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Baltics Cities: Update April 2009
Neil Taylor
Recessions are ideal times for travel. Prices fall, car-drivers take to bicycles or buses and service improves in hotels and restaurants, given the choice of good staff available under such circumstances. In the Baltics, it took a little time for all these factors to come into play, but by late March they had certainly done so. It was a pleasure to see local Estonians again being able to afford meals in Tallinn Old Town and to see normal Brits in four star hotels throughout the Baltics, reductions there more than compensating for the lower pound. It was an equal pleasure to see that Tallinn now has a dedicated vegetarian restaurant.
Whatever budgets may have been cancelled, those for culture have remained intact. In Riga alone, two new museums opened this spring, one commemorating film-maker Sergei Eisenstein, the other being the former studio of Romans Suta and Aleksandra Belcova, the king and queen of Latvian painting between the Wars. The Jugendstil Museum will open in May. Hotel building continues too. In Lahemaa, Estonia’s best-known national park, the Vihula Manor complex opens new facilities every few months and the former Uniquestay has now being upgraded to a four-stay hotel called the von Stackelberg, named after the Baltic-German family that used to own the building.
It was a shock in January for British travellers when FlyLAL went bankrupt, so stopping their daily London-Vilnius flight. In due course another airline will take over, but for now the best connection is via Riga with Air Baltic which operates twice a day from London and then six times a day to both Tallinn and Vilnius. Air Baltic overall has been one of the few airlines to increase services in 2009, so they now have a twice-daily connection from Riga to Palanga on the Lithuanian coast as one of their new services. This service is an excellent gateway to Klaipeda and the Curonian Spit. They also fly eastwards from Riga to many Bradt destinations in Central Asia and the Caucasus with fares usually much lower than those charged by other carriers. |
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