Today we stepped up to the big chainwheel since we came under heavy artillery fire from the Russian Army just outside the small village of Prudy some thirty kilometres from Kaliningrad. For some this might sound like a joke for other the beginning of the Third World War, however correctly said we heard artillery fire from what we think was a military exercise area. It must have been so damn crap to be soldier during the Second World War.

As with yesterday we basically flew the first sixty kilometres from our starting point only bothered by truck traffic and the odour of car exhaust – which are far worse in Russia than in the EU, probably something to do with low diesel and gasoline quality. The result of this was that we left the main highway (see below) near Znamensk for a much smaller road on the south side of the Pregolya river.

This ended up being a nice choice; the road was good and much (!) less trafficked that the highway and in addition the nature was more interesting with a lot of abandoned farmland around us. We even drove by an unpleasant looking prison.

Before arriving to Hotel Kaliningrad we somehow expected a centre of (rebuilt) old buildings. We were therefore really astonished to learn that most of the centre was one big Soviet post-war rebuild – and worst of all most streets and buildings were in decay, with the biggest and ugliest of all the buildings being the abandoned Palace of the Soviets situated in the extreme centre.

To make things better we enjoyed a nice meal at a bar with the peculiar name Pirate House:-) Tomorrow we will take a close look at the city since we will have a non-biking day. I guess the city will look better when it is sunny:-)

Today’s grand theme was good weather, tail wind and speed! The first twenty kilometres to the Russian-Latvian border was done in less than an hour. Fortunately the border control itself went smoothly no queue for pedestrians at least. I was quite amused about the sign above the small window at the Russian passport control (see below): ”Giving money to the border guards is forbidden”.

Listen to today’s audio report just before the Russian border (in Danish only).

We expected the roads to be worse on the Russian side, but our expectations were luckily not fulfilled and we kept the same good pace all the way to Chernyahovsk. In fact the tail wind became even stronger. The way from the border station and until a bit further than the city of Gusev we were surrounded by cultivated farmland which surprised us a lot.

Chernyahovsk we reached early around 15.00 hours and we therefore considered going the extra fifty kilometres to Gvardejsk, but declined on this option because we were not sure we could find a hotel there. In Chernyahovsk we almost immediately found a hotel with the strange name ”Hotel by the Bear”. It was an old renovated red brick building which looked closed down for the winter, but we were almost ready to go, when I found a small door bell. It worked and we got into a beautifully decorated hotel – with a lot of pictures showing the primary German history of the city.

We took a quick walk around the city and found that not a lot from the German period was left. Some buildings and a few churches. One of the churches was in fact very interesting since it was built in a typical German protestant style but later converted into a Russian orthodox church, that is on its exterior it was German but inside it was like any other orthodox church.

It is somehow sad to enter Russia after Lithuania, since it is like coming from modern times and welfare and back to the Middle Ages. Everything here is falling apart with competent authorities nowhere to be seen. A few days ago I read an article that compared the Putin era to the era of Bresnev – an era of stagnation (and without future). A pretty harsh comparison, but the more I think about it, the more it seems plausible.

Tomorrow we will reach Kaliningrad which will be a visit we have been looking forward to. Some five years back I actually was at a Moscow airport ready to fly to Kaliningrad, but we cancelled our tickets, since they had more than one meter snow in the airport in Kaliningrad. We later learned that the airport was closed for three days because of snow. I therefore feel like I have some unfinished business to do:-)

We left the Dzǖkija Hotel after a group photo with bicycles in front of the hotel now Kenneth was at hand as a photographer (see below). This morning was probably the coldest we have experienced so far and just after we left we also got a few showers.

We drove from Alytus to Vilkaviškis via Krosna and Marijampolé. The terrain until around five kilometres before Marijampolé was quite hilly until the landscape changed into flat farmland the remaining way to Vilkaviškis. My hope was to eat lunch at a café in Marijampolé, but the dream burst since they were renovating some parts of the road from Krosno which diverted us on to smaller and sometimes even gravel roads. This made us hungry long before Marijampolé and we thus stopped and ate lunch at a bus stop.

Soon after two local ladies and a guy came to the bus stop and looked quite puzzled about my bicycle. When I came closer they asked me something in Lithuanian – I replied in English which they did not understand a word of. We found common language in Russia and they were laughing a lot when they heard we were on way to Denmark by bicycle. As one of them said; ”She could not even go to the nearest city by bicycle”. Could have been fun if they also met the Dutch girl I met later at our hotel in Vilkaviškis – she was on her way by bicycle from Norway to Holland. What she was doing in Vilkaviškis puzzled me after we wished each other a nice trip.

Marijampolé really astonished us a lot, since everything was newly renovated or built; the main square, the biggest hotel, the police station (and the twenty cars on the parking lot were brand new) and the roads. The city like rest of Lithuania does not look like the Eastern Europe twenty years ago.

Vilkaviškis surprised us even more, since this small city with only thirteen thousand inhabitants had a lot of cafés and restaurants and more interestingly a bowling centre. All the restaurants (minimum 3 restaurants) were busy catering for banquets, so we were forced to dine in the local bowling centre. The food there was very good and inexpensive and the entertainment superb, since the ”whole” city gathered it seemed to us for watching the basketball match between Lithuania and Greece.

Who won I do not know, but I know that we felt like winners today.

We were sitting at a crowded restaurant in Alytus when suddenly we her a Danish voice from behind. With surprised faces we turned our heads to realize that it was my old school friend Kenneth standing there. Okay to be honest it was not a sudden surprise since we actually agreed to meet since he was nearby in the Polish city of Goldap, however we kind of misunderstood each other so we were not expecting him this night. Anyway it was a great surprise.

Today’s journey started in heavy rain and on cobblestone roads. Not exactly things on the present list of touring cyclists. When we came out to the perimeter of the city the only outbound roads was something similar to highways which is the last thing a cyclist want to engage into. We hit the ”highway” head on and on one of the first on-ramps a big cargo truck carrying wood deliberately ignored his duty to give way and basically forced me further out into the traffic.

Anyway after twenty five kilometres, a lot of cursing about the traffic and seeing a Ford Sierra’s motor blowing up in smoke and subsequently going on fire we drove into the tourist magnet of Trakai. It seemed to us that it is every tourists duty to visit Trakai castle when visiting Lithuania, so – in fact we did not visit it we instead took pleasure in viewing it from the outside:-) Certainly a place worth visiting (see below).

From Trakai to Alytus the road became much less trafficked and climbed up on down beautiful hills, into forests and farmland. I think we both are quite impressed by Lithuania’s beautiful and in many places unspoiled nature.

The day ended with a visit with Kenneth to Alytus’ up-scale nightclub Chicago (spelled quite a bit different in Lithuanian however). As with many other Eastern European night club’s the girls were dressed to kill and the dance floor packed with dancing crowds from early on. We did however not stay long; Kenneth thought it was a lame and with one hundred kilometres in my legs I was kind of not fit for action.

Today was our first day of resting our legs and back parts of our bodies. After sleeping marginal longer today our first visit was to the Genocide Victim’s Museum or the KGB-museum as it also is known as. Here the darkest history of twentieth century Europe was not only on display, but the cruelty was thought up and happened in the exact premises of the museum during Soviet and Nazi times.

Looking into the prison cells told the story by itself.

After leaving the grim history behind, we strolled around the old town which certainly is worth visiting. I cannot leave behind the tech geek within me so we also made a visit to the Lithuanian Energy and Technology Museum which was placed in Vilnius’ first power station. The station was beautifully restored and the turbine hall housed several smaller turbine / generator setups of old Siemens (see below) and Soviet produce. The only better thing would be if they were running. Nice!

Other than that they had some displays of equipment produced in Vilnius during primarily Soviet times. I was quite astonished that Vilnius is kind of a scientific laser hub producing high-end lasers and that Soviet tube computers were developed and produced here as well.

The day ended at the pub Universiteto with some nice beer, good food and a basketball match between Russia and Slovenia. Even though it was Thursday the pub was just before midnight almost filled with young students dressed up for some serious clubbing. My dad was already sleeping in the hotel and after a drink I also went home; we had some one hundred kilometres of biking the day after.

Above a picture of Vilnius’ best efforts at making the city bicycle friendly; they did not succeed.

Let me start with the annoying issues first; Vilnius is a labyrinth with a very strange system of bicycle lanes made directly on the pavement for pedestrians. While driving confused around in Vilnius’ old mess of streets I thus almost hit a girl who suddenly turned and walked onto the bicycle lane – a lane which was clearly marked for bicycles only. I luckily managed to brake and half a minute later I understood that this was a one-way bicycle lane and we were going in the wrong direction. The next thing was that I was working my gear shift so excessively that it did not change according to my wishes which made me understand that hard-core city biking requires a Shimano 7-shift internal gear – period.

In the end after 5 kilometres half-random driving in the centre of Vilnius we found Comfort Hotel which was a pleasant end to our longest distance so far and also the one with the worst headwind.

Following our nice stay in Ignalina city the first kilometres out of the city was very tough due to the unpleasant strong gusts of wind blowing now and then. Nonetheless we had a nice ride through hilly forests and farmland (most of which was not cultivated anymore). The most important thing was that the road was almost perfect, no potholes, no gravel only plain road almost all the way. The last fifteen kilometres before Vilnius was however really unpleasant since the road narrowed and carried a lot of traffic.

Below we stopped for lunch very close to the Belarussian border near some woods.

Below a church in Švenčionys.

Today became the longest leg so far both in total and on gravel roads (9 kilometres) and the wettest, since we unfortunately got our first rain the first twenty kilometres toward the Lithuanian border. Fortunately it was only a few showers and in the end we got a lot of sunshine while driving through the pine forests in Lithuania towards Ignalina.

We crossed the border from Latvia to Lithuania (see above) only two kilometres from the Belarussian border so it would not be wrong to say that we were cornered. The reason for this is my addiction to strange tourists destinations; the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant.

For those who are not familiar to nuclear power I will just sum up the important history of the Ignalina plant. It is of the same (unsafe) type as the Chernobyl reactor which blew up in Ukraine, the Ignalina version is just bigger by capacity and newer. The last reactor on the Ignalina plant was shut down on the 31.12.2009 as per agreement with the European Union, which did not like the safety issues regarding this particular reactor design. Currently the plants around two thousand employees are working to dismantle the plant and safely store the spent nuclear fuel.

From the outside and the surroundings everything reminded me of Chernobyl even though I have never sat my foot there. The reactor building design (see below) although a bit different reminded me of the pictures taken by helicopter short after the Chernobyl accident – it somehow gave me the shivers and yet again I knew the plant was taken out of operation but still not a toy.

We got the photographs and we hurried further towards the city of Visaginas, the Ignalina plant’s Pripyat, just ten kilometres away. Visaginas proved to be an interesting short visit since it was built totally from the ground together with the nuclear power plant, thus it was like going into a museum of the Soviet paradise and city planning. The city was indeed well-structured with a lot of pine trees around but with a total lack of family houses; only apartment buildings were to be seen.

Our final goal was the city of Ignalina some 36 kilometres south of Visaginas. I forgot to add 36 kilometres of pine forest with almost no human in sight and even the sign showing ”Ignalina 3 km” was kind of a joke, since it just turned right into more pine forest. Honestly speaking I began to doubt there would be a city of six and half thousand inhabitants.

At the last kilometre we found a very nice, clean and well-maintained city and even better a small three star hotel Žuvėdra overlooking a small lake. Here it is very important to add that the food and service in their restaurant was splendid (and very inexpensive).

Tomorrow there will be no horror-tourism, but instead we will have some 110 kilometres ahead of us to reach Lithuania’s capital.

The road from Krāslava went up hill and down hill all the way to Daugavpils and we quickly biked the stretch and just before lunch found our hotel Duets squeezed in between a huge railway junction. After enjoying a hot and long shower we went site seeing.

So what is there to see in Daugavpils? In fact not much. After dinner we walked from the city centre and out to Daugavpils fortress. Our brochure claimed it to be one of the most well-preserved fortresses in Eastern Europe dating back to the eighteenth century. We did not want to see the state of the others – this one consisted of old buildings in total neglect (see below). Thunder and a heavy shower arrived at almost the same time as we entered the fortress so we took shelter in an open building entrance.

We quickly evaluated whether people actually lived in the building we just entered into and we agreed; no! Two minutes after a man passed us a went up the stairs; so yes. I certainly hope the apartments looks nicer inside than the building looks outside.

The rain continued so we just went back to the hotel with a taxi and became sitting ducks until the evening came and our hunger paid tribute to the top floor (10th floor) restaurant at Park Hotel Latgola. Our stomachs liked the food but our minds thought the restaurant was not cosy and seemed a bit too cold in its interior.

I had a lot of expectations regarding Daugavpils, but I have to admit that the city did not live up to them. However it one would be a goods railway freak (see above), then Daugavpils is the clearly the place to go:-)

See you on the border.

Night life in Rēzekne was very quiet – the local nightclub Coco bar was closed of some reason and I could not locate other bars, although there was at least two places where parties (private ones) were taking place; at our hotel and at another local café. Admitted it is a bicycle trip and not a intercity pub crawl:-)

The weather did not look promising when looking out of the windows, but after double checking the weather report we should be home free, thus no rain! Our route took us through the Rāznas national park and even though this route was very hilly we had a good pace both up and down hill. On one of the hills I hit a maximum speed of 56 km/h.

For lunch we stopped in the small town of Ezermieki by a small lake (see above picture) which was very beautiful since the sky was clearing and the sun was saying hallo more and more often. The hills became longer and lower towards Krāslava which made it easier to keep pace. Even though the city has around seven or eight thousand inhabitants it was not exactly easy for find a hotel.

In the end we however found one, actually it looked more like a huge private villa with a few guest rooms, but that was good enough for us (the joke here is that anyway the name was: ”Hotel Priedaine”). The local and only pizzeria was closed so we instead enjoyed a beer on a bench overlooking the river at sunset. Magnificent.

We have now been a week on the road and status is that we have biked 623 kilometres with baggage averaging 19,9 kilometres an hour, but best of all we have had no rain at all!

Tomorrow we will have an easy day with only 45 kilometres to go leaving enough time for some sightseeing of Latvia’s second largest city Daugavpils.

The short summery is that the weather report did not look that promising, but we ended up having nice weather with back wind and a lot of sun – and not to forget good legs. Okay my dad had some problems with an itching ass. Other than that I will let the pictures speak for themselves.

Just after entering Rēzekne we stopped at a crossroad to scratch our heads (we could not find the road). Immediately a taxi driver stopped and rolled his window down and ashed what we were looking for. A hotel I answered in him in Russian and he kindly showed us the way. Admitted we did not take his recommendation and went to Kolonna Hotel Rezekne which showed promising photos and review even before going there. Yet another total bargain – the hotel was recently renovated and our bikes could be left in one of the hotels small garages, not to mention the extremely kind receptionist.

We came so early (at 15.00 !!) to Rēzekne that we actually had time for some sightseeing. We understood that the city had several nice churches, a few remaining walls of an old castle, a city square undergoing grand recovery from years of neglect and a nice restaurant with the humble name ”little italy” where we dined.

Of the much sadder items we walked by a small monument in remembrance of 120 jews brutally killed during the Second World War by the Nazis.

Also locals had made a tribute outside the local sportsbar to the players and staff of Lokomotiv Yaroslavl killed in the airplane crash just a few days earlier.

It is Saturday, my dad is already sleeping, but I will go for pint at the local night club.

See you in the club.