The Baltics & Warsaw (day 40-48)
Day 40-48 (21-29th Sept)
3954 miles
Riga - Kaunas - Warszawa
The early start gave me time to overshoot Riga and head to Sigulda, a small town with castle and grounds to explore. I wandered around for an hour or so in the sunshine then headed to the hostel at the edge of the Old Town in Riga. In contrast to the awkwardness of parking in Stockholm, I was able to tuck the bike into the pavement outside the hostel and unload everything. The hostel ran two social events a day and I was just in time to join the group heading to a shooting range where you can pay to fire AKs, hand-guns and semi-automatic shotguns. I'd never fired a handgun before, and figured I wouldn't get too many opportunities so joined the group after a quick turn around of checking in. The safety side of things felt a little more relaxed than I'd expected at the range, our passport numbers were taken and we signed to say we'd follow various 'house rules' but aside from the brief visual display of how to operate the different weapons in broken English, it was a little casual. Despite wearing ear defenders, I wasn't prepared for the sound and the reverberation in my chest from the first shot someone made with the AK, ckearly a lot of power in the gun. There was a group of approximately 15 guys, some fairly boisterous but no one messed around or acted up when it was their turn to fire down the range, the sombre seriousness of the environment was lost on no one. After each round of shots we got to inspect our allocated targets and there was a fair bit of ribbing for the guys who managed to spare their paper target entirely - tagging themselves as the guy you would be happiest facing in a duel! Having chosen the wrong package I missed out on the bigger guns but was pleased with my target practice getting some 'good grouping' as my uncle would have said. We headed back to the hostel, got some food and started to get ready for the second social of the evening; a hostel-wide pub crawl. The entire place turned into a party with beer pong, foosball competitions and multiple rounds of shots. The party moved on into the town and toured various bars through the night, until a fuzzy memory of mine suggests I was aware 4:00 came and went, and that I should get some food then sleep.
The next day was a wash-out. I woke at midday and applauded myself for retaining my valuables then dozed again, as dehydrated as a carcass in the desert but pathetically powerless to fix it. By mid-afternoon I made a break for the shop to get some bread for toast hoping the carbs would fix things, but had to sit in the street for half an hour and gather myself a little before continuing on - I am not 21 anymore, and I'm not sure 21 yr old me would have done much better anyway. At 20:00 I surfaced and wandered around Riga's streets by streetlight keen to see some of the day before it was over, then headed back and made a plan for tomorrow so that I would have at least something to remember from my time in Latvia.
The next morning I headed up to the viewing platform of the Stalinist Palace of Science for a view over the city then made my way to the KGB (aka Cheka) museum at the old Riga HQ for the organisation and learned a little about the occupuation of Lativa by the Soviets. I hadn't appreciated how conflicted life was here during that period. Secondary school history and general awareness of WWII suggests that come 1945 things started to improve in Europe once the Nazi regime had been toppled, but the Baltic states were repressed for much longer by the Soviets, and only gained liberation in 1990. These countries were either being run by one facist regime or another, but neither were freedom. It was eye opening to learn about the way the Soviets operated, the depths they went to in surpressing their opposition and the treatment of ordinary educated people with a constant and underlying fear in daily life.
Eyes opened and humbled by my ignorance to the history of the places I was visiting, I found some lunch at a Lido which operated like a university canteen, with multiple options of home-cooked food counters available, then you pay at the end and find somewhere to sit with your tray. It was a social and casual way of dining, very good value and I've no idea what I had but found it very tasty and was almost annoyed there are so few meal times in the day as there was a lot I wouldn’t get to try that looked tasty and interesting. I walked around some of the bigger buildings on my way back to the hostel then saddled up and set off toward Kaunas where I was booked in for the evening.
The weather was behaving nicely keeping me warm in the sunshine as I made my way down through the countryside of Latvia, drawing comparisons to the places I knew as I rode. My concluding thought was that Latvia felt very relaxed and tidy, and was clearly investing a lot in itself with infrastructure, projects in towns and villages repotting the centeral reservations with plants but that it was still building itself up and didn't quite feel like it had gotten to where it wanted to be yet. Not in a negative way at all, just that it's only had its independence for a relatively short period and people were still exploring the opportunites they have available to them. Everyone I met in Latvia was very friendly and kind, it had a very warm feeling to the country and not just because the sun was shining. Before long I was riding through Lithuania and toward Kaunas, the Baltics are relatively small countries compared to those I've been riding through up until this point and the borders came quickly.
Finding the entrance to my hostel was tricky, it was in a dark forecourt behind the main street of the town with no vehicle street access. I parked up near-by, found the hostel then backtracked to plan a route for getting my bike to the door where I could leave it safely for a few days. Camping with a bike is easy, you stop somewhere, pitch, eat, sleep, wake, decamp, continue. Hostelling with a bike is a pain. I'm constantly aware of the vulnerability of the bike around people, and not being able to sleep near it to know its okay is made all the harder when you have limited access pedestrian streets in city centres so have to keep it in obscure places just to keep it close. I also carry a lot of stuff I don't need when I'm in a hostel, which limits my requirement to a toothbruth and some sandals, so stripping the bike of camping kit and finding somewhere to keep it in a dormatory room with one small locker per bed is not easy either. Whinge over, I've managed to find a solution so far but is an extra complication of city touring with an adventure bike more akin to trails and countryside.
Once I was settled in the hostel and the unnecessary gear stowed somewhere for a few days I passed through the common room and sat to research somewhere I could get dinner. I got talking to a German lad with fairly light chat of where we'd arrived from and where we were going to, half paying attention half looking for some food. As he begun describing the last few days of his travels, he mentioned he had arrived by bicycle, and that he had actually cycled down from Nordkapp, via the west coast of Norway. Hostels seem to be a mix of people doing short city break stays and looking for cheap accommodation, or people doing a few weeks touring a couple of countries by public transport and exploring museums & parks as they go, and occasionally people doing slightly more involved trips, the latter draws me in as they're hard and interesting but its not always obvious because it's a little crass to start every conversation with how grand your trip is, most start with where they were that morning or where their next point is. As Lasse and I were talking a group joined the room and sat amongst us, producing a pack of cards, and asked if we wanted to join. Demi and Lara from The Netherlands had been travelling a few weeks down the Baltics and met the other two at previous hostels and bumped into them again, until the four had congregated by coincidence in Kaunas. I learned how to play (read: lose) Durak, a Russian card game popular in a lot of Europe, and started to get to know the others a little until 01:00 came and the last few called it a night. I didn't quite manage to find any food that night but it was more fun to meet new people and I'd had a big lunch anyway.
The next morning I went for breakfast with Demi and Lara and made a plan to meet up with them in a couple of days down in Warsaw as we were both going to be there at the same time once they'd called by Vilnius on their way. They were a lot of fun, Demi had spent a fair bit of time in the US growing up so had a slightly american accent when she spoke english, enough to throw me with where she was from except that she had the sass and wit of a European, and Lara was the world's best fan-girl with positivity, which was 50/50 legit to sarcastic pisstake so they made for a lot of fun conversations. Once they'd set off for Vilnius I had a wander round Kaunas centre and some of the old town to get a feel for the place. It was a nice city but I didn't feel as though I'd cut my stay short by only having a couple of days to explore it. Unusually the Old Town was fairly quiet, most cities I've been to, the old town regions were the mecca for tourists, cafes and souvenier shops but the life of Kaunas was in the main pedestrian street which led from the Old Town on the west up to the Church of St. Michael proudly overlooking the street on the north east. I sat people watching for a few hours in a restaurant then cafe, before heading back to the hostel and ultimately bed.
You get all sorts of wildlife in hostels, but my stay in Kaunas has so far earned top award for being the smelliest and most annoying. When clothes get wet, they need to dry, and possibly air to retain freshness in them before they're stowed - that's basic, everyone knows it. If you don't let clothes dry properly, they get musky, and if you do it badly enough with enough clothes, it feels like it could choke you. Combine that with the lack of awareness for your own body oder then double it for the fact at least two people in the 8 bed dorm were totally oblivious to it, and you are close to the aroma of the dorm room I stayed at in Kaunas. So, naturally the window was wide open all night just to give some air to breathe, but the wide-open window didn't help keep the piercing alarm from the shop across the road at 3am becoming such a feature in my dreams that I woke and lay contemplating sleeping by the bike in the dingey courtyard outside.
The next morning I set off for Trakai near Vilinus to sit with a view of the castle on an island for an hour and have some lunch, then turned toward Warsaw through the narrows of Kaliningrad and Belarus. The countryside cutting across from Trakai south toward Poland was pretty, giving me a mini tour of the small holdings and farms in the Lithuanian countryside against the background of soft rolling hills and woodland. Some of the small holding buildings looked to have been transported there from back in time with their rustic wooden construction and outbuildings, its clear this area had been standing and farming for decades.
I stopped for a coffee and rest a couple of hours from my target when for the second time I was mistaken as being from Ukraine from the 'UK' sticker on the back of my bike. It made sense as I was only 120 miles from the border but without knowing any Polish or Ukrainian, I couldn't really communicate that UK was for United Kingdom and that UA is for Ukraine - to be fair I'd make the mistake too if I was in their shoes.
As the sun was setting I rolled into Warsaw and navigated the city by streetlight to find the hostel, tucked my bike outside the front door on a heavily touristy promenade and learned how to play Macau with the staff of the hostel.
I met up with Evie the next morning, who I had originally met 33 days ago at Kjerag Boulten in Norway. She had family close to Warsaw and had kindly let me get the final drive for my bike sent to her cousins so whilst that was happening in the background, she took me around Warsaw for the day to see some of the city. We walked through the Old Town, along the river and visited the university gardens on top of the library which were a hidden gem, then on toward the Royal Baths and Gardens for a few hours before getting dinner at a 'bar mleczny' (milk bar) - a style of restaurant established after hard times in the early 1900s to provide home cooked style food at good value to the Polish population. The food is incredible and it is unbelievably good value, from learning some of Evie's family traditions its clear how important food is to every family occasion and the variety and tastes are good - I could definitely get used to the cuisine! We had a wander back toward the old town and got a drink before she headed off on the bus and I made my way back to the hostel. I had such a good day with Evie and felt like I have a much better unstanding of Warsaw, Poland and family relations & traditions from her. Just as I got there Demi and Lara arrived off their 8 hour train ride from Vilnius so we caught up for a little then made a plan to meet in the morning on a guided tour of the Old Town to get some historic background to the city.
Without spending too long on it one of the reasons I came to Warsaw was to sort the final drive out on my bike after realising it sustained more damange than I first thought during the crash on the 30th Aug. I managed to find a second hand one in the UK, get it delivered to my parents where Pa fitted new pivot bearings and cleaned it up then packaged it up with the tools I needed to swap it on the roadside and forward on to me. It arrived in Warsaw on Monday, but by Friday it was still stuck with DHL who have been practicing for the bureaucratic olympics in the specialism of delays and pointless queries. I have been chasing them up multiple times a day since Monday with emails and calls to answer the same questions, in a variety of languages, trying to get them to deliver it. The final trick was that they put it on a van knowing it had a balance to pay and therefore didn't actually deliver it, not for customs as Polish Customs declared they didn't want any duty for the import, but DHL want paying for having spent 5 days asking me pointless questions like what the accompanying chocolate bar is made from, and how it is going to be used.
I headed to Sigismund's Column with Demi and Lara the next morning for our two hour tour with Mr Intense, but learned some interesting points about Warsaw, one being that its UNESCO heritage status is not because of the style of its buildings, or historic significance, but because after they were levelled in 1944 during 2 months of the Warsaw Uprising, they were rebuilt using the original techniques, and to a historically accurate representation of the previous. Walking around, its very easy to forget that almost everything you see is less than 70 years old. We met 4 others on the tour who were all doing similar sorts of travelling and went for lunch at one of the restaurants the guide had recommended for some Polish food. Bizarrely one of the travellers, Carlotta, had spent time in a village 15 minutes from my home whilst on holiday with her family - its odd how small the world can feel when you're sat in a restaurant 1000 miles from home discussing a nothing little village a few minutes from where you live with a stranger! Between the 7 of us there were 3 engineers and physicist, so after lunch we headed to the Marie Curie museum established in the house she spent the first year of life in Warsaw, to learn more about her.
The male dominated world she fought through to discover two elements, fundamentally changing our understanding of radiation and change the basic principle of physics with the realisation that atoms are not the smallest particles, is incredible. Her achievements in science, against the adversity of the impoverished background and family loss growing up are inspiring to see what someone is capable of. Learning about her and talking about studying physics with Carlotta reminded me how much I enjoyed learning the theories and principles at uni (but would be happy to forgo complex mathematical derevations and cramming for exams). I made a note to read through some of it when I get home and refresh my memory a little. We had a walk down to the university gardens again where I left the others to join Demi and Lara in the Royal Gardens for an hour or two, before introducing them to the milk bar as I enjoyed it so much the previous day! We all met up again that evening for a recital at the Fryderyk Chopin Concert Hall which was an impressive display of classical piano by a noted professor of music. Demi and Lara were getting an early train back to The Netherlands the next day and Carlotta an early bus north toward Estonia so we said farewell before the rest of us went for a cherry wine then bed.
My original plan the next day was to build the bike up with the new final drive then head south, but it was still being held hostage by DHL and nothing was going to happen over the weekend. My hostel was full so I found a new base, did a clothes wash then relocated to another part of Warsaw, picking up some gearbox oil for the eventual bike task when it does happen. I went out for a walk to get a change of scenery and bumped into Edrees, one of the chaps i’d met on yesterday’s walking tour. We walked a little around Warsaw taking in some of the illuminated buildings of the city in the evening, and stumbled upon a sound performance at the National Gallery of Art which was - an experience. Watching and listening to a gothically dressed artist create jarring noises from conch shells, a saxaphone and some electronic equipment. We carried on through the city, past monuments and sculptures until we found a thai-vietnamese restaurant tucked away on a quiet street for dinner before calling it a day.
The next morning I got up and spent a few hours cheering in the thousands of competitors at the finish line for the Warsaw Marathon which was only 100m from the hostel. Having done some big runs in the past, and knowing how much effort for months goes in to a single event, it was really warming to see it in the faces of everyone channelling the last of their energy into the the final 100m, with their family and friends screaming and cheering around me. I decided at that point I need to find an official marathon to sign up to, the atmosphere was captivating. I phoned home for a little before settling in to a cafe for the afternoon to write up some of the past week, sample their version of Medovik Honey Cake, and look at where I might head later this week assuming the next few days allow me to build the bike up and move on. I concluded the day watching the sun set from the viewing platform of the Palace of Culture and Science 30 floors up looking out over the city, had a disapppointing mexican dinner and went back to the hostel - hopeful that tomorrow would be a productive day.
