Latvian Liverwurst - Where Are You?

Day 83 

Having not seen the whole of Tartu the previous night, we woke fairly early and took another wander around town. What we wanted to see specifically was the old home of Colonel Barclay de Tolly, who was an exiled Scot that became famous fighting for the Russian army against the French in their campaign against Napoleon. 

Now were not necessarily fans of de Tolly, although a Scotsman fighting for the Russians against the French is quite extraordinary, however, what was most interesting about his home was that it is on a significant lean! The building is still in use as the Tartu Art Museum, which is quite strange considering the significant lean that it is currently on.

After trying to work out whether the building was actually leaning, or just a visual effect (it is leaning), we headed up the hill to get a view over the city and university buildings. 

With Tartu done and dusted, we then started our way on to the Latvian border with a plan to go through the town of Cesis and then to Sigulda.

It’s always quite amazing to drive through the old checkpoint/border control and then be confronted with a completely different scene to what you left just 500 metres back up the road. 

Crossing over from Estonia into Latvia was quite the eye opener as you go from one country that is firmly making inroads to it’s development and infrastructure to another that is still breaking off the shackles of its communist past. 

The first noticeable difference is the quality of roads between each of the countries, with Estonias being mostly newly sealed and smooth to drive on as compared with Latvians patchwork of bitumen, asphalt and concrete. The driving quality is also quite below par in Latvia and they are certainly a country that could be competing with Poland for worst European drivers.

In fact, in a recent study, Latvians were found to have the highest rate of head on collisions of any other European country. After seeing a few of them overtake on blind corners and play chicken with oncoming cars it is not hard to see why they lead this statistic.

As we got about an hour over the border we pulled into a town called Valmiera as we noticed an amazing BMX track just at the side of the road. After some enquiry at the front desk, it turned out that everyone could use the track for free. The kind Latvian also explained that it was an Olympic sized course and it was the home track of the London Olympic Gold Medalist – Maris Strombergs who won only 3 days earlier!

With a build up like this I wasn’t going to miss an opportunity to ride around the track and pulled the mountain bike out of the van. When we pulled into the track there was no one to be seen, however, as I pedaled up to the starting line the place had been inundated with teenage kids. Being a thirty-year-old male, without a BMX and wearing a helmet it was a little intimidating so I waved them on to go ahead. Unfortunately they just sat there, so not wanting to look like a pussy, I headed down the starter ramp into the first jump.

As I was riding a mountain bike, the dimensions of the bike weren’t that suitable for the track and I caught the old breadbasket a few times on the first lap around. Despite a little bit of pain and fair amount of embarrassment I had another crack at the course and managed to get around a bit quicker, but left it there before some serious damage was done.

Giving the breadbasket a workout at Maris Strombergs home town track.

With that little bit of an adrenaline injection out of the way, we continued on to Cesis arriving at lunchtime and parking up in a car park that looked like it had seen better days. Cesis had been described in our guide as the ‘most Latvian’ town in Latvia, so we were quite excited to see what it looked like. 

Despite the initial shock of the bombed car park and quite run down buildings surrounding the car park, we moved further into town and found the Cesis Castle, which dates back from 1209. The castle was also surrounded by a well manicured park and lake, however, after walking through the less touristy areas of the town to get more of a feel for the area, I wouldn’t say it was the most inspiring of places with a lot of abandoned and rundown houses.

Quality car park in Cesis. The photo doesn't do these craters justice though.

Outside the Cesis Castle walls.

Cesis castle walls and the manicured
 parklands just outside.

Cesis town square.

For some reason our travel guides always fail to mention these
 amazing backstreets and real estate gold mines.

As we were wandering through the streets we came across a building which was formerly (between 1945 -1991) the Cesis District Branch of the Communist Regimes oppressive organization – Cheka. The plaque on the wall also said ‘here people were humiliated and tortured, and their homes, families, freedom and lives were taken away’.  At the present time the building was being used for an art exhibition so we wander up the two flights of stairs to see what the building actually looked on the inside. The interior itself looked clean, but in need of a renovation, however, there was definitely and uncomfortable feeling throughout each room of what may of happened. 

The Cheka Building - former headquarters of the Cesis Communist Regime.

Having covered the better part of the town, we loaded back into Maxi and made our way on to Sigulda, which was only another 20kms or so down the road. 

Sigulda is a small town located on the Gauja River and hosts a large number of adrenaline sports and activities, so has been described as the ‘Switzerland of Latvia’. 

As we arrived into town just before dinner time, we did a few laps of the town to try and find a wild camp spot and eventually settled on a car park at the top of the hill, nearby the chair lift that allowed people to go down on a toboggan. 

When we pulled into the car park it was fairly quiet, although there were a few people around using the chair lift and associated activities nearby. We figured that things would get quieter as the lift closed, however, I think the car park we had chosen was the local hangout for young males in their shitty little cars to smoke, drink and talk about their shitty little cars.

As more and more teemed in, we decided to move on and headed down to a small camp spot by the river at the bottom of the hill. This turned out to be a great location as we had it all to ourselves and it was as quiet as a mouse.