13th
Sept 2015
A tough day,
almost ending up in Russia !
Janet enjoyed the
residual heat from the sauna from last night – I preferred a normal shower –
Too hot for me ! After buying some
cheese from the local supermarket in the hotel / restaurant whose facilities we
were in last night, we headed south, towards Vilnius. We had no specific reason to got to Vilnius
other than the fact that it is the capital of Lithuania – We have no guide book
for the Baltic States, so we decided to head into Vilnius to the Information
Centre and proceed from there. Sunday,
nice and quiet traffic wise, should be no problem, right ? Wrong !!
To go to Vilnius
we had to go somewhat out of our way, for a couple of reasons. If you look at a map, you will see that the
Russian / Belarus border is quite close in the east – We keep seeing signs to
Minsk etc – and in addition there is another little piece of Russia on the
Baltic coast, where the city of Kaliningrad is located. And there is a fairly narrow “neck” between
the two Russia’s, with only one major road coming down through the middle. And Vilnius is not on that central road – it
is tucked away in a little crook of Belarus. But to see Vilnius, this was a
minor inconvenience.
However, on
arriving in Vilnius, and getting in near the centre without a problem, we
suddenly came upon MASSIVE traffic jams.
Not just traffic jams, but fenced off roads, cars parked everywhere, and
coaches, 100’s of them, everywhere. What
on earth was going on ? And of course
the information centre we were trying to reach was well in behind all the
fenced off roads, and there was no where we could park in order to leg it
in. At one point, after maybe an hour,
we got close enough to see runners – It must be the Vilnius or Lithuanian
Annual Marathon or something. We tried
going round the back to get in from the other side, we tried going every which
way, but each time we seemed to end up where we had started from, and in the
traffic jam ! After a couple of hours we
gave up – I am afraid the sights of Vilnius will have to wait for another day !
Getting out of
Vilnius I headed down the road I thought would take us back to the main road
south, until suddenly Janet realized that that road went through a tiny corner
of Belarus that stuck out into Lithuania !
Oh NO !!! So we had no choice but
to back track towards Vilnius, and then head NW towards Kaunas. Because Kaunas was not really on our
schedule, when I spied a short cut of avoiding the city, to turn south, I did
so – Unfortunately Janet decided she wanted to see Kaunas ! After a slight discussion, we headed into
Kaunas, only to find it was really a pretty dismal place, or what we saw of it
was, and after driving around for a while and getting lost a couple of times,
we called it quits and left. NOT a
successful day today for exploring cities !
Lithuania is very
rural – As usual we tried to keep off the main roads where possible, and this
led us onto dirt roads several times – Some of which were good, and a couple of
which were diabolical and caused us to turn around and retrace our steps back
to the main road. But in general the smaller roads are so much more
interesting, so it is worth looking for them.
We saw small markets in a square in one village, and a lot of older
style wooden houses in many places – Some just raw wood, while others were
brightly painted in green or red or yellow.
And at one point we even saw a couple of deer in a field – The first
wildlife we have seen for a while. Even
road kill has been pretty scarce recently, although today we did see 3 or 4
foxes.
And naturally,
with the Russian border so close, we were seeing increasing numbers of Russian
trucks and cars on the road, while in Vilnius the trolley buses were real
Soviet style – ie looked as though they were built in 1960 !
Finally we had
had enough, and started to look for a camp site, but, typical of today, they
were in short supply ! We decided to
stop before we reached Poland, partly because we have no currency, and being a
Sunday not much is open. We eventually
found a couple of places marked on the map as camping n a road a few kms off to
the west from Marijampole towards Vilkaviskis.
The first one was in a forest and was obviously a gathering spot for the
local lads, with lots of rubbish and old fires everywhere. The next one was in the little town of
Vilkaviskis, and was a “proper” camp site, but no one was around – We knocked
on doors but they were all out. So we
went to explore another place just 5 kms away round the other side of the lake
that is beside Vilkaviskis, but this was just a tarmac parking area for picnic
and not that nice, so we decided to go back to the “official” camp site and
stay there.
Still no one
there, so we set up camp and were just relaxing when someone finally
arrived. The facilities aren’t the best
(ie minimal !), but since we are pretty well self sufficient, that is not a
major issue. So here we are in this
little camp site in SW Lithuania, about 10 kms from the Russian border in the
west, 15 kms from the Polish border in the south, and about 50 kms from the
Belarus border in the east. Tomorrow we
intend to head south towards Warsaw, but making a detour to the Treblinka
Memorial. We also have a friend we met
in South America in Warsaw so look forward to having a cup of coffee with him
before we head on into central Europe.
Pics are here :- https://picasaweb.google.com/110185357936043625130/0356PanevezysToVilkaviskis?authkey=Gv1sRgCMvdwraVpfG0Yg
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