This morning while packing up I attached an icon of the Blessed Virgin onto my handlebar bag, hoping it would protect me on the road, but it soon revealed itself to have quite the reverse effect. After negotiating our way out of the cobblestoned hell of Riga (actually, the city had grown on us after our more than two days there, but its tramways, cobbles and countless potholes make it impossible to ride in), we found ourselves on a quiet country lane. The birds and crickets were doing their thing, the sun was shining, and I was thinking how ecstatic I was to be back in the saddle.
Then Fred turned his head to gawk at a shirtless lad walking along the roadside, causing his bike to swerve violently into mine. Before I knew it I was face-down on the pavement, my elbows, knees and belly scraped up. But worse was my left hand, which hurt like hell from the impact. I was afraid I wouldn't be able to ride, and I chose to follow the route I normally do when I hurt: try my best to ignore it. This wasn't easy at first, but after a while it became clear that it would only be a temporary setback.
Not long after this incident, we found ourselves on the main road to the South, an excellent four-lane affair, with little traffic and so wide that the shoulders had shoulders. We were both reminded of our autopista experience in Cuba, especially when we saw an old couple leading their cow down the median strip. Our first scheduled stop was in Jelgava, a biggish town dominated by a mammoth palace that once belonged to the Dukes of Courland. The rest of the town is of recent construction and u-g-l-y. No one could tell us where a restaurant was --the whole concept being obviously alien to them---so we had to settle for yet at another lunch of bread and salami purchased in a little kiosk.
Since it would be our last stop in Latvia, we tried as we always do to spend our remaining agoutis, especially the coinage. Adding up the costs of a bottle of vodka, oranges, chocolate and yogurt, I felt like a contestant on \"The Price is Right.\" The woman behind the counter found our antics (and no doubt our clothing-from-outer-space) amusing, and treated us to that rarest of things: a Latvian smile. We ate at a table outside, entertaining ourselves by trapping wasps in Fred's bottle of Fanta and watching the townspeople saunter by. Next to us were a table of young Latvian girls dolled up to within an inch of their lives.
I theorized that one --if not all---of them was a Mary Kay representative, and wondered what makes Baltic girls such hopeless fashion victims. Do they feel that they have to look like streetwalkers in order to attract the (decidedly unrefined and inelegant) menfolk? In Riga Fred pointed to nearly every girl in the street and pronounced her a hooker, but I doubt the market could bear such a glut of working girls, convinced it's just the fashion in these parts. We still had nearly a hundred kilometers to our goal for the night, and I dreaded having to follow the main road to Sovietsk and Kaliningrad.
But the dauntingly wide red line on the map turned out to be a charming country road lined by birch trees and apple orchards. It looked a lot more civilized than the endless forest we'd seen up to this point, and the warm, sun-dappled road smacked of summer. It wasn't long before we were at the Lithuanian border, which had the same gates and guardhouses as the Estonian border, but felt much more relaxed. The Lithuanian guards barely glanced at our passports before waving us through. A few kilometers later, Fred voiced his opinion that Lithuania felt more prosperous than the other Baltic States, just when I was thinking the opposite.
I found it to --and still do---to possess an old-world, pre-war kind of ambiance. Contributing to this impression were peasants toiling in the fields, pitching hay into horse carts or carrying milk pails on their bikes; it looked like a Millet painting come to life. The few vehicles that lumbered past were ancient tractors and trucks of Soviet manufacture, and every woman we saw had a babushka on her head. We definitely weren't in Belgium anymore. The first town we passed through was called Joniskis. While Fred shopped for frozen treats, I looked around and taught myself Lithuanian. It's easy, I discovered, since all the words are English with \"-as\"
tagged onto the end. Above me was a sign marking the bus stop marking the \"centras,\" and across the street I saw a baras, a bankas, a restoranas and a telefonas. Fred reappeared with icecreamas just in time to see a drunken boy drop his beer bottle and stumble away, nearly falling on his assas. The perpetual perfectionist vis-a-vis his tire pressure, Fred decided he needed to change his rear tube, prompting me to go into a pharmacy for aspirinas --for real\-- though I had a harder time with \"Band Aid.\" Our next destination was [Kryziu Kalnis (\"Hill of Crosses\")](../../mnt/user-data/uploads/glhell.htm), mentioned in our guide book as one of Lithuania's prime attractions.
Fred wasn't too keen on the idea at first, since it involved a bit of backtracking and didn't look like much from the highway. After so many miles of flat, he wondered if the attraction was not so much the crosses as the hill, which from a distance looked vaguely like an untended garbage heap. A closer look revealed it to be quite an amazing sight, though, and I found it rather poignant in spite of being a militant atheist. Apparently the place is a major pilgrimage site, and the tradition of planting crosses --millions of them---dates back to the 14^th^ century.
The poignant part --and the part that draws Western tourists, no doubt---is that the Soviets bulldozed the crosses down at least three times. (What P.R. firm did those people use, anyway?) The place looked amazing in the late afternoon light, and we took a bunch of pictures. Dizzy and weak from so much riding, I was easily persuaded by Fred to commit a shameless act of desecration and self-promotion: writing our web address on a cross contributed by a church group from California. In our defense, it was already covered in American graffiti of the \"His name be praised\" variety. *\[Andrew wins the Mr.
Yellow Journalism '97 award for his writings this day. First, shirtless boy above is fiction, I was avoided children hitchhiking. Next, not keen on the hill of crosses, hmmm?! I did question whether our guidebook was just in recommending an entire day and night trip to this town just to see the hill of crosses. Lastly, Andy demanded for me to find a Sharpy so that he could write on the cross he stole, and I suggested placement of further writing.\]* The road to Siauliai was mercifully short (thank you, Jesus!) but shockingly hilly. The town is perched on a high hill commanding a view of the surrounding plains, but apparently this strategic situation hasn't helped much, since --like most Baltic towns\-- it has been destroyed countless times.
What remains is a nondescript provincial capital dominated by the hideous old Intourist hotel (where we stayed) and surrounded by crumbling concrete housing blocks. The fifteen-story hotel was virtually empty, and the Soviet-era staff had turned off all the lights in the cave-like lobby. Boris gruffly announced that he would keep our bikes in the luggage room for three agoutis, and Natasha explained that the t.v. in our room didn't work because it was new. The elevator was scarier than most rides at Magic Mountain, and the \"floor lady\" glared at us suspiciously each time we walked by. I meant to ask her how her town got its Chinese name, but it slipped my mind.
I held Fred to his promise to buy me dinner as an atonement gesture for this morning, and he got off easy. The only place we could find along the attractive --though unlit---pedestrian mall was a so-called \"piceria\" where I had a dog-food filled calzone and a salad that was mostly mayonnaise. Our waitress was competent but had the same no-nonsense personality of everyone else in Lithuania, causing us to doubt the many reports that Lithuanians were \"the Italians of the Baltics\" (the meal had assured us this wasn't the case as far as cuisine is concerned), warm, friendly and emotional.
To me, it still felt like Brezhnev was running the show, especially as I lay in my tiny communist bed, listening to the plumbing leak and waiting to be carried away by sleep.