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Published: October 18th 2023
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‘Trucdrivers?’, I ask, while I make some moves with a imaginary steer, to make clear what I mean. In front of me sit two shaggy, massive men with big heads and enormous bellies. I am sure they are trucdrivers and that they speak Russian, like all shaggy, massive men with big heads and enormous bellies here on the Victoria Seaways.
We sit on deck in the warm sun. The Baltic Sea is everywhere around us. I guess we are near the coast of Poland.
The two trucdrivers stare down at me, like boxers do.
‘Trucdrivers? Nein, wir sind Bauern. Wir kommen aus Deutschland.’
I ask what they are going to do in Lithuania as German farmers.
‘Hunt. We are going to hunt. On deer and moose.’ They are laughing friendly.
Farmers? Hunt? Deer and moose? Terrible, I think. ‘Interesting’, I say. And they begin to tell how nice it is to hunt. The freedom. The thrill. The silence of the woods. Being one with nature and so on.
At 6 p.m. we arrive at Klaipeda, Lithuania. Looking down from the deck of the Victoria Seaways I see the Curonian spit, a wooded isthmus of let’s say hundred kilometers long and
three kilometers wide. Half of it belongs to Lithuania, the other half is part of Kaliningrad, Russia.
An hour later we stand in the queu for the ferrie to the Curonian spit. At the other side we drive through the woods to Nida, near the Russian border. It is dark. Just in time I stop for a moose, which suddenly came out of the shrubs. At 9 p.m. we arrive at our appartment:
Pass Edgara at the Purvynés gatvé.
Nida In summer it is full of tourists here. Now it is quiet. It’s raining and we decide to visit the Thomas Mann Memorial Museum, the summerhouse where the family lived between 1930 till 1933, just before they moved to the US. Mann was deprived of the citizenship of Germany.
There are some interesting pictures. Mann together with Einstein at Princeton. Another picture shows Mann speaking at a conference, while disturbed by the SS. Mann spoke himself out against the Nazi’s at the time. Maybe he was not as bad as I thought.
The villa is beautifully situated at an inland sea, surrounded by woods. It is so beautiful that painters came here to depict it. They called it
the “Italian scenery”. And indeed it looks as if we are at the Mediterranean Sea.
In the afternoon the weather is fine again. We make a hike across the Parnidis dune. It is said that it is the highest dune of Europe with its 52 meter. Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were here long ago. Near the top is a statue of Sartre based upon a picture while he was walking across the dune. In the far end we see the border with the Kaliningrad exclave.
Down we go to the lagoon. We are curious if the water is salty. I put my finger in it. It is fresh water. Strange, because it has an open connection with the sea. Maybe it is because the Nemunas river flows in the lagoon. It comes all the way from Belarus.
We walk along the shore of the lagoon. Thousands of dead freshwater snails mark the flood line: the great ramshorn (posthoornslak) and a species I don’t know. Then we see dead freshwater fishes like pike-perch. However beautiful the lagoon, something is wrong. Is it the pollution coming with the Nemunas from Belarus? Is it something coming from Kaliningrad?
Or is it because of cyanobacteria due to the warm summer?
Next day we drive over the A1 via Kaunas to Vilnius. The road is excellent. We are passing a friendly hilly landscape where woods and agriculture alternate eachother.
Vilnius I park Miss Polo, our loyal vehicle on four wheels, at the courtyard of the Domus Maria Hotel at the Ausros Varty Gatvé in the very centre of the city. Miss Polo is surrounded by cars from all directions: Ukraine, Poland, Germany, Lithuania, Belarus…
When I say hello to a man coming out of a Belarussian car, I don’t get any reaction. From a German on the other hand I get a friendly reaction. It is symptomatic. Once, when I was St Petersburg I got the same experience: no reaction, looking away even. As if you cannot trust eachother.
The Domus Maria Hotel is a former monastery. Though it feels a bit as if we are in a sanatorium, it is absolutely fine: clean and perfectly situated in between the treasures of Vilnius. I am overwhelmed by the beauty of the baroque city, the churches of all denominations, specially the Russian Orthodox churches.
Unfortunately the musea
are closed on Monday, but we can visit the churches: the St. Johns church with its pendula of Foucault, the Russian Orthodox St. Nicolaas Church, the St. Anne’s church with its three colours of bricks, the Gothic Bernardine church… And we climb ofcourse the Gediminas Castle Tower on top of a hill.
Everywhere are restaurants and souvenir shops, specially in the Jewish area. In one of the restaurants we have dinner: restaurant Zeppelin in Sv. Mykolo, very atmospheric (see the picture).
Next day we leave Vilnius and drive over a bumpy A14 to Latvia.
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