After a long walk in the forest it was time to head back to Riga for my flight home. I got the cable car back across the valley, and enjoyed the fantastic winter scenery.
The train back to Riga took almost two hours but only cost 70p. Latvian trains were cheap, but also battered, [...]

On my last day in Latvia I got an early morning train to Sigulda, and walked to the Gauja River valley. I’d heard good things about this place, and I was not disappointed. I got a cable car from one side of the valley to the other, swooping over the frozen river, and [...]

Not far from Riga is the site of the Salaspils concentration camp. Here, 100,000 people were killed during the Second World War. I can scarcely take in the fact that such a huge number of people died in one place, and it’s almost unbearable to think that was only a tiny part of what went [...]

On my journey to Vilnius, the skies had been grey, and when we stopped at a small roadside cafe just inside Lithuania, snow was falling. On the way back, the skies were blue, and the endless expanse of snow shone brightly under the wintry sun. We stopped at the same cafe, and this [...]

I wanted to go up the TV Tower in Vilnius. It looked like the views from it would be awesome, so I followed the instructions in my guidebook and got trolleybus number 7 from by the station. The windows of the aging machine were scratched and opaque, so it was a bit difficult [...]

I spent a day in Riga, keeping warm in cafes and visiting the moving Museum of the Occupation, which charted the horrors of life under the Nazis and then the USSR. Then I got a bus to Vilnius, which was a nice six hour journey through snowy countryside.
Vilnius was incredibly picturesque but also incredibly [...]

London winters tend to be nondescript. Snow is rare but rain is common. With Ryanair having just started flying to Riga, I headed to the Baltic states for a slice of real winter weather.
I got to Riga late at night, and after I’d found a place to stay I headed out to explore. [...]