Vilnius to Riga

 

Jessica Redmerski the American Novelist said:

A bus ride is like being in another world.

We are going to test her thesis today as we travel by Bus, well Luxury Coach really, from Vilnius to Riga.

But before we get into that detail, a little about the way the morning started.  

Morning

I woke at 4.30, the room here has plenty of plug sockets (which is proving to be a key measure of success on this holiday). So, all our devices were charged (a laptop and phone for me, an iPad and phone for Drew, plus camara battery and a weekly charge of each of our electric toothbrushes means there needs to be a lot of charge points).

The room has a lovely large desk and I have plenty of photos to edit, so I continued with that task until Drew woke up at 6am and I made tea for the two of us. There are a good selection of teas in this hotel.

Breakfast

We went down for breakfast at 7am and, like yesterday, we enjoyed a wide range of pickled food, and Drew managed to squeeze in some sweet treats at the end of the meal.

Journey to the Bus Station

We leave the hotel at 9am and walk down to the Bus Stop. We catch the 53 bus, that takes a slightly longer route than the 1G we caught on arrival. We saw parts of the newer city, with lots of people heading to work on this bus. After 7 stops we arrived opposite the Bus Station (and near the railway station, very keen on integrated transport here) 

3 day ticket

When we arrived in Vilnius, I think I expected the city to be bigger than it turned out to be. Well in truth it is quite a big city, but the centre is much more compact than I expected. On arrival, as we were staying two days and they offer a 24 hour or 72 hour ticket via the Traffi app and we opted for the latter. A day ticket is €5 and a three day one €8, therefore having only caught the bus four times, we made a loss on this deal, a single is €0.90 so four is €3.60, a €4.40 loss, so any return visit I'd plan things in other ways including using the app for single tickets, which seemed to work fine. The intangible value of knowing you have a ticket on the app which you could have used throughout the stay may be hard to account for but does give a sense of confidence. So, we didn't have to panic about ways to pay as we headed to the bus station. (See picture at the top of the post)

Why the Bus?

Like the case between Warsaw and Vilnius, the Vilnius Riga route would traditionally have been done by crossing into Belarus on the way - this option is no longer available, so it was Coach or car hire. An EU funded programme called Rail Baltica is working on connecting these cities from Warsaw, through Vilnius, Riga and Tallinn to Helsinki. However, apart from the Warsaw-Vilnius section, which is well on the way, the other parts - where there are no existing lines to be upgraded - will take until the late 2030s.

 

Bus Station

The Bus Station in Vilnius is open and airy, we joined the already forming queue at stop 19 and about twenty minutes later the bus arrived. 

Our luggage was checked in at 10am, ready for departure at 10.20am and we were given sticky labels with a luggage number, so we got the right luggage at the end of the journey.

The bus driver used his mobile to scan our pdf ticket and spoke to us by personal names based on that data - a friendly touch. He told us our seat numbers, [Co-Pilot's note: I think, dear readers, I have a recollection of the words: "Okey Dokey" from the driver!!] which we already knew, and we boarded the bus and took our seats.

The bus was, to me, surprisingly comfortable. I've done some National Express journeys recently and these seats had more leg room, and faculties than those. In particular the technology was good, with films, TV shows and Maps in multiple languages. We also had a socket between us and tables large enough for my laptop - so I used the time catching up with my holiday accounts, making notes on previous days we hadn't yet blogged about. 

While the wi-fi was excellent it wasn't quite up to photo uploading, so we didn't post any of the blog content.  

The Route

The bus went out of Vilnius about four blocks to the right of where we had caught the bus this morning, we saw the River Neris for the last time as we crossed it and the coach stopped at an out of town shopping area where it picked up passengers who were staying in the North of the City. From there we were ten minutes to the main road which is good A road, rather than motorway in style, this is the A2 or E272. 

We were due to go on to the A7 (E67) but there were road signs informing the driver of major road works ahead, so instead at Panevėžys we went through the town centre and on through the Žaliosios girios biosferos poligonas - Nature preserve - through the village of Stumbriskis and on to the 191 to Vabalninkas and the 124 which at Biržai becomes the 190 and runs parallel to our original route and entered Latvia at Germaniškis (the Lithuanian name for the town) and Skaistkalne (the Latvian name) at 11:40am 

We rejoin our original route at Lielvārži with 20km to go to Riga.

Arriving in Riga

We arrive at Riga at 2:50pm and walk 450 meters from the Bus Station, again integrated with rail, to the hotel. The area is like a building site, as the Rail Baltica project is starting to take shape here and various tram lines have to be dug up and rerouted to allow for the extra space for the trains. 

The walk was simple, but challenging with all the cobbles, cases which roll away happily on many surfaces don't like cobbled streets, so we ended up carrying them, rather than rolling them.

Following Google's directions we missed the hotel twice! This was not Google's fault but Riga's. As we were to discover over the next 36 hours - Riga is full of little streets and side alleys and if you don't look down each one of them you could be walking around for hours 10 meters from the building, but impossible to get to it.

Thankfully, we retraced our steps and facing towards the station not away from it, we could easily see the hotel, three meters from the entrance to a small street - the moral of the story is to look backwards as well as forwards when navigating Riga.

Rixwell Old Riga Palace Hotel

The Rixwell Old Riga Palace Hotel has a very impressive frontage, and even more historic inside. The walls of the annex, in which we stayed, joined to the front of the building by a 3-meter walkway, entirely enclosed, is built into a very old building with walls three to four feet wide. It gave the rooms a very quaint look, though Drew was a bit concerned that the window was more like a porthole and that there would be no way out in case of emergency.

Why Rixwell Hotels? 

As with the other two places where there wasn't a convenient IHG hotel I'd looked at Booking.com for hotels in Riga and had found the Rixwell chain, their site mentioned they were a local hotel brand and booking would be cheaper directly - so I signed onto their website and booked for here, and for our next venue, Tallinn - both which have Rixwell hotels. They were 20% cheaper online on their website, than Booking.com could manage. 

Getting to know Riga

We settled in and sorted ourselves out. Drew decided that as it was still early afternoon, we could go out and orientate ourselves - especially as he is going to do the laundry tomorrow morning while I am in Mass.

We walked through the city and found it really attractive. 

Given the time taken by laundry tomorrow we spent three hours site seeing, especially on the area north of the river, that might be called new town, as the area south is clearly old town.

Freedom Monument

We came to the amazing Freedom Monument in the centre of the town between the old and new parts of the City.

Dinner

We decided that as we were out, we would go for dinner early before returning to the hotel - Drew had worn me down and managed to persuade me it was time for a pizza [Co-pilot's note: I, dear readers, have a slightly different recollection of events. I merely said that something Italian might be good tonight. The fact that, some simple-minded people (you know who) conflate Italian cuisine with pizza is not my fault.] [Pilot's note: I love Italian cuisine in all its glory, from the tomato based sauces in the South, to the rice, peas, cheese and fish through the dishes of the North and everything in between - but when Drew says: "Pizza is the only true food group" he means it and is regularly complaining that I don't give him enough. I offer his t-shirt as indication of the prompting I was getting. The photo is from when it was new, but it has been on at least two days during the holiday 😁]. 

Drew's new t-shirt (photo taken in July)

We went to Peppo's Contemporary Neapolitan Pizza.

We began with a mixed plate - Sundried tomatoes in oil, eggplants (aubergines) in oil, green olives from Sicily, Apulian Taralli, rocket salad, cherry tomatoes, extra virgin olive oil and a pinch of whole sea salt from Trapani. It was fresh, refreshing and delightful.

This was served by a lovely, freshly cooked Focaccia with lots of rosemary cooked into it. Excellent.

Drew had the Pizza Amatriciana, he says it was delightful. The heat from the pizza oven had given a lovely, charred flavour to the meat and the spiciness was running all the way through the sauce. The base was crispy where it should have been and soft at the edges - this is perfection.

I sadly have to admit, that even with my reservations about eating pizza ro often, the pizza here was fantastic. The Pizza Calabrese Bionda which I had was spicy with Nduja and other herbs. The mozzarella was gooey and delightful. The crust was light and fluffy and perfect with the flavours. 

I mentioned in yesterday's post that Drew hadn't had as much sweet food on this holiday as usual, so I persuade him, that with their lovely food this would be a good place to try some. He opted for the Dolce Pistachio which he expected to be the size of the earlier focaccia with pistachio and pistachio cream, but it was enormous - the size of a whole new pizza.

Still, you can see the contentment in his face as he bit into it.

We returned to the hotel by 9pm and after editing and uploading some photos - and realising that while we had crossed a time zone on Saturday, the camara was still on Central European Time, so I had to re-edit the details on Flickr! Otherwise the phone (right time) and camara (wrong time) pictures get out of order!! The worries of a Flickring journeyer! 

Task almost complete it was 11pm when I got ready for bed. Looking forward to exploring Riga more tomorrow.