Lithuania - the last of the Baltic States

Druskinkinnai Spa town, Lithuania
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Lithuania  25 July 2009

And still the culture lives in the Baltics

Not expecting a great change in scenery as we entered Lithuania, we were not disappointed!  Many cornfields, birch forests and possible ex-soviet collectives lined our none too smooth major highway south but a vast improvement on its neighbours’!  We were headed for the somewhat industrial town of Siauliai where the famed “Hill of Crosses” is situated.   Well not quite, as we missed it on our way into town so we holed up for a while and took a tour of  this soviet style place. Huge tracts of tower blocks east and west punctuated by a small central old town only not so old. One or two monuments which held our attention for all of 20 minutes sorry we cant be more positive about the place!  Still the supermarket prices were good! 

Old lady in "Siauliai" in Lithuania
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Found ourselves a small guest house that allowed camping and next day [26^th] set out to find the “Hill of Crosses” which we did and we guess it means a lot to the locals but we found it a little grotesque without demeaning the original intent of the individuals who placed crosses for freedom in the 1930s. Also we were pretty annoyed that cars parked for free, whereas campervans like us were charged 20Lits around 5 Euros anyone who can see the logic are welcome to post us a message

Old town in Vilnius in Lithuania
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Anyway we retraced our route back through Siauliai and carried on south eventually hitting a large river and a quaintly titled “Honey valley camping” a really delightful –if somewhat rustic find.  We were tired and ready for doing nothing, so we stayed, long drop loo and quaint shower in a wooden hut – so nice!  Next day had the first decent walk for ages heading thru the mosquito-invested forest setting out to see the local castle (yes, another one!).  Fortunately, it was Monday and closed.  Think we’ve seen enough castles?  Perhaps!  Turned out to be quite splendid as it had only had a small amount of restoration work done and was in fine original form.  Once again a castle built in the 1600’s – but surrounded in “descending” lakes – quite picturesque.  On the way back walked down to the river edged with sandbanks, swam and relaxed. The owner of the camp site here has built everything from scratch himself and was exceeding friendly, we hope he’ll do ok.

Camping by the river in Lithania, only ones there!
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Our route next day (28^th) ? its getting hard to keep track,  took us all the way along the river Nemunas to Kaunus, where we didn’t linger and then via the Highway to Vilnius where yet another city campsite in an exhibition centre awaited us for a little while actually- as we went wrong thanks to a myriad road works all around it but we retraced our tracks and arrived at the capitol of Lithuania intact.

Vilnius old town
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Maybe its us, sadly we were uninspired by what seemed to us to a be a huge soviet style outer suburban  ring of concrete apartment blocks, a working power station stuck right on the city limits and a rather jaded inner city with a  preponderance for churches  and morose  local inhabitants mooching around. Having said that a somewhat revitalised  newer area encompassing the University, Presidential Palace, Cathedral, New and Old Arsenal and Castle with a pleasant river scene seemed a lot more pleasant and alive. Still all was not lost as two rides on ancient trolley buses made it all worthwhile!

Vilnius
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Leaving our concrete haven we headed for Trakai, what a difference only 27kms from Vilnius but a world away.  Touristy?  Certainly, but a number of lakes and a castle filled island made the large numbers visiting ok with us. This is another castle which, in its time, controlled much of the area near the border with old Baltarussya (byelorussia now) and Poland. It had been restored to its former splendour and was filled with exhibitions of day to day life from the 1300’s through to its decline in the very early 1800’s.  Blame the Russians again. The weather was hot, people swam in the lake system, bought fresh berries and mushrooms carted in from the fields only hours before and many small children “busked” on the approach bridge blowing wildly and appallingly into small recorders and pipes.

Old bell tower in Vilnius
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This heralded our move onwards to probably our last port of call in Lithuania – Druskinninkai, a small but neat (apparently well known) spa town. This, we approached on the best bit of highway in the baltics, 90kms of flat, smooth bitumen, why cant it all be like that?  Our short stay there  proved pleasant as there are no medievil pretences here, just a turn of the century spa town with wide avenued flower laden pedestrian streets and sanatoriums  full of ageing russians drinking various foul mineral concoctions and being dipped in mud -hope it worked!  Our actual object though was a visit to Grutas Parkas, a somewhat bizarre collection of soviet monuments unwanted in Lithuanian cities after the great  fall of the USSR and collected by a Lithuanian millionaire and placed strategically in his large country house gardens.  Added to that, was a reconstructed soviet style reading room, portrait gallery, many propagandist posters, loud soviet comradely encouraging music and a children’s soviet playground from bygone days.  We spent 2 hours here before escaping to freedom only to find 2 lots of friendly Lithuanian police waiting to gently enquire if we’d scraped a rather attractive young ladies’ expensive black car in town before coming to Grutas using methods a lot less painful than the KGB of old!  We managed to persuade them otherwise and left them studying the far more geographically interesting young lady than the scratched car.

Trakai Castle, Lithuania
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