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Published: August 4th 2013
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Viljandi
A small lake side town in Estonia. Needing a break from both churches and castles, we spent a couple of hours one afternoon walking along a boardwalk over the Kodru bog in the Korvemaa Landscape Protection Area in Latvia. We'd never have found the trail without the help of the young girl selling tickets for a museum there who walked half way across a mown field full of sharp stalks in flip flops to point out the beginning of the trail. When we emerged from the trees the landscape looked like something from a post-apocalyptic movie, with wizened-looking trees, quite different from field after field of grain or the herds of cattle we'd been driving past, and we had to watch out for tiny brown frogs and small lizards leaping from the boards as we put our feet down.
Driving on to Viljandi for the night we were dismayed to see hordes of people strolling the streets. This is not a good sight when it's early evening and you haven't reserved a room ahead of time. We quickly learned there was a big music festival on but luckily this was the last day so we managed to get a room in a decent hotel. The castle ruins
Salaspils
A memorial to the victims of WWII. with a hilly and treed park area around them were a perfect setting for such an event and the weather glorious. The following morning, we walked the twelve or so kilometres around an attractive lake in the valley below the castle ruins.
In Salaspils we woke to pouring rain but by the time we reached the nearby Salaspils Memorial, the site of a concentration camp during WWII, the rain had eased off but it was appropriately damp and gloomy. We walked the curved path to the Memorial thinking of those who had walked that path, hidden in the woods but just a few minutes from the railway line, before us. For some, the camp was merely a point on route to the larger camps of the Third Reich. The 'lucky' prisoners were to be put to work. For those unsuited to hard labour it was probably the end of the line. As we approached the large concrete entrance bunker, the notches in the stone presumably showing the number of Latvians, Russians and other Europeans who had died there each year the camp was in use, we became aware of a 'heartbeat' sounding from a wide, black, granite plinth inside
Salaspils
Mother guarding her children. the memorial ground. On the grass inside, several forty to fifty-foot grim-faced stone figures faced the bunker, one a woman with children hiding behind her skirts, also a man supporting another who was dying or perhaps already dead.
In Liepaja we took in a tour round Karosta prison which was used as a military prison until 1997 when Latvia joined the EU and the prison did not meet EU standards. Although inmates were served regular army meals three times a day, it was a grim place and we were told a soldier might be kept there for up to three months while he waited for the military judge to arrive and hear his case.
As with the Latvian-Estonian borders we crossed, the buildings at the Latvian-Lithuanian border crossing were no longer in use. In Klaipeda we found the comfortable Old Mill Hotel on the waterfront and took the ten-minute ferry ride across a narrow channel of the Baltic Sea to the Coronian Spit, an attractive nature reserve. Here we wandered around an Amber museum, the solar clock pictured in our previous blog, an aquarium and nautical museum situated in old fortifications, and a path to Witches Hill, once
Old Mill hotel
Great hotel in Lithuania. visited for Midsummer's Eve celebrations and now featuring around 80 wooden carvings of fairy-tale figures.
Of all the museums we've been in, we found the Kernave Archeological and Historical Museum with its surrounding ancient hill forts one of the most interesting. We enjoyed watching the audio visuals of how the people of the time made their clothes, weapons and other necessities of life.
Our final stop in Lithuania was Vilnius. After our first day, when we walked to and from the railway station a couple of times trying to arrange our train journey to Warsaw, we rated it the least attractive of the many towns we have passed through in the Baltic states. The main tourist routes are attractive enough but, off the beaten track, there are many dilapidated and often graffiti-covered buildings and lots of garbage. It is, however, the capital of Lithuania and in fairness we are now on foot again, have mostly confined our wanderings to the old town, and our second day found ourselves wandering better kept, touristy parts of the old town. We didn't see much of the more modern parts of the city.
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