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Tour dates: 9-22 June 2002. Total distance: 1130 km.

Bicycle Tour: Poland, Lithuania, Latvia

Thomas Driemeyer
2005-10-16 14:25:58

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Poland and the Baltic states have not yet been discovered as a tourism destination, so we decided to discover the place for ourselves before the inevitable hordes of German package tourists do. We read up a lot on it, primarily from the Lonely Planet guides (not very helpful except for Gdansk and Riga) and the web. We also brought "Polen per Rad'', volume 1, ISBN 3-932546-11-3, a German-language bicycle guide for Poland that proved essential to find all the sleepy and very scenic and quiet side roads in Poland. Recommended if you understand German - or even if you don't, just for the route maps!

I had some problems finding a travel agent in Berlin for the train and ferry tickets that really knew the area, and didn't just look up package tours in glossy catalogs. I eventually found a "Holidayland'' agent on Leipziger Strasse, +49-30-2082423, ask for Gabriele Lode.

Many guides stress the poor roads and recommend ridiculous tire widths like 40mm. Unless you plan to go offroad or use forest paths, you can forget that. The asphalt ranged from a little coarse with potholes to excellent. Usually the latter. I used 32/37mm, but one of us had no problems with 23/25mm. We had a total of 2 km of cobblestones, near Riga.

Poland and the Baltic republics all used to belong to the Soviet empire, but they are modernizing at a furious pace. The Soviet legacy still exists in places, especially Lithuania, but it's vanishing fast, mostly through German imports. Everybody seems to drive German cars, they have German mailboxes, German phone booths, German yoghurt, German everything... We even saw a modern Berlin public transport bus in Jelgava, with the BVG logo still on it!

Language is a problem. In Poland German is sometimes spoken, and in Latvia many people speak English, but lots of people speak only Polish, Lithuanian, and Latvian, respectively. My friends knew ...