Day 45 - Riga to Ventspils

The sad news this morning was that there was still no laundry facilities, so there could be trying times ahead to test Laura’s tolerance!


There was a bit of a worry when we went to collect our hire car and found the office shut, despite the booking sheet clearly saying that they opened at 9:00am. Since nothing else nearby was due to open until 10:00am we figured we might as well wait until then before we started to panic too much. To fill in time we went looking for the Memorial of the Barricades (to commemorate those who manned barricades against the Red Army in 1991) that was supposed to be nearby. We couldn’t find it so returned to the Europcar office, which was now open.

Collecting the car went smoothly and I only managed to drive down a one-way street the wrong way once while navigating back to the hostel to collect our gear. The drive out of town was uneventful as we headed west to the nearby beach resort of Jurmala, a favourite of the Soviet hierarchy during the days of the USSR. As we drove west on the main motorway we saw a couple of signs in quick succession about having a permit to drive in to the centre of Jurmala and were trying to figure out what this actually meant when we passed a parking bay lined with what looked like parking meters. Immediately after that we were waved over by police who explained (once they found one who spoke English) that we had crossed the line before which we had to buy a permit without having done so. (It seemed we were actually on the road which went through Jurmala, not just the road you had to turn off to get there). The upshot was that we were liable for a fine of 40 Lat (approx A$72) for failing to purchase a permit before crossing the magic line. They were obviously used to dishing up these fines and clearly no excuses or pleading of ignorance were going to make any difference. So when a compromise was offered - of a 20 Lat fine including unlimited access to Jurmala for 24 hours - it was evident that accepting this was going to be the best way out (even though we only planned to visit for an hour or two). At least we received an official recept for the amount we paid, so I guess it wasn’t all going straight into the Policemen’s Christmas Party Fund.

And so we were now “free” to explore Jurmala at our leisure. The neat and clean main pedestrian mall was lined with souvenir stalls and restaurants and some upmarket shops. I suggested to Laura that the venders of T-shirts with the usual slogans like “I love Latvia”, should add a new one that says “I went to Jurmala and all I got was a lousy police fine”! Away from the shops it was apparent that a number of the nice looking villas hadn’t had any maintenance, or residents, for some time, which is a bit of a shame. The precinct itself was still quite clean and tidy.

The beach itself was unexceptional, and noticeably lacking anything that Sam would recognise as surf. The portable changing sheds placed at intervals along the beach were covered with advertising signs which was a bit of an eye-sore. Interestingly we saw a guy with a metal detector wading back and forth about waist deep in the “surf”.

Along the board walk

Leaving the (for us) expensive resort village of Jurmala we drove a little further west to the Kemeri National Park. The nice lady in the park’s information office gave us the details of a number of short walks in various parts of the park. We started with the nearby 300 metre stroll on an elevated board walk through forest with a dark-coloured river winding around us. We managed to finish this in fairly quick time without being carried off by any of the enormous (but thankfully non-disease carrying) Baltic mosquitoes. The next walk was slightly longer and took us back to the old water tower and a huge old Soviet era hotel currently being refurbished, which we had driven passed shortly before reaching the information centre. Also near the water tower was a little pavilion just below which was an ornamental fountain dispensing the sulpher water famous in the region. Apparently it is quite harmless to drink though an acquired taste - a taste which Laura thinks would actually be very difficult to acquire! It tasted like the strong rotten egg smell pervading the area, only stronger.

The lake tower

The next walks we went to check out started from next to a nearby lake, though as we pulled up there in our car a heavy shower moved in for a few minutes. Once it had passed we admired the view of the lake (maximum depth 1.6m, average depth 0.70m) from a little pontoon tower sitting just off shore. However the combination of the time of day, the freshly wet ground and the numerous mosquitoes put us off the idea of actually doing any of the walks around the lake. Instead we drove around to a lake on the other side of the park where a number of fishermen were trying their luck from the shore or from a boat out on the lake.

By now it was about 4:00pm and we had made it nowhere near as close to Cape Kolka as we had planned. Since there seemed to be little accommodation available up there (according to our sources) we decided to head across to Ventspils on the west coast and drive from there up to Cape Kolka tomorrow. Laura managed to contact one of the hostels in Ventspils and confirmed that there was room for us before we set out.

To get us back onto the main road to Ventspils (A10) we opted to take a back road from where we were, rather than backtrack to get around the national park. This had Laura a bit worried as the “road” quickly became little more than a goat track that almost needed a 4WD Drive, which our little VW certainly is not. We made it OK, though Laura has suggested that we avoid any further roads marked as a single thin line on the map!

When we reached Ventspils and found our lodgings it appeared locked up and lifeless. We rang them again and in about five minutes someone showed up to check us in and give us our room key. I guess it is getting late in the tourist season in these parts, though there was at least one other family in residence.

The only other news of note is that while we were having dinner Sam rang and broke the news that instead of being home a week after us he now plans to get a Canadian work visa and travel on there to try and get work in the snowfields. His mother almost needed CPR! Sam also broke the news that the Wallabies had managed to lose to Ireland in the Rugby World Cup. His father almost needed CPR!