Exodus to the Baltic States

Wanting ever desperately to prevent selling a kidney – which is what a further stay in Scandinavia would have required – I decided it was time to push on into Eastern Europe to a handful of countries that most Americans could never imagine as travel destinations, let alone place on a map: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Slovakia, before reaching the more popular tourist spots of Austria and Italy.

I fled Sweden in style aboard the Tallink ferry – the name being a hybrid of the words ‘Tallinn’ (Estonia’s capital) and ‘link’ – which was the biggest vessel of any kind that I have ever had the pleasure of boarding. I would have never in a million years thought that Tallinn would be enough of a draw to merit the daily departure of a 10 story cruise ship with hundreds of cabins, casinos, bars, disco, and a cabaret show. For Americans, Estonia and the other Baltic States remain relatively obscure and well off the radar of travel enthusiasts, but for Swedes – and for many other Europeans, including hordes of obnoxious British stag (bachelor) parties – the secret is out: Tallinn, Riga (Latvia), and Vilnius (Lithuania) are stunning, rife with life, and are quickly becoming the next big tourists destinations of the old Soviet Bloc.

The reasons that everyone is coming to the Baltics these days are twofold: the miraculously well-preserved Old Towns (the cultured response) and the pulsing nightlife (the real appeal for most). Each of the capitals features labyrinths of narrow cobbled streets winding through centuries old buildings dating far back into the medieval period filled with Gothic churches and spacious, café-laden squares. Personality wise, I found the three to be totally different from each other, Tallinn feeling quite a bit more contrived than the two, like a Medieval Disney Land of sorts. Riga’s Old Town felt like the most genuine and lived-in of the three, its neoclassical buildings and adorning nymph statues spilling out from the center and filling the entire city.

I spent about 3 weeks between the three Baltic countries, covering each of the capital cities, as well as attending the 5 day long Ollesummer (Beer Summer) festival in Tallinn, camping out in a Latvian national park for Fonofest (a 2 day ‘hardcore’ music festival) and dropping by a Chapel Hill-esque college town called Tartu (Estonia) and Lithuania’s stunning 40km long sand dune spit.

The Baltic States were not at all how I had imagined. Ignorantly, I had pictured a series of backwater towns with technology from the 70s, music from the 80s, and prices comparable to Thailand. I was shocked to find that almost all public squares were equipped with free Wi-Fi and that all Estonian citizens were using computer-chipped ID cards that had made the country one of the world’s first test grounds for online voting in a general election. They really couldn’t be very more modern. Stuff wasn’t cheap either. The cost of goods wasn’t exactly expensive, but it certainly wasn’t Budapest or Krakow either. But then again, compared with Swedish prices anywhere else in the world could seem like Eastern Europe.

Click HERE for pictures from the Baltics