Prelude
Being frank, I didn’t exactly book a trip to Latvia because I absolutely wanted to go there and had my heart set on it. I booked it because it was a new country, relatively easy to get into and the flights were cheap. Little did I know that I would end up so invested in a country and its history. Of course, I had few storms and hiccups to dodge in the process.
At the time of writing, Europe is also entering an uncertain period, with Russia having invaded Ukraine. This makes looking back, in hindsight, at a trip to a country which fought to break away from Russia and retain its identity, all the more poignant and at times, chilling.
We start this story at 9pm on February 17th, as I was making my way back towards Central London after having spent the evening with a friend in Chichester. As we were approaching Horsham, the conductor made the bleak announcement that “most services tomorrow are cancelled, including everywhere in Wales and much of the South East. It’s going to be a bit windy.”
The lass across from me grimaced and uttered “I pay too much for this shit“. Feeling sarcastic, I responded with “I used to work for the railway until yesterday, how do you think I feel?” The irony being that she’d short-fared and bought a ticket for half a journey anyway. Her input of “yaaaas, power to the people” suggested that maybe alcohol or drugs were also at play here, but who was I to judge, as I sipped on my M&S Bramble Gin.
I knew for a fact though, that I was trying to outrun a storm. Storm Eunice, to be precise. Weather warnings were gradually seeing the country painted in Yellow, Amber and the deadly Red colours as we were told that chaos was to come. Meanwhile, I had more important things to worry about, such as the fact that I was getting a bit chilly outside of London Bridge Station and really needed the bus to Liverpool Street to hurry up. After all, I had to get to Stansted Airport, sleep, then catch a bastard 6am flight.
For some reason, it took an absolute age for one to actually turn up, in which time I could have not only walked but probably swam across the Thames and had 12 pints in the Queen Vic. Alas, the 388 did eventually grace me with its presence, in the process giving me just enough time to purchase a ticket to Stansted and nab a can of lager from the M&S upstairs. It was just approaching 11 as I left Liverpool Street in relative solitude, with a few hardy souls leaving us at Harlow Town & Bishops Stortford.
For some reason, we had a bizarre influx of suitcase-wielding folk joining us at Stansted Mountfitchet, the Airport’s namesake which is in fact just a sleepy village to the west. One can only assume that they boarded a ‘Cambridge’ train and realised their mistake about 10 stops later, which of course is an easy mistake to make, considering that ‘Cambridge’ and ‘Stansted Airport’ are indeed one and the same.
There were surprisingly quite a few people on the platform at Stansted heading back to London, but unsurprisingly very few of us actually getting off the train and heading towards either the terminal (for the very brave) or nearby hotels. I was staying in the Premier Inn, and so I headed for the shuttle bus, which very conveniently proceeded to fucking leave as I walked up to the stand.
Having concluded that I would rather die than spend half an hour in the cold staring at an empty bus station, I clocked an Arriva bus bound for Harlow in the next stand over getting ready to leave. A quick look at Google Maps suggested that it went near-ish to the hotel, and I’d probably only have to take my life in my hands a few times to get to the hotel. Plus, it likely wouldn’t set me back £4 (unlike Mr Shuttle) so what did I have to lose?
The driver was perplexed that I even wanted to get on, suggesting that I needed to wait for the actual shuttle bus which went directly to the hotel. He didn’t seem to understand that I wasn’t arsed about the walking involved, but I just wanted him to do the bulk of the work and I’d walk across a few fields, dual carriageways or death-traps afterwards. Having pointed at the stop I wanted on Google Maps, he squinted at it, and simply replied “ah yes, that’s only one stop, I’m not charging you for that” and gestured for me to take a seat. What an absolute legend.
I was relieved to be at least getting out of the Terminal area, which did entail a good two minutes or so of my new best friend hot-footing it down a dual carriageway. That is, apart from the brief pause when somebody decided to do a U-turn on a roundabout.
As we approached the stop, he said “you’ve got some walking, yes?” and I laughed this off, merely thanking him for his generosity. We even waved to each other as I headed for a literal field, while he swung off to the right onto another roundabout, into the night, towards the beautiful bastion of Harlow.
No kidding, I was very relieved to have my walking boots on. There was no lighting, no anything, as I squelched my way through a pitch-black field with my phone torch lighting the way. I was somewhat weary of the fact that this ‘field’ seemed to turn into a ditch before turning into a dual carriageway, so ended up cautiously edging my way along the side of it in the direction of the hotel, before sprinting across what felt like about 90 lanes of traffic.
Stansted isn’t designed for you to walk out of the terminal and go anywhere, and it shows. Granted, my hotel was about 35 minutes walk or so from the actual terminal, but I was really attempting the last eight or so minutes of that which was bad enough. Thankfully, once I’d played chicken with what felt like several incarnations of the M25, it was just a case of snaking my way through a service station to stagger into the Premier Inn and realise it was already past midnight when I had a 3:30am alarm.
Day one
The alarm was unwelcome and I certainly wasn’t in the mood to be getting up, but needs must. I judged that there was a bus due at 3:55am and made my way downstairs to the hotel entrance, alongside various other suitcase-pulling half-asleep zombies. When departure time came, I sauntered outside and then back in, when it was evident that the various buses going past weren’t for us.
“Can you come inside please?” was the drone of the receptionist as I was also causing the automatic doors to keep blowing in the increasingly brisk wind outdoors. Eunice was certainly coming.
The bus chose to turn up just past 4, and proceeded to sit and wait for nearly fifteen fucking minutes until it was so full nobody else could board. The first flights leave Stansted just before 6, so this was a great way of ensuring that everyone had to rush that little bit more around the terminal. Thankfully, I was at security for 4:25, having struggled to ram everything inside the always slightly too small liquids bag.
Stansted is essentially the bus station of Airports. There’s nothing pleasurable about it, it’s always impossibly busy, but it’s functional and you get to where you need to be. At least I only had an hour so to contemplate the excessive amount of people sleeping on benches and having 5am £50 pints of Fosters.
It was just a little bit chaotic when the gate was announced, as just about everyone descended on the shuttle train. Yet, there was a bizarre serenity in the boarding process, with the agent asking me if they’d actually announced it in the main terminal. Boarding was then the typical Ryanair fashion, with an awful lot of queueing halfway down some stairs before being subjected to the wind blowing a hoolie across the tarmac.
It was also a fully booked flight, and I wish I could tell you more about it, but once we took off in somewhat lively fashion and were thrown about a bit, I was out cold until we were on the approach to Riga. One of the flight attendants was wearing a Ryanair Scratchcard lanyard, I can tell you that much.
Riga Airport was modern and fairly uncomplicated, though passport control felt like a throwback to the Soviet Union, with officers in highly elaborate uniforms giving everybody a bit of a grilling. I was asked why I was there, where I was staying, if I had a return flight booked and for all of my health documentation. To be honest, fairly bog standard stuff but when you’ve been used to the heady days of the pre-Covid EU and waving your passport willy nilly, it was a bit of a faff.
It was cold too, really cold. I batted away a taxi driver and made my way to the windswept bus stop across from the terminal building, paying the 10EUR for three days travel on public transport and hoping that the bus would turn up sooner rather than later.
Sooner it indeed was, with it only being a few minutes until I boarded the 22 into the city centre, being taken down various nondescript highways and through uninspiring suburbs to the banks of the Daugava, where I swapped to the tram around the corner to 13. janvara iela, on the edge of the old town. I didn’t really have any idea where I wanted to go, other than that I needed to have a good wander around and appreciate some old buildings.
Appreciate some old buildings I did, taking a winding route around the various churches, past the Swedish Gate and to the Brīvības piemineklis (Freedom Monument), which commemorates those who lost their lives in the Latvian War of Independence between 1918 and 1920. Alas, it wouldn’t be the last time that Latvians had to fight for their right to exist as an independent country. So poignant was the moment that I almost missed the fact that my phone had decided to go from 50% to dead in a matter of fucking seconds, such was the pain of the cold.
I became a little sick of walking, so took myself to the main railway station and decided to board a random train out to the suburbs. I settled on Tornakalns, being a short hop away across the Daugava. I purchased my ticket for a whole £0.70 on the Latvian Railways app, and psyched myself up for having to physically haul myself onto the classic ER2 unit, which is a mainstay of suburban railways across the entire former USSR.
We shuddered our way over the Daugava rather slowly before pulling into Tornakalns, with an old bloke joining me in throwing himself down onto the platform. It seemed like a fairly quaint little suburban station, to be honest. That was, until I trudged my way outside and something didn’t seem quite right. There were various plaques stating place names across Europe along with a freight wagon and information boards. This station serves as a memorial to the deportations of 1941, where over 15,000 Latvians were forcibly sent to remote areas of the USSR. It was somewhat surreal that it was placed in a quiet suburb of Riga, but this is how the history of the Communist terror in Latvia goes. It gently follows you everywhere with subtle reminders. It doesn’t jump out at you but it’s always there.
It was a short ride on the tram from here to the rather striking memorial to the Soviet victory in World War II. Suffice to say that despite a large Russian population in Riga, this memorial is not exactly popular and while enormous had certainly been left to rot. In fact, at the time of writing, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, discussions are currently underway to demolish it entirely. That’s not to say it hasn’t already been attempted, when members of the far-right Pērkoņkrusts group attempted to bomb the fucker in 1997. It didn’t work, though it did succeed in killing two of them instead.
The whole area felt rather windswept. It was imposing, yet everyone simply pretended that it wasn’t there. It formed part of a park chock-full of benches and other places to sit, yet the only soul in the vicinity was a lone dog walker (with a dog obviously, not just an empty leash). I was glad to have seen the Monument, but agree that the best place for it is either removal (and placement in a museum) or simply being left to rot. It is, after all, a monument to the so-called liberation of Latvia. All it is, is a reminder that one chapter of oppression was ushered in by another. There was no liberation.
I was starting to get bitterly cold as I headed further down the road into the suburbs for a bus back to the city centre. It was also getting quite busy as we approaching school kicking-out time, but thankfully it was also time for me to check into my hotel, the Pullman Riga Old Town, and take half an hour to lie down.
What a beauty the hotel was, too. It plays host to a very fancy restaurant (more on that later) and the whole lot is equestrian themed. I was also thrilled to see a bottle of local black lager waiting for me on the desk of my room, and I happily necked that back while working out what my evening would look like.
Of course, my first thought was to go to a building where people were previously murdered by the KGB. So, it was a quick hop, skip and a jump onto a tram to the ‘newer’ part of town as freezing rain lazily fell from the grey February sky. The ‘Corner House’ wasn’t exactly a very imposing building, blending into the cityscape like any other building, rather than being the headquarters of the Soviet’s secret police force.
I almost questioned myself as I walked through the very non-descript door and waved my vaccination status at the woman behind the window. All of these museums are free, but donations are welcomed.
Straight away, I was faced by stories that ended with ‘they were shot in this room’ and ‘they disappeared into this building and were never seen again’. It was fascinating yet sobering. The tours through the different rooms discussed the different methods of control and fear used over the population, and the stories of those who dared to defy the oppressive regime under Soviet rule. In some cases, they weren’t even defying it, they just acted in a way that those in power didn’t like. Paranoia reigned supreme. It ended with a looping video of people telling their own stories of how families had been deported to Siberia for the most minor infractions. How they’d spent time in prison for expressing the fact that they were Latvian. Most of these people were still alive too. A great proportion of Latvia lives with this memory (as do the rest of the Baltics).
There’s a much larger ‘Museum of the Occupation’ which is currently in the final stages of reopening after refurbishment, which no doubt will provide significantly more depth to the information available at the Corner House. Alas, it was still closed when I visited and I had to think about what else there was to do on a rainy evening as darkness slowly fell.
‘Go to the grimmest, Soviet-esque industrial shithole you can find’, was my first thought, so I paid another 70p and took a peak-time train to Mangaļi. It was mostly full of commuters and shoppers, but there was the odd jolly alcoholic joining us too. I chose Mangaļi on the basis that it was only a short walk to the Mīlgrāvis tram terminus, which would then take me straight back to my hotel.
Around 15 minutes later, I was jumping off at my lovely destination and watched as everyone else wandered across the tracks through various holes in fences and across some scrubland. I was the only person walking towards Mīlgrāvis, which didn’t bode too well. I felt like a true Bald & Bankrupt as I trudged down a partially-flooded road and past various abandoned buildings. The entire place was like some sort of setup for a shooting range, with no actual people in sight.
I turned a corner and negotiated various roadworks and stepped over a set of rail tracks leading to a freight terminal. The air didn’t feel too clean and smoke belched out of various factories. It’s a bit crass to find such grimness interesting, but it was a marked contrast to the polished old town of Riga. This was the grey, industrial legacy of the Soviet Union. I’d just missed a tram though, so I had 24 minutes to admire this lovely terminus:
Back at the hotel, after a freshen up, I decided to take the plunge and see what this intimidatingly fancy restaurant was up to. I couldn’t find a menu online, so there was every risk that I’d sit down and scream at the prices.
‘Just you alone?’ asked the waitress as she took my drinks order. I nodded in agreement and wished I hadn’t just been called out on my forever alone status.
Thankfully the menu wasn’t horrifying, with all of the rather opulent sounding main courses being around £15-£20. It wasn’t cheap dining, but I wasn’t exactly feeling rinsed. I ordered the duck followed by a melt-in-the-middle cake served with Balsam (the true liquor of Latvia) ice cream. It was worth every penny. ‘Something else?’ I was asked. Yeah, my bed, I’m fucking exhausted.
To be continued…
The Lone Bon Voyager 