We couldn’t come back to France without having visited, even briefly our two Baltic neighbours. Although we had visited Helsinki in Finland and St Petersburg in Russia, we have mostly explored the estonian countryside and though it is a small country, have many things yet to discover. We therefore decided to spend a week, travelling to the main places in Latvia and Lithuania (video above), using buses and trains to get around.
In this winter, with no snow, there was not so many things to see as there could have been in summer, but the people and places we saw all seemed peaceful and we too were very relaxed during this trip. We didn’t see everything, not at all, but we did get impressions of Riga, Kaunas and Vilnius, some of the more important cities of Latvia and Lithuania. We also traveled to some less urban places, such as Sigulda, in what they call the “little switzerland” near Riga, and in Trakai, an interesting village with a brick castle, where a small turkish community, landed there by the strange twists of History, not far from Vilnius.
We mostly walked all the streets of the old towns, tried many restaurants mentioned in our guide and slept in hostels. We met some nice people along the way, some spanish, an australian couple and even a french girl who was on her way to China, through Russia.
This trip helped us cut from our volunteering project and to think of something different, while staying in the baltic countries and traveling, a good transition towards coming back to France.
Below, here is the video on latvia :
