Bunny hopping to Riga

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We travelled to Latvia via Lux Bus and it was luxury in terms of space when you consider the room on the Easyjet flight. The bus driver was rather tense and stressed, felt like he was about 10 coffees in before our departure time of 8.30am. The funniest part of the journey was when the drivers changed and the new guy had clearly never driven the automated bus before and managed to stall twice leaving the car park. He persisted but it was a long drive in as the bus bunny hopped and stalled about 4 times on the long straight road into Riga, hilarious. When we crossed into Latvia boarder control staff did jump on the bus and do a check of passports even though it was EU to EU. We did notice the difference crossing over; the roads weren’t in such good nick and the houses looked a little more run-down. Our first afternoon in Riga was a little strange to say the least. We had booked on a tour and the guide ended up being a rather liberal English guy who was hung-over, yawned multiple times, swore and made comments about passing women, plus started yelling at one of the tourist trains as being cliché then tried to drum up a business contact when he took us into a shop. Hmmm. He didn’t really want to be in the old town, but we managed to hear a couple of interesting stories and he did know a lot about the history when you asked some questions. The old town in Riga certainly wasn’t as pretty or as buzzy as Tallinn. What was very interesting was the next area visited which was the Art Nouveau District. There were rather ornate and decorative large buildings some fully restored and some crumbling down with people swatting in the rooms. We also visited a couple of roof tops (hotel and shopping mall) to get a great view across the city. That evening we found a newly renovated courtyard area and had dinner a very new wine bar – very pleasant. The following day was a little overcast so we decided not to head to the coast but just chill in the city. We headed into the Old Town and visited a few more sites including the museum that detailed the countries occupation. It was a very interesting and informative museum, the country certainly dealt with a lot pre and post WWII, and like most other countries the Latvian Jewish population was nearly wiped out upon the arrival of the Nazi’s. That afternoon we watched a little movie on the history of Riga in a historic movie theatre down from our hotel. They showed footage of one of the elements of the Baltic’s regions history I find extraordinary. Back in the late 80’s people from Vilnius in Lithuania, through Riga and up to Tallinn all linked hands and formed a human chain more than 650km long demonstrating their peaceful unity to end the USSR occupation of the Baltic’s - absolutely amazing. In the evening, after the rain had past, we had a couple of cocktails on a roof top terrace in the Art Nouveau area. The city is rather large 800k or so people the skyline has a few prominent features, the old town of course, but also a large TV tower, a Moscow style ‘sky-scrapper’, across the river you also have a some modern glass buildings and a large library (near seen such a large library) that is still under construction. Before dinner at a local pub, we strolled past some more of the brightly coloured buildings many now embassy’s; pink, yellow, green, blue. On our last morning in Riga we visited their central market. It was busy with people running about getting their produce, meats and fish. They certainly like their meats, so there were huge cuts of pork and beef. It was good to see, but we did wonder how long before the likes of Tesco’s and Sainsbury’s type places pop up on each corner and this place disappears. So that was Riga and onward we headed to Poland.
PHOTOS

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