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Our Baltic trip started in early July 2006 at Harwich port where we boarded an overnight  DFDS ferry headed for Ejsberg in Denmark.  Despite the usual heavy swells in the North Sea we arrived next morning in good spirits and a dry sunny day. The bikes had survived the crossing intact and so we were off.                                           

First stop was Copenhagen where we spent three days sightseeing, and some lovely sights there were too – just masses of long legged pretty blondes. Copenhagen certainly has its fair share of totty. Apart from being given the honeymoon suite at the hotel (complete with four poster bed) the stay in this great city was very pleasurable and I made a mental note to take my wife Gina there some day.

We left Copenhagen and crossed the sea bridge into Malmo, Sweden and made our way around the south coast to Stockholm. We made some basic navigating errors in Stockholm by assuming that this city only had one port from which our Tallink ferry would be sailing to, guess where, Tallin in Estonia. Well we soon got the hang of the geography and made our way to the quayside at which our pretty impressive ferry was moored. Loading took a while but we finally got to hunker down in our cosy cabin complete with free hard core porn channel (closed my eyes – didn’t look J). The boat also boasted a huge (but very hot) sauna on board plus a large duty free shop which was stacked with bottles and demi-johns of vodka.

 On arrival in Tallin we found our route out of the city being dug up and closed to traffic which caused us to suffer a bit of a detour but eventually landing us on the right road for our first port of call which was the university town of Tartu. We stayed in the Barclay hotel for a couple of nights and we went swanky and booked a suite complete with balcony and en-suite sauna.

We also found out that until the mid 1990’s the hotel had been the headquarters for the Red Army so no surprise that our mobiles didn’t get a very good signal in the room. Anyway, if we thought Copenhagen was a haven for pretty girls Tartu certainly wrenched that title out of their hands. All the girls (and I do mean all of them) had short mini skirts, long tanned legs, and blonde hair and very pretty faces. We reckoned that there must be a mould somewhere mass producing these heavenly creatures.

We left Tartu and headed south into Latvia where we stayed in the lovely city of Sigulda situated in the Gauja river valley some 50 odd miles outside the capital city of Riga. On our way southwards we skirted around Riga and headed into Lithuania which had a much more Russian feel to it. We found our hotel in the old city of Kaunas where we also found a group of some fifteen or so office workers who, having finished for the day, had repaired to the restaurant and were taking turns to propose a toast. By the time they had finished this ritual they had each managed to consume the greater part of a bottle of vodka and were still both standing and coherent.

 We left Lithuania and entered into Northern Poland and edged our way south westerly down the country just skimming Warsaw as we went.  The weather was very hot and we had been travelling for many days in heat exceeding 40 degrees which is no fun in a set of leathers I can tell you. Sweaty leathers aside, we ended up at the Hotel Galicja in Oswiecim where we were able to securely store the bikes in a garage. Oswiecim is better known to us as Auschwitz and a tour around the camps is well worth taking and will bring a tear to the eyes of even the most hardy of souls.

We said our goodbyes to Poland and went up into the Czech Republic and stayed in Kutna Hora. We had seen the Boorman/MacGregor TV series and we were fascinated by the ossiary and just had to see this macabre scene for ourselves. We were lucky because the place was relatively empty when we arrived and after shelling out some cash to allow us to use our cameras we spent a good hour or so staring at chandeliers made out of human bones and piles of skulls made into pyramids. Once again, well worth going to see if you can.

Our exit from the Czech Republic into Germany was also quite bizarre as we began to get into a series of twisties a few kilometres from the border. Suddenly in mid flow around a corner I fleetingly spot from the corner of my eye a bikini clad maiden waving to me next to a hut selling garden gnomes. I knew that I hadn’t had much to drink the night before but why was I suffering a mirage ?  The next corner told me that I wasn’t dreaming as we encountered a lot more huts and scantily clad ladies, and the corner after that and so on. I realised that the ladies were not waving to me because they liked a fat man on a motor bike but more that they liked the wad of cash that the fat man was carrying and they would do all manner of things to his body to wrench the dosh from his stick fingers. Not tempted by the sirens of the road we reached Germany and made our way to Mark’s father in law’s flat in (East) Berlin where we stayed for three days and took in the sights.

It was still very warm as we left Berlin and went south towards the Black Forest and out westwards into France looping back up to St Malo and home to Blighty. This is just a very quick taste of what we did on our 4000 mile trip and I will eventually get around to writing up the full story complete with some very funny anecdotes which happened along the way.

Copyright (c) 2010 by Mark Rowles and Martin Lloyd
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