day five: don't make me get my tank!

So ... after changing hotels this morning (the Soviet tower block was fully booked out for Monday night, apparently), I headed for the office of Velo-Vilnius, who organise city tours by bicycle.

I know some people feel that the 'grand city tour' is a bit silly, but depending on the city, I personally find them rather useful. You can get around to a lot of things in a short space of time, cross the boring bits off your list, and come back to the interesting parts later to do them at your own pace. I'm especially fond of bicycle tours, and for a number of reasons, the Baltics are definitely the place to do them. The bicycle tour of Tallinn, for example, is by far my pick of the many Tallinn tours available (and I've done most of them!).

Because of the hotel change, I was the last person to turn up for the tour, just a minute or two before it was supposed to leave. In fact, I got there just in time to be given a bicycle, a lovely basket and a special job. I would ride last in the tour group, wearing the fluorescent yellow safety vest. Throwing the vest on and trying not to visibly wince, I followed the group up through the Old Town.

Silly clothing aside, this was going to be great!

I won't give you a  blow-by-blow of Vilnius, because that would go on forever. Historically, it has that Baltic "pretty much everyone has ruled us at one time or another" thing, the result being a wonderful layer cake of styles accompanied by a treasury of stories. It also has the Baltic oddness that I love ... here and in the neighbouring countries, what you tend to get is 'Europe with a twist', which always makes Europe more fun than when it's straight up and twist-free.

I will, however, tell you some things I loved about the tour. 

Firstly, it started in what was once a very dodgy neighbourhood of central Vilnius, full of drug addicts, prostitutes and the inevitable inner city criminal element, but which is now a self-proclaimed independent state called the Republic of Užupis. 

The great thing about this particular political entity is that it's run entirely by artists. And they run it pretty much as you'd expect artists to govern a small country ... i.e. without much concern for everyday political realities, but with an awful lot of whimsy and flair and fun stuff like that. The parliament building is a pub (naturally), the entry visa is a smile, Independence Day falls on April 1st, there's a statue of a 'backpacker Jesus' in one of the main squares, there are four national flags (one for each season), the formerly twelve-strong army has been disbanded, and the constitution ... well, have a look and see what you think.

The Užupis constitution has been translated into 40 languages, all engraved on mirrors and displayed outdoors in a prominent street. In a few cases, the choice of which languages should be represented has been a political one. When the Autonomous Region of Tibet recognised Užupis, for example, the artists/governors responded by adding a Tibetan translation to their public collection. This annoyed the Chinese government, because there was no Chinese translation. And that suited the rulers of Užupis fine, since they weren't big fans of China's incursions into Tibet anyway. Thus Chinese is still conspicuously absent from the wall.

Mostly, though, the republic is more about personal politics than geopolitics, and they seem to care more about whether visitors have a 'favourite bit' than about whether or not they annoy far-off evilocrats. And rightly so, I reck'n.

(Incidentally, one of my favourite bits is not visible in this photo. It reads: "Everyone has the right to love and take care of a cat".)

In case you're interested, you can find the entire constitution here.

Another very pleasant discovery I made on this tour concerned the Mayor of Vilnius, Arturus Zuokas, a former independent journalist in Iraq. He is now, I would have to say, probably my favourite politican in Europe. For one thing, he has put a lot of green projects in place and made Vilnius extremely wi-fi friendly. He also has his police force zipping around the city on Segways (those machines that you stand on and drive), looking more bouncy and fun than any police force you've likely seen elsewhere.

Personally, though, I think Zuokas' most impressive mayoral exploit relates to the cycling lanes in Vilnius. He'd ordered these lanes to be put in all over the city, but they weren't working so well because motorists persisted in parking on them. To combat this, he simply borrowed a tank from the army, drove it downtown, found a car parked in one of the cycling lanes, and crushed it!

To drive the point home (so to speak), the Mayor's Office then produced stickers that said in Lithuanian "Don't Make Me Get My Tank!", and began distributing them around Vilnius. The cycle lanes now work brilliantly.

Give the guy a freaking Nobel Prize, I reck'n.

When myself and the others on the tour found out about this, we pleaded with our guide to ride with us to the Mayor's office and ask for some stickers. She said there probably wouldn't be any, because they've become collectors' items, but she reluctantly agreed to try. So off we rode to an anonymous-looking block where the mayoral action apparently all happens. She went inside, explained that the tank thing had inspired some foreign tourists she was with, and emerged 10 minutes later with a handful of little round adhesive masterpieces. We were thrilled! I now carry one with me everywhere, as a reminder that politics doesn't always have to be depressing :-)

One last thing about Zuokas: although he's a hit in his home town, on the national stage he sometimes makes people wonder if he isn't basically a loony. An example was his suggestion to the national parliament a few years ago that Lithuania buy a Greek island, both to enlarge its territory and also to help out a European neighbour in crisis. The scheme was more or less laughed out of parliament - and it's not entirely clear whether or not even he was serious about it. Still, you have to love the sheer eccentricity of the idea.

So there you go.

After the bicycle tour ended I headed immediately out of town, because there was something else I wanted to see. About 40kms from Vilnius, there's a place called Trakai which has been on my 'must go there' list for ages. So that's where I went.

Trakai is basically a little community that spreads across the mainland and a few islands in a natural lake. On one of the islands is a castle. Whenever you read about it on the internet or in the guidebooks, the reviews are all 'ohmigod' and so forth. I thought I was going to have my mind blown. Instead, I went out there, walked around the lake, went up to the castle and went "Um ... yeah. It's very nice.". So, y'know, a little less than I'd expected, but still pretty cool. After all the other stuff I'd seen, I guess my brain was just a tiny bit overloaded.

The following day I left Lietuva, feeling quite sad to be on my way out. The landscape I saw through the train window was pretty and green and punctuated with the occasional stork, all of which made me wish I could stay a bit longer.

Luckily, though, I was headed for Poland. So that helped. The prospect of being back in one of my most beloved European countries is a gigantic upside, whatever the situation :-)

As you know, I was planning to write a separate entry for each day of this journey. As things have turned out, though, there just hasn't been time. I've got some further adventures to tell you about, and they're going to be big. So for now ...

Byeeeeeee!!!