’ll be staying here again tomorrow.

Today was our last day in Rīga. We’d considered staying another day, but we’ve essentially done what we came here to do and there’s still so much to see on this trip. That said, we’ve scarcely been out of Vecrīga, the historical old town district.

The highlight today (for me, anyway) was a visit to the verbosely named Museum of the Occupation of Latvia 1940 – 1991. The ironic location for this museum is inside a hideous Soviet-era building (the only one still standing in the city, left as a deliberate, haunting reminder) that was once, in an all too recent past, home to the Museum of Latvian Red Rifleman.

The museum is a moving experience, featuring heart-rending of deportation to Siberia; torture, death and famine in the Gulags; perceived liberation from the Soviets when Nazi Germany invaded, followed by horrific disillusionment when they started to systematically execute Latvia’s jews in the forests;the ousting of the Nazis by the second Soviet invasion; and last, but not least, the complicity of the West in allowing the Baltic nations to be annexed by the USSR at the end of WW II, when the rights of other European nations to self-govern were explicitly granted and protected.

Pretty much every nation has had a hand in the persecution of the Latvian people, but the USSR and Nazi Germany were the worst offenders by a considerable margin.

It’s shocking to think how recent some of these events were. For example, after the death of Stalin, the programme of forced deportation and resettlement was relaxed somewhat, and deportees were allowed to return to their native republics. However, until the end of the eighties, it wasn’t legal to even discuss the deportations. These people, whose were often separated from the rest of their families, with no knowledge of whether their loved ones were dead or alive, returned home after decades in exile and weren’t even allowed to discuss the experience with another human-being. Stories like that put problems like leaking ceilings in the proper perspective.

The museum is packed with detail and it would take a day to see it all. I did my best with two small children in tow (and Sarah trying to entertain them), but I couldn’t spend as much time on each exhibit as I would have liked.

Our other main activity today was a visit to Rīga’s central market, where one can buy everything from pig snouts to strawberries, where counterfeit CDs and Russian-manufactured bootleg MP3 CD compilations are sold next to stands purveying kvass, a drink made from fermented rye bread. Eloïse and Sarah liked this drink, but I didn’t think much of it. Still, at twenty santīms a beaker, who’s complaining?

Tomorrow, it’s a relatively short hop to Sigulda for a couple of nights.