Vilnius, Lithuania

Amazingly, on the bus from Warsaw to Vilnius I had passed within less than thirty miles of Mother Russia.

Wedged between Poland and Lithuania is a curious outcrop of land facing out onto the Baltic Sea known as Kaliningrad. The area has had a turbulent history. A former Prussian kingdom centred around the city of Koenigsberg, it was cut off from the Fatherland by the re-establishment of the Polish state after the First World War. Following the defeat of Germany in the Second World War, the Russians kicked out the Germans and renamed Koenigsberg to Kaliningrad. At the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the area once again became cut off from its ruling power when Lithuania claimed its independence, but Kaliningrad never followed suit. It survives today as a curious western exclave of the Russian Federation.

I slept poorly on the 11-hour bus journey, with the four stops we made throughout the night making it difficult to get back to sleep each time. At least the drivers were chirpy; one of them, who I shall call Fernando, had a particular fondness for Abba, playing it constantly throughout his leg of the journey.

We arrived into Vilnius at 6:45am; it was still dark. Map in hand, I took a wander into the city to find my hostel. The deserted cobbled streets lit by olde-fashioned lamps looked very beautiful indeed as I made my way to the door. Two girls who had been on the bus and following at some distance behind turned up at the hostel shortly afterwards; they were a Dutch girl and a German girl both studying in Warsaw. Having reached the end of their semester, they were taking a whirlwind trip up through the Baltics to Helsinki before heading back home.

Bizarrely, the chap that checked us in was not Lithuanian, but rather had a broad Scottish accent; he was a traveller who had hung up his boots for a while to work at the hostel. A kind chap, he let us creep into a dorm and put our heads down for a few hours, not something that most hostels would let you do without paying for an extra night. As I laid back on my bed, I thought I’d have difficulty sleeping; the next thing I knew it was 10:30am.

I chipped out to explore Vilnius, making my first stop the impressive old building inside which the tourist information was situated. The woman was friendly and helpful, supplying me with a map and info as well as the Lithuanian word for “thank-you” (an easy one to remember: achiu, like a sneeze).

Lithuania immediately fascinated me for a number of reasons. Firstly, the language on the signs was like nothing I had seen on this leg of travels so far. Whilst English, Dutch and German had its familiar Saxon roots, and Czech and Polish shared many similarities due to their common Slavic ancestry, as a Baltic language Lithuanian only shared similarity to Latvian and nothing else. The Baltic languages are said to be the closest living languages to proto-Indo-European, and apparently Lithuanian even contains grammatical constructs that are found in sanskrit. I was floored when I found this out and thought it amazing that the Baltic languages had prevailed in such a pure form for thousands of years despite the huge turbulence, linguistic and otherwise, all around them.

Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, I was floored by the outstanding beauty of not only the streets of the capital, but also of the women here, who are by far and away its most stunning attractions. Walking down a main street of Vilnius is akin to walking down a fashion catwalk: there are models everywhere.

Despite all these beautiful sights to take in, my priority was shopping – I needed a few warmer clothes for my assault on Russia, as the further north I was travelling, the more nippy it was getting. I worked my way out of the centre aiming for the Akropolis shopping centre, passing over a bridge adorned with classic Soviet-era statues which apparently escaped the bulldozers after the country declared independence because the locals were so fond of them.

It was a real mission to get to the shopping centre on foot; without a car, I had to tackle two dual carriageways and a sliproad and then climb a muddy bank in order to gain the privilege of buying a pair of trousers and a fleece. Perhaps it was some sort of social filtering at work.

I took a different path back to town, past decaying Soviet high rises, which took some of the sheen off the glossy picture I had painted in my mind’s eye of Vilnius. But back in the bubble of the Old Town, it was all regal buildings and little coffee shops (staffed by models, of course).

On the evening of what had been a long, long day, I visited the Presidental Palace, university and cathedral and settled for a late-night, er, veggie curry in a cavernous underground Balti restaurant.