Arriving to Latvia — Again

 

After walking around in Ämari, we were headed South, first in two weeks! It sounds exciting doesn’t it? In the past two weeks we were only driving North! I think that sounds very cool. 

However, we weren’t driving straight to Riga, we were driving to the border of Estonia and Latvia, because there was something we needed to check out, and the mysterious thing was a pier, build out of rocks, and as far as I understood it was famous for being absolutely useless. We were driving into a small town where the border of the two countries ran literally between two houses! Right there was a medium sized parking lot, where we left our car, and started our walk on catwalks, then it turned into a dirt path, and then we eventually ended up on the pier, which as I told you earlier was built out of rocks, however those rocks were size of a watermelon without anything between them, so I can hardly believe they used that thing for any commercial purpose. Although it didn’t seemed too useful in the sense of a pier that most people think of, it’s purpose might not even was that. I just came to realize it maybe was built to slow down the sand’s migration. As stupid as it sound sand does migrate due to currents, air movements and so on, so they might just wanted to stop that. Otherwise what would a pier do right on the border of two countries — to countries that thanks to the Soviet Union was one country for way to many years.

We walked around the beach for a while, it was beautiful, incredibly long, wide as a Cadillac, flat as a pancake, and empty as an unopened HDD. We loved it there. We checked the different formations of the sandy beach that were created by the currents like the ripper marks — you can also see and fill ripple marks at the bottom of Lake Balaton.

Ripple marks and us.

 The only annoying thing was the wind. So, after admiring the views for a bit we had to walk back to the car. There we had lunch and met a nice couple, who seemed to be just as surprised as we were to see fellow travelers during Covid-19. We had a nice conversation with them, we asked them where they were coming from; when we answered Hungary there was a bit of and ‘oh, bummer’ feeling, because they were coming from Austria, one of the  neighbor country of Hungary! It was strange, but also funny how two neighboring country’s citizens meet at probably Europe’s least touristy place. As we were talking a Police car showed up, they stopped every car and everyone who was passing the border, after the cars were gone they came at us, they only wanted to see our registrations to enter their country, but they were not doing it nicely. Of course our papers were correctly filled out, so they had to leave us live. 

We were starting to take pictures with the Latvia sign when the police stopped an older couple, who were locals, but went on a short walk, and their short walk happened to cross the border. We didn’t exactly understood what they were saying, but the police seemed to be asking for their registration, and the couple wasn’t happy about that. The man looked quite pissed actually, and I can totally understand him. They definitely looked older then 50 years olds, which means they were older than 20 years old when the Soviet Union existed, and there were absolutely no border control between Latvia and Estonia, they could just run around the town no problem for 20+ years, and now two 25-ish years old police tells them they can’t. I totally get it why they were pissed — they eventually were let back to their country.

For the record I’m not suggesting to be rude to any police officer, in fact I would rather encourage you to be nice to them, because they probably hate to be there as you hate them being there, if you know what I mean. They have bosses and those bosses are the one who make them do things that they not necessarily would love to do. So, be nice to police and be nice to everyone! That’s today’s blog’s takeaway I believe.

Take care, be nice, see you soon!

Almos