The driver was amazed. An English tourist with only a few words of Russian asking for a ticket to Kaunas - via Jurbarkas. "Luchshe ekspres!" Better to take the express.
And yet I really, desperately wanted to be taken on a five hour detour through some of Lithuania's more mundane landscapes. The northern route through Siauliai goes via the mesmeric Hill of Crosses, which is...a hill of crosses. The southern route goes past the Russian border, through towns not mentioned even in Lonely Planet, and past railway lines which look like they have not been modernised since before Hitler re-annexed Memelland to nearby East Prussia, the northern Sudetenland-that-never-was. The war removed anything resembling a German presence and Koenigsburg, as I mentioned in my last post, is now a forgotten outpost of Mother Russia which didn't even have a single church until after 1991. But one glimpse of the junction at Pagegiai with one road leading directly to Kaliningrad and the other running flush with the river Nemunas is worth an extra two hours added on to the journey, if only because the third option, the express, was so mind-numbingly dull when I tried it the first time I was here, that I might start to think I was back in Latvia if I took it.
So anxious had I been to make sure I spent three nights in Riga (I have a masochistic streak, evidently, which would explain the lifelong quest to get the Conservative Party to keep itself electable on the off-chance Labour might feel they've had enough), dead owls and all, I had adjusted the itinerary such that my time in Lithuania was going to be extremely limited - three nights, with the two stops, Klaipeda and Kaunas, far enough apart that I only ended up with one full day to really breathe in the atmosphere of the only country to suffer severe bloodshed during the process of detaching itself from communism. (Five people were killed in Latvia, but two of them were only filming the process - caught in the crossfire for the sake of journalism rather than going out there preparing for the worst.) The pull of Kurzeme - Courland - had been enough that instead of Vilnius, the "Jerusalem of Lithuania", with its cultural monuments - Ostra Brama (Ausros Vartai, or the Gates of Dawn) in particular, and a church on every corner - and political significance (the TV Tower where the main violence occurred), I chose dark, cold Kuldiga and staid Liepaja over even a single night in my second favourite hotel in the world, the Gintaras, opposite the Vilnius bus station, a commie hole with included pancake breakfast that finally convinced my mother she was going to enjoy the two weeks I had persuaded her to spend with me in the Baltics six years ago.
So it was imperative to actually see something of Lithuania proper. Buses are great. Trains tend to run through the only junkyard in a nature preserve, and although they are often less cramped than being squashed up against a plate glass window from Reading to Rosslare as on one horrendously memorable trip in Britain, the view from that window is more human than giant piles of rusting metal. The Baltics don't have a railway network worthy of the name. Tallinn railway station is a commuter affair with timetables that may or may not have said "Absolutely no trains until 31 December, not necessarily due to essential maintenance works, but because we're so painfully cool we believe trains are passe this season", depending on your command of a language closely related to Martian with a pinch of Outer Mongolian added for good measure. (If this seems rude, I apologise, but it is the only language that remains impenetrable to me even after three attempts at trying to use it. I can already say "Man ir cemodans" - I have a suitcase - fluently in Latvian - so fluently that I often forget to tell the driver where I want to travel first - and am getting stopped on the streets in Riga and asked complicated questions that assume I have a local knowledge. I want to try Estonian but I can't even manage "Do you speak English?" in anything other than, erm, English.) It also has the best Russian market in Eastern Europe - by which I mean smelly cheeses, kiosks selling Cyrillic calendars, and toilets which would make a sewer ashamed (though it still exists despite the glossy and soulless Virukeskus and other concrete-and-glass temples to Mammon, which lack that same rough-and-tumble atmosphere and are about as depressing to the naked eye as they are over here, though not many have a gaping hole where Woolworths was, which lessens the pain somewhat.)
I'm getting away from the main topic here, but in essence you bus because you have to, not because it's the best choice. In Romania it was the opposite, though that did not mean the trains necessarily behaved themselves either. The only way to get from Tallinn directly to Riga is to go via St Petersburg, Moscow or Vladivostok, because the Soviet Union didn't want internal links to strengthen within the Baltics. Most villages, however, therefore have the lone shelter on a trunk route and most buses passing will stop to pick someone up and drop them three villages down the line. Reading, by contrast, no longer even has a bus station, and all National Express services stop at the motorway services at Calcot. So bus is really the best way to travel in order to share a bit of local company, and if you are lucky they will show you Crocodile Dundee dubbed into Russian on the way.
On the Klaipeda-Kaunas trip, therefore, going the long way round meant sharing the bus with stroppy teenagers who wouldn't sit still all the way to Silute; dozy students sleeping off the excesses of last night; and a whole pig crammed into a string bag and oozing blood all over the floor. (That is, my lunch from the bus station buffet.) That little local colour was more than made up for by that cool, crisp junction at Pagegiai, and just as I was beginning to doze off myself, the bus shelter somewhere between Jurbarkas and Raudone grabbed my attention. It was painted with pictures designed to entertain children - the usual big-eyed teddy bears, dancing butterflies and primary colours which came as a welcome relief from grey and brown concrete.
Bussing around does mean that you can't just stop when you feel like it. The lack of Sunday services via Vana-Vigala from Tallinn prevented me from replicating the Lithuanian trip again within Estonia (international routes, even between Baltic States, take a much more direct route, although for those interested in seeing how most people still live northern Latvia's somewhat bleak industrial fishing villages such as Salacgrieva are visible from the main road between Riga and Parnu; Latvia being Latvia, they have recently built a bypass round Saulkrasti, where the light glinting off the sea is particularly fetching, which means the main road now goes inland just at the wrong moment while an enchanting suntrap is formed by the angle of the coast). The best hint is to get a road map to follow each village and river - Jana Seta does the main detailed map of all three Baltic States. Even though you are not having to navigate yourself, I found at some points it was quite exciting to start to try and predict which turnoff we would be using; self-evident quite a lot of the time but in the Abava Valley outside Kuldiga, one of the more interesting parts of three countries which are mainly one large forested plain, indispensable as the bus tries to take the most efficient route along a precariously balanced road straight out of Hansel and Gretel or Red Riding Hood.
Now all you need are the three - four if you include Russian - versions of Are we nearly there yet? and you're set.
