Our journey from Latvia to Lithuania started with a visit to the 'Versaille' of the Baltics; Rundale Palace, designed for the Duke of Courland in the 18th Century by the same architect who designed the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg.
After lunch, we crossed the border at Eleja into Lithuania. Our first stop was the 'Hill of Crosses', a remembrance for all those people who are 'missing' whether deported to Siberia or possibly murdered but never seen again. There we had an impromptu and unusual chat with a Franciscan monk before the long drive to Klaipeda. During the orientation walking tour of the town, we visited the harbour and old town.
We had dinner on the Restoranas "Meridianas", a restaurant on a former sailing training ship, moored at the quay of the River Dangė. It served European cuisine with Mediterranean highlights, to "emphasise the maritime identity of the port city". I had Zander fillet with purple sprouting, asparagus, carrots and local beer.
After dinner, we went up to the 12th floor of the 2nd building of the Amberton Hotel (we were staying in the 1st building) for a drink and dessert and views over Klapeida. Apart from the dinner experience, we weren't too taken with the city; there were holes in the pavements, things broken in the room and dodgy lifts.
However, it was the gateway to the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Curonian Spit, and that was a completely different kettle of fish. The national park is a spit of land 90km long. 50Km of it is in Lithuania whilst the remaining 40km is in Kaliningrad (Russian province formerly East Prussia). It separates the freshwater Curonian lagoon from the Baltic Sea. The lagoon is 93km long varying in width from 390m in Lithuania to 46km in Kaliningrad and ranges from 400m wide at its narrowest point on the Kaliningrad side to 4km wide at its widest point; the ferry journey is across the narrowest point.
The first stop was at the Hill of Witches; an ancient parabolic dune covered with century old pines to its 42m summit. There were lots of wooden sculptures alongside the path carved by Lithuanian artists since 1979: good on one side and bad on the other. The figures represented characters from regional folklore and included The Story-Teller, Health Chair, The Happy Fisherman, their version of George and the Dragon, Lucifer and the Gates of Hell and the card players. We had a walk along the seafront, past the cormorant colony and over towards Parnidis Dune and the Sundial, a viewpoint to the Great Dune, the second highest in Europe. Lunch was at 'Tik Pas Jona', eating smoked fish: half a butterflied mackerel and half a seabass, as fresh as anything and exceptionally tasty.
In the afternoon, we took a boat trip on the lagoon to look at Parnidis Dune and the Great Dune from the water. We could see the border with Kaliningrad marked by poles in the dunes, buoys at sea and patrolled on either side by Lithuanian and Russian Coast Guards respectively. On the way back to Kalipeda, I had another dip in the Baltic Sea, and we stopped at an Amber Museum.
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