Last update we were a little ill, but that pretty much passed by the next day fortunately. We biked a loop around the park and moved on. Now it's time for Baltic state #2: Latvia! When we crossed the border it was hard to tell, as we went through a town that was half in Estonia and half in Latvia, with only a small sign informing us of having changed country.
For the next days we had a good time wild camping (mostly near more of those little recreation sites) and doing little bits of hiking. The good weather has run out again, with cloudiness and bits of rain. One funny story: one evening we had stopped for the night, but realized that we had no reception and Federica needed to do some work, so we moved a bit further. But only after we had parked again, in full dark, did we realize we had left a hanger with a wet towel and swimsuits below the bike rack... The hanger was still hanging on, but no sign of the items. The next morning we drove the 25 minutes back to the other site and lo-and-behold, we found 3 out of 4 items along the side of the road, spread over almost 10km!
We entered Gauja National Park, a massive nature park along the Gauja river, to stay most of the week. We were hoping we could kind of disappear into the woods here and more easily find neat official trails for hiking, but we were a little disappointed. It didn't feel very remote with still a lot of towns and farms around and real trails were still limited. Nonetheless, we still had a good time camping and doing some biking. When we tried one longer hike we ended up spending a solid 4 hours just wading through shoulder-high weeds and shrubs.
Come Thursday evening we drove to Riga, to a large parking lot near a park at the edge of the city, where we planned to sleep for three nights. The next day we took an excellent free-walking tour around the old town and learned a lot about Riga and Latvia in general. Then we went for some errands (including a haircut for me, which took 90 minutes for some reason) and wandered around some more, until we were exhausted. In the evening we had a reservation in an amazing restaurant: it's in an old cellar from the 1200s and completely in middle ages style, with candlelight everywhere, dressed-up waiters and traditional menu items and drinks. Afterwards we really tried to keep the evening going, but we were destroyed and took a tram back to the van by 22:00. Riga is pretty awesome: beautiful, easy to go around and very lively.
That night we had a nasty surprise through: a group showed up in cars that started drifting in our parking lot. The noise and smell were terrible, let alone that they came kind of close to us. We just moved to the far corner of the lot in the darkness and later called some 'Riga tourist police'. But just then the little street racers left us fortunately, though we were too anxious to sleep well. We moved further outside the city for the next night.
Thoughts on Latvia so far: quite nice, very similar to Estonia, but more old castles and ruins. Latvia feels more old-fashioned and less rich than Estonia. Fun fact: the Latvian language is entirely different from Estonian! I was expecting them to be similar since we often consider these three countries in a single breath, but Estonian resembles Finnish while Latvian (also known as Lettish) (together with Lithuanian) is super old and completely alone on the language tree.
By now we are a bit fed-up from all the moving around, which is okay because it's time for our next work-away! We are going to stay for three weeks with a family in the Latvian country side, in the Madona region, where they having building up their permaculture homestead. More on that next time.
