The few Polish people I had met so far had been really nice and friendly, and not the misery guts I had for some reason expected them to be. My brief traversal of the country had left me with positive impressions, but now I needed to advance north. I went for the overnight bus option for my jaunt to Vilnius, capital of Lithuania and the first of the three Baltic states I would hop through.
Clocking in at 11 hours, the bus ride was lengthy but a walk in the park compared to some of the mammoth rides I had taken in South East Asia, including one twenty-hour busathon almost the whole length of Vietnam. On this occasion the four stops in the night meant for a broken sleep, but I got a few hours behind me to arrive at a quarter to seven into sleepy Vilnius.
I set off immediately for my hostel, wandering the warren of streets that made up the old city with crapmap (courtesy of Lonely Planet) in hand. It was very quiet. Two figures not far behind - I hoped they weren't following me as my sense of direction is almost as bad as my dress-sense - looked to be backpackers, and peering into the pre-dawn I recognised them as being on my bus. They were a university coursemates, a Dutch girl and a German girl who were coincidentally heading to the same hostel, so we navigated together.
The hostel was, rather bizarrely, run by a young Scottish chap, and was like someone's house - cosy and relaxed. He kindly let us put our heads down for a kip; more strict hostel owners would've either
said to come back at 12 or either charged us an extra night. With the dawn creeping through the windows, I didn't think I'd be able to sleep... and then it was 10:30am.
I set out to explore, knowing precious little about Lithuania. The first surprise was the language, which I had assumed would be similar to Polish. In fact it was completely alien and indecipherable, despite being written with Roman characters. I later learned it is one of the two Baltic languages (the other being Latvian) unrelated to the Romance, Germanic or Slavic tongues, and can be traced back to ancient Indo-European languages - apparently it even has grammar constructs similar to Sanskrit!
Tourist Info sorted me out with a map and some advice as to what to see (and how to say "thanks"), and I wandered the gloriously preserved cobbled streets agape.
I soon discovered that the buildings were not the only stunning attractions of Vilnius. It also had the largest proportion of naturally attractive women I have ever seen. Free wifi was also prevalent across town in modern, classy restaurants and cafes. I think I might have just found my heaven.
On the evening of which had been a long, long day I visited the Presidential Palace and Cathedral at night - both were dramatically floodlit and awe inspiring to the eyes, if not in my photos - and polished off the day with a cheap late night thali meal in a cavernous underground Balti restaurant.
I really felt like lingering in Vilnius, but I had already done more than my fair share of lingering in Prague and Berlin, so I couldn't justify it, particularly as I had to get to Japan overland by the end of March, which was near in time for a place so far away.
I booked a train north to the smaller Lithuanian city of Siauliai. Such a provincial place was only on my itinerary for one reason: to see the supposedly spectacular 'Hill of Crosses'.
The train was hot and packed, and I squeezed into a tiny compartment already occupied by five others. I was not looking forward to the two and a half hour ride one bit.
Studying the torn-out sheet from my guidebook which covered Siauliai in all of a few sentences, a voice spoke out next to me in English. "You going to Siauliai?" Luckily, it wasn't the voices in my head again; rather, it belonged to the chap next to me, who turned out to be a Lithuanian student of ecology at a university in Vilnius. His English was great and for the duration of the journey we nattered away about our countries, travel (he had recently come back from a hitchiking trip around Spain). The girl opposite him got involved as well, speaking a little English and so did the immpressively-moustached chap next to her, who couldn't speak any English with his moustache but who instead contented himself with looking through our photos and asking questions in Lithuanian to the others. The journey flew by, and it was with some regret I waved goodbye to my three new Lithuanian buddies.
Finding the hostel without a map was a challenge, but luckily it was on a main street and I had the address. It turned out to be an university ex-hall of residence, so for one night only, I was back as a student.
I took a local bus the next morning along the A12 to a point 10 kilometres north of Siauliai to an unremarkable stop in farmland out in the middle of nowhere, and headed for an equally unremarkable track save for the solitary cross that marked it. Two kilometres down the trail a mound started to appear - a mound which housed thousands upon thousands of crosses.
Apparently during Soviet times the site was regularly destroyed by troops, but people would defiantly creep past the guards at night and plant more. Even as an atheist I could appreciate such stubborn and strong-willed defiance in the face of oppression.
I wandered up and through the crosses - the mound was absolutely thick with them and many were surprisingly ornate and sizeable - noting that a number came from tourists on pilgrimages. I had myself once dressed up as Brian of Nazareth from the film Life of Brian, and I kicked myself for not bringing my cross with me on this trip. I think it would've looked great on the Hill of Crosses.
