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 I decided to visit the three Baltic countries of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia a few weeks before thay joined the European Union. It was a cold, wet and windy ten days, but I got to see the capital cities and a couple of others too.
I started in Latvia’s capital - Riga. The Old Town had some lovely buildings and some museums with harrowing stories of the Nazi and Soviet occupations.
I then travelled into Lithuania and to the coast, at Klaipeda. I took a ferry over to the Curonian Spit a couple of times, to see the enormous sand dunes and Witches Hill - a park walk populated by carvings of witches and other monsters! Near Klaipeda wa s, perhaps, the highlight of the trip - where else could you get a guided tour around a secret, abandoned underground nuclear missile base? It used to house four 1 megaton missiles before Lithuania got its independence from the Soviet Union, and the base was abandoned! Heading  south, I spent a few hours at the Hill of Crosses. This is a pilgrimage site which now houses over a million crosses of all sizes. Despite being bulldozed and later flooded by the Soviets, the crosses continued to be placed there throughout the last 50 years. I visited Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania before heading north to Tallinn on an overnight bus. Estonia’s capital had the best Old Town of all three capitals and it seemed that everywhere you looked was an old and interesting building I also spent a day in a nearby National Park at Sigulda . There were some nice castles and viewpoints there, but the cable car was shut, as was the World Cup bobsleigh run. That, and the cold weather detracted from the scenery. Overall, although cheap, and with friendly people, these weren’t countries I would revisit soon, but still worth seeing before their tourism really takes off (as I’m sure it will).
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