Blogs from Latvia, Europe - page 4

Hello my fellow travellers! My final day in Latvia was certainly enough to equal, maybe even top, my last day in Lithuania! I left together with my host Katrina and then we split up as she went to her office and I headed to the bus station to catch a bus to Sigulda. The connections there are excellent, the bus was nice and only cost 2.5 euro and took one hour and 15 minutes. As I left the bus it was a feeling of ready set go and I immediately headed for Siguldas Viduslaiku Pils, a castle that used to belong to the Livonian Order. I knew that time would be a bit of the essence today because I only had about seven hours in Sigulda until the last bus back to Riga. Sigulda has no ... read more

Chose promise, chose due... voici mon petit crapaud qui vous chante sa berceuse... etc... https://youtu.be/LbWIMSL8H2s Riga est la plus grande ville des États baltes mais sa population (les Riganais ou Rigois) continue de décroître rapidement. Le déclin démographique est particulièrement évident depuis 1991 avec le départ de nombreux russophones en raison du positionnement politique letton jusqu'en 1998 (nouvelles lois sur la naturalisation), et l'incapacité du pays à augmenter son taux de fécondité. Cependant, la ville connaît un fort taux d'immigration interne au pays qui n'est pas répercuté dans les chiffres à cause du système d'enregistrement qui est une démarche personnelle que beaucoup ne font pas. Nous n'avions pas beaucoup de renseignements sur cette ville et seulement un p... read more

Well - after a few days to recharge our batteries, we are up and running again. When we last left you, we were in Estonia preparing to go to Latvia and Lithuania. We stopped in Riga, Latvia for 2 days. Took a couple of cycling tours. One of which took us into the real Riga, not the touristy Old Town. The part we saw was called the Moscow Area. Up until about 10 years ago, we would not have been permitted to go there. You would have been mugged and/or stabbed within the first few blocks. Obviously it has cleaned up but is still very distressing to see how the people are living. It was the Jewish Ghetto back in WW 2. It has changed, but not too much. Very eye opening. We celebrated Colin's 55th ... read more

That was the only advice we got before we were flung down the icy tunnel in a “bobsleigh” that looked like it had been knocked up in someone’s garage. There were no other warnings, no training, no disclaimers to sign, “it is for five people, you are six, no problem we will squeeze you in”. The image I’d had before arrival of donning a lycra suit and sprinting down the ice track in spiky shoes before jumping in then carefully navigating the streamlined craft around the twists and turns were far off the mark. Turn up, get given a helmet, sit down in the padded coffin, off you go. They said with five people in it goes 80 km/h so with six I’m going to say 90-100 km/h. Certainly fast enough for us to bounce off ... read more

Bremen – Riga: Ryanair £27 I showed the old geezer in the driving seat the address of my hotel and he nodded. Off we set. As we left the airport perimeter, I tried to engage him in conversation. “No English,” he barked. I nodded, irritated by his casual rebuke. Maybe it was because he was sick of Englishmen visiting his city and causing trouble. I couldn’t blame him if that was the reason. Ever since low cost airlines had invaded Riga, young Brits had flocked to the Baltics. In 2008, things came to a head when the Latvian interior minister described British tourists as ‘dirty, hoggish people’. His comment followed the arrest of a drunken 34-year old British man caught urinating on Latvia’s most revered memorial – the Freedom Monument. The taxi hit a ... read more