Bicycle touring in Lithuania was fine. There was some nice scenery, a few kind of interesting sites; we swam in some reservoirs. But it was hardly spectacular or amazing. Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising. I never heard anyone say, “wow, you really must visit Lithuania.” From my notes I am reminded that we had a fair bit of wind and too many mosquitoes at some of our camps.
Trakai is known for its castle on an island in a lake. It was crowded with tourists enjoying the hot weather on a Sunday afternoon. It’s only about 40km west of Vilnius, but the recommended bicycle route was on a busy narrow road.
There’s a museum in Trakai about the local Karaite population, a Turkic Jewish group (?), but they didn’t sell tickets at the museum itself, and the staff was not welcoming. We weren’t the only ones turned away a bit frustrated.
One of Lithuania’s UNESCO sites is the archaeology site at Kernavė where ~2000 people lived in the 13th-14th century. Castle-like structures (that no longer remain) were built on hills made a bit flatter and steeper by the residents. It looks like this:
We had a pretty view of a bend in the nearby Neris River from our campsite where a wooden structure allowed us to cook out of the rain.
What does it say that one of the most exciting things in Lithuania was the Padalių-Čiobiškio reaction ferry across the Neris? A fixed cable keeps the ferry from going downstream while the current against the rudder pushes the ferry across the river. Turn the rudder, and you go in the opposite direction. There is no engine, no pushing, pulling, or paddling. How cool is that?
Kaunas used to be the capital of Lithuania and was my favorite city in the country. The 1000 litas building was kind of interesting (for a guy with a banknote collection), but thankfully there’s more to see in Kaunas.
A local’s collection of devils reminded me of the nativity scenes in Évora.
Only about 10km west of Kaunas we enjoyed visiting the castle/manor complex at Raudondvaris. There’s even an orangerie — a fancy greenhouse building where they could grow oranges at this latitude (55°N)! The castle is now used as a museum and the orangerie as a restaurant.
Jasper rightly pointed out that Kėdainiai looks Dutch.
The bicycle museum in Šiauliai is closed on Mondays, the day we happened to pass through. The town was pleasant enough to poke around for a couple hours.
Is the shell in that church the same shell that marks the Camino de Santiago?
The most tourists we saw in all of Lithuania was at the kind of out of the way Hill of Crosses. Maybe it has some special meaning for Christians. To me it was just a pile of crosses. It felt like a case of too many tourists and not enough interesting sites, like the road in Taiwan lined with trees.
Another wooden mystery in Lithuania was all the totem poles.
I have photos of about a dozen of those things. We never did figure out why they’re there — maybe because it’s the same latitude as Ketchikan?!
My favorite camp in Lithuania was one of our last, at a small reservoir near Meškuičiai.
