Beach Bums on the Baltic, Bay of Riga, Latvia

Zagan the motorhome’s gradually filling with fine white sand, brought in on the eight footed trio of beach bums which are Team Zagan. The car park barrier’s remained up, so no charge to stay still, and we’ve neglected to shift from yesterday’s spot. Being but a few meters from the pristine, miles-long beach on the southern side of the Bay of Riga, why would we (N57.03836, E23.40254)?

Sunset over the Bay of Riga

Actually, that brings me nicely to an observation a couple of folks have made recently, that we’re generally doing exactly the opposite, and are burning our way across Europe faster than Concorde. A fair observation too, since we’ve not spent more than a few days in a country since we exited the cracking Croatia. Why? Having met Karen and David (thegreygappers.co.uk), who’re spending a year travelling Spain by motorhome, we’ve long discussed how we should use our incredibly-free lives. Should we do the same thing, and immerse ourselves in a country for months or years? Or should we keep shifting, trying to see as many countries as we can?

Our conclusions are fluid, but at the moment this is where our heads are at:

• The breadth of experience from travelling between cultures continues to excite us, and pushes us to keep moving.
• Some countries are simply larger than others, and take longer to see. Italy held onto us for months, but it’s rather larger than Lithuania, where we only spent a few days.
• Before we reached the Baltics on this trip, we’d visited most of the other countries before on previous tours, so had seen much of what we wanted to see.
• Huge areas of some Central and Eastern European countries are forest and farmland, dotted with villages and quiet towns. As we’re not into hiking or farming, there’s not a great deal too entice us.
• Recently we’ve skipped some places based on the experience of others. Kaliningrad was bypassed after reading of legendary motorhomers Chris and Catherine’s trip there. The Curonian Spit in Lithuania didn’t sound worth the money in Adam and Sophie’s write-up. We just didn’t fancy visiting these particular spots on Earth at this point in time.
• Although we’re pretty much free to do what the hell we please (woo hoo!), we’ve set ourselves a goal to get to Nordkapp this year, which is still at least 2000km away, if we drive straight there, which we won’t. Plus we want to get there in good time to enjoy Norway, Sweden and Denmark on our trip south. Gotta keep moving.

Trip-pondering aside, we’ve had a good chill-out day in our spanking shiny car park here in Latvia. As ever, countries continue to confound expectations. For example, parking costs here, when they’re actually enforced, are high at £11 a night, when you consider the average Latvian wage is £4650 after taxes (from WikiPedia). I’m not complaining.  €14 a night to stay in such a great location would be great value in some countries, but isn’t Latvia supposed to be poor?

I don’t know why I’m continually caught by this same trap in thinking: that entire countries are poor. Maybe it’s the way media portrays places? Whole countries aren’t poor. Latvia has one of the biggest gaps between the rich and the poor of any European country; 26% of the income here is earned by 10% of the population. Some Latvians are very poor, and some are very rich. It seems many folks continue to live in the poverty left behind by communism’s final failure, but many thousands of others have run alongside and then jumped on the wonga wagon. The huge official-looking P-for-Parking signs pointing into what appeared to be people’s back gardens yesterday: folks capitalising on opportunity, and it feels like there is enormous opportunity in these Baltic states.

Beaches Italian hotspots are privately owned, and the punters are packed on ’em in summer. Here in the Bay of Riga the beach is public, miles upon miles of it, pristine, with no development and practically no people

Right, enough ramblings for today folks. After a day on the beach we’re planning on a Friday night staying cool in the van (we have some much-loved shade here), no running tonight after we about killed ourselves in the heat yesterday, and we’ll head off somewhere tomorrow.

Shiny new trainers got a run out on the beach yesterday. Too hot, 2 or 3 miles later we were roasted alive and had to walk back, grim

Cheers, Jay

P.S. Interesting fact of the day: over 250,000 people living in Latvia are citizens of no country. These folks, mainly ethnic Russians, were encouraged into Latvia by the Soviets and were citizens of the USSR, which ceased to exist 25 years ago. Latvia chose not to automatically give them citizenship. They can’t vote and some government jobs aren’t open to them. They can travel in the Schengen zone visa-free, and unlike Latvian citizens, can also travel to Russia visa-free. It’s a weird situation.