Curonian Peninsula

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29 April 2007: We woke up early only to find all cafés in Palanga do not open on Sundays (or any day for that matter) until 10am. Odd for certain for a tourist town.... So, off to the Curonian Spit. After a 30 minute drive, we arrived in Klaipėda and took the car ferry over to the peninsula. The peninsula is 97km long, but only 52 of them are in Lithuania (the southernmost portion being Kalingrad and Russian). The Lithuanian maps uniformly do not show the remainder of the spit below the border south of Nida.

The four principal Lithuanian towns on the spit (Nida, Preila, Pervalka and Joudkrantė) all united in the 1960s into “Neringa,” and the spit was named a UNESCO world heritage site for its “cultural landscape” in 2000.

At Joudkrantė, we visited the Witches’ Hill Exposition of Wooden Sculptures which were all carved in 1979-1981. There are 70+ sculptures in a gorgeous pine forest setting.

Next stop Nida (approximately two kilometers from the Russian border). The town has a nice harbor, but the Parnidis Dune just south of the main town is the highlight. The view from up top is fantastic of the Baltic on one side and the Curonian Lagoon on the other. The pictures don’t really give a sense for the size of the dune. We walked down the dune to the Baltic coast for some beach sitting, wave watching and stone gathering.

On the way back up the spit, we stopped at a cormorant nesting colony where approximately 5,000 cormorants nest. If Bernie Krauss has not yet recorded the Biophony here, he should.

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