Notes on a 12-day road trip through the Baltics
Twelve days and 1,400 km by car from Vilnius to Tallinn: three Baltic capitals that each look towards a different neighbour, flat but wild country, bogs and dunes, and some memorable overtaking.
I spent the second half of September on a road trip through the Baltics: Lithuania, then Latvia, then Estonia, from Vilnius up to Tallinn in twelve days. I went in knowing little more than the names of the capitals and the habit everyone has of saying “the Baltic states” as if it were one place. By the end, that habit was the thing that made the least sense to me.
The whole route fits on one map. About 1,400 km by car, and, according to my phone, 88 km on foot.
Closer to France than I expected
The first surprise was how familiar it all felt. I expected somewhere distant, a bit Nordic, a bit post-Soviet. What I found was, in many small ways, close to home: the way people eat, the way they drive (a little too freely, more on that below), a general attitude I’d have trouble defining but recognised straight away.
The food especially. It’s colourful, it’s cheap by French standards, and it’s looked after. Even in a plain restaurant with no ambition to be chic, the plate arrived arranged, with some colour on it, as if someone in the kitchen cared how it looked. In Nida, on the Curonian Spit, the smoked fish hangs in rows in front of the stalls.
People, on the other hand, seem cold at first. Distant, not very chatty, few smiles for strangers. After a few days I stopped reading anything into it: it’s reserve, not rudeness, and it’s how people are there.
And paying for things is frictionless. Every payment was contactless, everywhere, without a single hiccup.
Three countries, three different neighbours
This is what I’ll remember most. Each of the three countries leans towards a different part of Europe, and you can feel it in the street.
Estonia looks north, to Finland. Estonian and Finnish are closely related languages (I speak neither, so I’ll take the linguists’ word for it), Helsinki is a two-hour ferry ride from Tallinn, and I kept seeing Finnish flags and tourist information translated into Finnish. Tallinn feels Nordic: tidy, calm, a bit understated, right down to the Swedish photography museum Fotografiska opening a branch in an old factory district.
Lithuania looks south-west, to Poland, with which it shared a state for more than two centuries in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It shows in the churches: Vilnius’s old town is full of Baroque, and the city has a bohemian side too, especially around Užupis, the arty neighbourhood across the river.
Latvia sits somewhere in between, and Riga has its own identity: Art Nouveau, whole streets of it, with faces and flowers carved into the facades. The old town is older and more Hanseatic, although its most photographed building, the House of the Blackheads, is a 1990s rebuild of the original destroyed in the war.
On the way between Lithuania and Latvia, two stops stood out. The Hill of Crosses near Šiauliai, where people have left hundreds of thousands of crosses, and which the Soviet authorities bulldozed several times without ever managing to empty it. And, right across the border, Rundāle Palace, a Baroque palace by Rastrelli, the architect of the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg, which looks slightly lost in the Latvian countryside.
Flat country, but not a boring one
The landscapes are flat. Very flat. But the nature is anything but poor, and each country has its own thing: the dunes in Lithuania, the river valleys in Latvia, and the bogs in Estonia.
The Curonian Spit is a 98 km strip of sand between the Baltic and a lagoon, reached by a short ferry from Klaipėda. From the top of the Parnidis dune, near Nida, you look south along the spit and see Russia (the Kaliningrad exclave) about a kilometre away. I didn’t see soldiers or anything dramatic, only a line in the sand and the forest beyond it. It was still an odd feeling to stand that close.
The bogs were my favourite part of the trip. Boardwalks run across them, over black pools that reflect the sky perfectly and between pines that stay tiny because the ground is so poor. The cover photo comes from the Tolkuse bog near Rannametsa, and further north, in Lahemaa National Park, the Viru bog trail is the same kind of place.
What I liked most was the emptiness. Walking alone in the forest or on a boardwalk for an hour without meeting a single person is a real luxury, and I loved it.
Lahemaa, on the north coast, was the other highlight: the wide, low Jägala waterfall, and fishing villages like Altja, where boats are left in the grass at the edge of the sea.
The main roads, and then everything else
The main roads are fine. Leave them, though, and you’re quickly on narrow country roads, then on dirt tracks, sometimes for kilometres, even to reach well-known places.
The overtaking takes some getting used to. Drivers pass with a lot of confidence and not much margin. More than once I saw three cars side by side ahead of me on a road that only had two lanes. Nobody seemed bothered, apart from me.
Blue and yellow everywhere
Ukrainian flags are everywhere, in all three countries: in front of every official building, on buses and trams, in shop windows. For countries that were occupied by the Soviet Union until 1991, and that share a border with Russia or Belarus, the solidarity is visible and it doesn’t feel like decoration.
Sun in the morning, rain in the afternoon
The weather changes all the time. During the whole second week, the mornings were sunny and the afternoons rainy, almost like clockwork, so plans had to stay loose. The showers came with a bonus: that’s how I got the rainbow on the cover.
Ending in Tallinn
I ended the trip in Tallinn, walking from the port past Patarei to Kalamaja and back to the old town.
Driving up from Vilnius, you cross three countries that often get filed under one name, and each one turns out to face a different neighbour: Poland, Finland, and, in Latvia’s case, a bit of both. Have you driven there too? Which of the three would you go back to first?