Day 9: Marijampolė, Lithuania to Augustow, Poland

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Before posting anything, I just wanted to thank the first contributors -- I've heard back from PDSNOKI that some very generous checks have been rolling in, so thank you very much for all your support! Keep them coming!

Today started with my good friends at the Zilina Hotel in Marijampolė, Lithuania ; ) all serious, the people here were very nice. I sat down to breakfast and this must have been the first meal I had where there were no tomatoes and cucumbers. A mother and son from East Germany were sitting at the table next to me. They had seen me come in the night before with my bike. The mother spoke a little Russian, but otherwise, we had no formal way to communicate, but we somehow managed. She spent much of her life in Kaliningrad, which is where she learned her Russian. He told me he was born in Danzig, which is now Gdansk, Poland. As best I could undertstand, they were there to go hunting but I suspect I did not correctly understand that part of the conversation!!

As I hit the road towards Poland, there was one more stop in Lithuania -- Kalvarija. There was a beautiful but crumbling baroque church here, but otherwise, there was almost nothing in this town. It even took me quite a while to find a place to eat lunch, but I did find a little basement place which barely mentioned in any public way that it served food. Despite that, the lunch was good (advertised as a shnitzel, it was something else entirely).

I then was ready to speed the last 10 km to the Polish border, with my passport at the ready. But there was no speeding. First of all, just outside of Kalvarija, I hit a police checkpoint. This was the second one I had seen in Lithuania and they did stop me this time. They inspected my bike and pointed to the wheels saying "need, need". I interpreted this to mean that I needed reflectors in the front and the rear. I showed him my light in the front and my reflector in the rear and he seemed satisfied. He let me go but wouldn't let me take his picture!

The next impediment were hills. This was the beginning of a long stretch of beautiful, rolling pastoral hills, but they seemed to be all uphill on this road. They culminated at the border crossing, which again was anticlimactic (other than that of the hills, I guess). I couldn't find any place with the Lithuanian and Polish flags next to each other, unfortunately, to round out my collection! I changed my litas to Polish zloty and failed to find a cash machine. I had a cup of coffee, said hello to the customs guys and kept pedalling into Poland.

I pedalled hard in the cold straight into the first major town, Suwałki, Poland. I am sure I could have done a better job exploring this town, as I later discovered in reading the Rough Guide, but it was a pretty depressing place, with block after block of Soviet-style concrete apartment high rises which you can see from miles back as you arrive in the town. I looked for a cash machine to no avail and was starting to worry that I wasn't going to be able to get cash anywhere.

I just kept pedalling the remaining, thankfully relatively flat 30 km to Augustow, where I had pretty rough pavement and it was getting quite chilly. My gudebook tells me that this stretch, including the Augustow forest, is one of the last remaining large tracts of virgin forest in Europe. It is definitely beautiful (again, I had to imagine what it would have been like in the sun). One lucky thing for such a long day of cycling was that I gained an hour when I crossed into Poland. But since I've only gone due south, that means it gets dark one hour earlier here. By 6:45 I was coming into Augustow and the sun was starting to set. But luckily my hotel was on the northside of town and I was relieved to be at the end of my journey.

I settled into my very basic hotel, the Hotel Krechoviak, and wandered about 2 miles into town to get some dinner and some cash. The town looked pretty -- a place where a major lake meets two canals. I had some fried fish in a little waterside place. These fish were small (bigger than anchovies, smaller than trout) and were served with two forks to help you remove the meat from the bones. I then headed into the center and found that something was going on in the main church -- I could smell the incense from several blocks away.

Tomorrow, I head for Białystok, Poland, another 90 km away. I plan to stay there for a day and do some sightseeing. On the way, there is a small town where some old Russian Orthodox "old believers" live, so I also plant to check that out.

Vitals on today's ride:

Distance: 57 miles (toal trip distance: 500 miles)

Map of route: http://veloroutes.org/bikemaps/?route=21574

Soundtrack: Murzilki, Live at Manhattan Express, Moscow, 1995; Neil Young, Live at Massey Hall, 1971; Miles Davis and Quincy Jones, Live at Montreux.