 Trakai Castle, Lithuania / Flower seller, Riga |
Come clean. You don't know where the Baltic countries fit on the map, or which capital is which. I didn't either.
 The hardest part of deciding to visit these countries is determining where to start. That is, unless your childhood was influenced by family stories of war and peace, the collective memory of the post-War emigre communities.
Yet the only obvious shared characteristics of the Baltic nations are compactness and a tortuous shared history as playthings of the great powers, most recently Russia. Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians - from north to south - each speak their own languages, tenuously related to any other. There are no dramatic landscapes here, but endless forests and winding rivers, interlocking lakes and the wave-swept sands of the Baltic coast offer plenty of fresh air.
More images of Latvia and Lithuania
|
