Riga: great sailing destination

Riga is in its own way a very pretty town.  Accomodation is fairly cheap, as is food.  There is a good, large central market, where we as tourists always seemed to choose the older not so good stuff....

The interesting thing we realised about the Eastern European states is that stuff is really pretty similar in price.  Your honey will be a better quality at the same price, having simply had the comb taken out of it, but otherwise the prices are kept down by qualitative differences.  Just as Japan gets Australia's best and most expensive beef, Europe seems to get the better cuts and what we saw at the markets was all pieces of meat that cost less per kilo but were very poorly butchered.  Imports cost the same as they would elsewhere in Europe, so are less affordable for the local population.

The view from the cathedral tower

Shaslik bbq at the midsummer festivities. The lonely planet kept going on and on about this chain of restaurants (Lido), turns out that they really do have the goods.

Midsummer market setting up early in the morning.  Many people wore these traditional wreaths.  Latvians love flowers, the difference is that that prefer a natural field mix to the very structured bunches of roses we see a lot of in the West.  This means lots of grasses and often wheat are incorporated into bunches.

We also went to a midsummer market on the other side of the river (new-er town) which was really nice, behind  Julian is a traditional style wooden house.

Sigulda

Sigulda has a massive concrete bobsled run, which sounds like fantastic fun.  We arrived there by train from Cesis on a Sunday and decided to hide from the rain for the day and read the guide book generously donated by Christian from Bonn in our really very fancy hotel room.  Of course you can only bobsled on the weekend, d'oh!

My bike as it starts to rain.  The moss on this tree tells you all you need to know about rain/humidity in this region!

Sigulda, rain, bobsleds, ravines, castles, rain, 24h liquor and sandwich kiosks, ask a policeman for directions and the one who speaks a little english asks with a sigh 'what happened...', getting lost, cable cars across the gully for more castles and how could I forget the forest, moss, lichen.... 

Latvia, Soviet infrastructure: Cesis

1 litre beer cans, well I never!

After the hassle and expense of Talinn airport we decided not to be suckers and to land at Cesis and take public transport to Riga. All our net research indicated that the bus is by far the better option, but with the bikes it had to be the train.

Flying over Latvia we were a bit confused by all the pinkish roads, a new type of road surfacing???  No, no surface.

That morning I'd called a hotel to check the pricing and we cycled directly there. Only problem, the price she quoted 'thirty-two lat', did not equal the price she wanted 42 lat. We circled around this point for a while, with her sometimes agreeing 'yes thirty-two lat' and sometimes disagreeing, 'no, thirty-two lat!' whilst pointing at the number she had written '42'.  Despite our best efforts I don't think we managed to disabuse her of the notion that 42 is pronounced thirty-two and we eventually left.  (These two sums represent €45 and €60).

We couldn't really understand why the hotels in town were full, but luckily one lady on reception kindly called around for us (we hadn't found the correct mobile provider at that point and couldn't call ourselves).  Oddly enough the hotel we'd just been at was not on her list of places to call.....  So we ended up a bit out of town, but it was cheap and a shelter from the rain.  The next day we had a look at the quaint old town and discovered hundreds of mountain bikers.  Turns out there was a race....

Cesis town walls tower

Mmm wild strawberries, just the thing for the train ride to Sigulda

Regarding Cesis airfield (link to their website), we didn't actually see anyone there, except for the watchman with his kinda scary night stick thingy.  No one wanted any payment, the watchman was in fact horrified when I wanted to give him my change as I was leaving Latvia.  So despite being on the side of a main road it seems a secure position.

It is about 4-5km to the main station, which would be an easy enough walk, the most direct way ended up via a large amount of roadworks and stone roads which was less ideal with the bikes.