Yellow Brick Road – More Like Solid Brick Wall

26.04.08 Camping in Kladow, a few kms West of Berlin and close to Potsdam, alongside the line of the old wall (we think). A beautiful wooded area and the most raucous dawn chorus we've ever heard. Had lunch outside in Kladow town itself and had my first schnitzel (Alexis). Campsite great – clean and plentiful facilities. Cooked our first camp dinner, then went for a walk and came across a beautiful lake – all pretty idyllic.
Next day we went to Berlin itself, and due to a language error, ended up paying to get into the city zoo, and then couldn't find our way out. Good side of language barrier – ended up driving right up the Brandenburg Gate (above) and got some fab photos of it (was only supposed to be route for taxis!) Also got our zlotys (Polish currency) for the next day.
Monday 28th and off to Posnan in Poland. For some bizarre reason it took us 4 hours to have breakfast and get all packed up (Not bizarre at all. Just too flipping casual and not in a mind to leave – Russell) – we only just managed to get out of the campsite around checkout time (11.15am when we should have been out by 11.00am). Once outside Berlin we came across a Toyota dealer - Thomas Reist - who sold us ½ dozen car fuses (to top up our supply of the ones we'd blown up earlier in the week). On the road in Poland it became apparent that Polish drivers are “slightly” nutty – they think nothing of overtaking into oncoming traffic, even if that oncoming traffic is a huge truck. We learned pretty quickly that you pull off the road as far as you can when you see a vehicle sitting on your rear bumper. Didn't make it to Posnan til 7.30pm that night, so found an Ibis hotel with not too much difficulty and hunkered there for the night. (I regret not taking any photos of Posnan - pretty city centre. Poland seems vibrant. A lot of businesses are 24 hour – notably amongst them, depots buying and selling pallets for truck freight. Polish trunk roads are very busy (and not always well-constructed) – sometimes just long lines of trucks. The town and city centres seem to have kept their history, but the bigger of these also have sprawling out of town retail and commercial areas that look more like the USA than Europe – Russell).
(Along the major roads, at least, there are a lot of modern, privately-owned restaurants (some 24 hour) and hotels. Food in these (good, fresh food at that), seems to be less than half the cost of the UK equivalent (or a quarter of a Little Chef bill). I suspect that the hotels are cheap (and comfortable), too. As with the Netherlands and Germany, the cost of petrol and diesel in Poland is about the same as the UK, so fuel must seem, disproportionately, very expensive to Poles. This is probably why there are a lot of LPG stations in Poland - Russell).

- The Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw.

Tuesday and on again – Posnan to Warsaw now. Found out we couldn't get on the motorway without a special permit (there are very few motorways; we should have obtained a 'vignette' at the border, but found that out too late - Russell), so decided to take the E route, and what a difference suddenly, to the quick, easy autobahns we'd become used to; now it's speed up, slow down, (swerve to miss oncoming, overtaking cars and trucks), etc as we leave or get to small towns along the route. It took over 5 hours to get to Warsaw and then we spent another 1 ½ hours trying to find another Ibis hotel that had been (badly as it turned out) signposted. In the end we gave up and found ourselves in a very comfortable Novotel (above) bang in the city centre (sorry JP, hardly the hippy dream you'd pictured for us!). The one big plus of having to spend another huge wodge of cash on accommodation was that we had free internet access – praise the gods! (A little melodramatic, perhaps. Finding cheap internet access is difficult when you don't have time to spend in a City centre looking for it. It's not that we are aimlessly surfing the net; amongst other bits of 'admin', we were in the middle of re-arranging our itinerary with the Chinese agent when we left the UK, as travelling through Tibet is no longer an option - Russell).

- Probably, a less common sight in recent years, but still normal transport for a few Polish.

Another day, another town – Bialystok this time; a very nice town with a very nice Best Western (yes, there's a theme here, but it's about to quite rudely change when we realise what our daily budget is supposed to be, versus what we've already spent). Not much to say about this place really, except we had a tasty veggy pizza at a street cafe. (Poland has a reputation for car crime. In Posnan, guests seemed to clamour to park their car outside the front of the hotel lobby, but I didn't sense that it was a dodgy area. In Warsaw, we were parked in the 'culture and entertainments' centre of the city and, I guess, there were plenty of 'reasonable' folk walking around day and night. In Bialystok, however, the hotel seemed to be in a little bit of a seedy part and had an office manned 24 hours, overlooking the car park, with the gate to the car park controlled from the office).

- Below - an example of a Soviet Era statue. Prior to independence, you weren't allowed to forget who was in charge.

Into May, and a different border to cross, from Poland into Lithuania. This time (following our wake-up call re funds), I'd done a bit of research and found a cheap and cheerful Hotel Metropolis in Kaunas (Traveladvisor.com said it had clean sheets and towels and was just fine if you went with a sense of humour and closed your eyes to the rest). We found Kaunas an odd mix – flash shops down a main promenade, but then defunct factory / industrial buildings around the edges and quite a few “bag” ladies and gents. Not sure what's been going on here. (In Kaunus, too, a 24 hour car park means that there is somebody in an office (more like a shed) watching the car park night and day - Russell)

And yet another border on Friday 2 May – from Lithuania into Latvia, and the capital, Riga (right - 'Old' Riga). What a shock, for the first time since we'd started travelling, it rained! Managed to have a bit of a wander round old town Riga – very pretty but very touristy. We booked ourselves in the Hotel Irina close to the station, after turning up at one of the Youth Hostels to be told we'd be lucky to find a room since we'd come at a major holiday weekend (4 May is Latvian Independence Day).
Saturday we were meant to cross into Russia, but hit some interesting problems today. For one, suddenly our credit card was being refused .... slight panic to say the least, added to by the fact that my phone (our main contact with the Western world) had run out of credit and couldn't be automatically topped up cos it came off the credit card, which was now not letting any payments go through .... Luckily we had a brainwave and put my old sim card in my phone and managed to call the credit card company. Note for all future travellers – tell your credit card company if you're going away for a little while – ours had stopped transactions because it was “out of character” for us... (sigh...my fault; it was the one card provider that I hadn't informed - Russell). Our Wedding Anniversary day was spent driving 4 hours to the Russian border, realising that info we'd read re getting Russian 3rd party car insurance at a petrol station was a kind of a moot point since there was not a petrol station within 2 hours of the border, and driving back towards Riga for another 2 hours until we found a hotel to sulk in for the night. (When Latvia was still part of the Soviet Union, this would have been very busy, as it would have been the trade / supply route between Latvia and Russia. Along the route, there are large hotels, restaurants and truck facilities that are now unused and boarded up or unmanned. Presumably, Latvia now looks to the EU and the US for trade and Russia makes a point of ignoring it, in that respect. There are still some Russian tourists, but I think they are welcome only for their money (that said British 'stag-do' tourists have caught the critical eye of Latvian media, too - Russell).

- A view from a rural Latvian home.

Must mention the Hotel Melkuri on the Riga – Pskov road; it was the equivalent of £25 for the night, B&B, and was a real oasis in the middle of pretty much nowhere. The owner speaks little English, but Russ and he managed to converse quite comfortably in German, of all languages! (In other words, his German was as basic as mine. Also, the older generation in Poland and the Baltic States seem wary of saying much to strangers. Perhaps, this is a hangover from the Soviet era– Russell).
4 May, Sunday, back to Riga, to see if we can sort out our car insurance tomorrow and head back for the Russian border .... but no. The holiday weekend for banks continues inclusive of Monday, so now we have another 2 days to kill in Riga. Spent some time today taking in the Latvian Independence Day parade etc. and even saw the Latvian President laying a wreath of flowers at the main memorial. Also did the “proper”tourist route of old town, which was indeed scenic, but now we've done that, what's left??? Managed to book into the Balthostel, thehostel that had been fully booked a couple of nights back (and JP, this is definitely more the travellers accommodation you'd have pictured us in!!!).

So now it's Monday 5 May, still a public holiday, and we're kicking around, trying to work out what we can get done at the local 24 hour internet cafe, so that we can be as ready as we can be to get on with stuff again tomorrow. Let's hope next time we do our blog, it'll be from the “other” side.