Blimey – having an interesting time on FB in Klaipeda putting photos into an album and creating and ordinary post. Looks a right mess at this end, and probably even worse at yours.

Pouring with rain outside with 800km ahead of us to Tartu in Estonia, where we’re now thinking of taking a train for the last bit in 10 days to Tallinn, our end stop.

Good to be out of Kaliningrad in some ways though already being missed – Russians are lovely, friendly, open, curious, but politically things feel so stuck in a Soviet-nostalgic past.

As old Soviet hands (Jutta and I did after all first meet in Moscow 43 years ago in 1974 when we were both working there), we head out of Kaliningrad/Koenigsberg towards EU-member Lithuania today with mixed feelings.

The Russians we’ve met here since crossing on Daisy from Poland five days ago, have been unfailingly kind and generous – all of them of course either themselves immigrants or descended from those who repopulated East Prussia after it was ethnically, brutally, understandably-at-the-time perhaps, cruelly, ethnically cleansed of Germans immediately after the war.

Much is of course different from Soviet days (not that we would ever have been able to visit Kaliningrad as the closed military district it once was) – the openness of conversation, the quality of the (actually, now universally-excellent) food, the shops, the enterprise, the bright colours and fashion of ordinary street life..

Of course, Kaliningrad as a Russian territorial exclave remains as yet only sparsely visited by tourists, and is clearly struggling to find a new balanced identity between the political, cultural and geostrategic pulls of Russia, history, and of surrounding Europe.

And let’s not get too misty-eyed about outsiders imposing their ways on a part of the world that has more history than most could digest – think Sweden, Teutonic Knights, and Napoleon, Hitler’s Nazis as well as Stalin’s Soviet Union and now the new Russia.

But we have been in honesty been disappointed by how Kaliningrad and its region again illustrate a Russian truth we know so well from our time in Moscow of disconnect between the warmth and soul of ordinary Russians and a collective and continued disregard for beauty, quality and the individual.

(I think Tolstoy and Dostoevsky used to write about this, actually – it’s an old story.)

There’s a great deal more that could and perhaps should be written (maybe one day, we both will!), but to take just one example, Kaliningrad’s shiny new Orthodox Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, making its unsubtle, unmistakable political point in Putin’s Russia, is so brightly, garishly illustrated within with icons and gold that visitors are advised to bring sunglasses.

But without, it’s an astonishingly sloppily-finished construction, with corners cut and gaps in the marble cladding chipboarded over in a manner reminiscent at the same time of Brezhnev’s Moscow (think the blocks on Prospekt Kalinina) and of some kind of quick-build new hotel for the new Russian rich.

All in saddening contrast with what little is left of the carefully-built quality of Koenigsberg’s German heritage, with some lovely examples of restored Prussian forts and gates but so much throughout this region that’s been either left to rot or which has been brutally torn away and replaced with vistas of Soviet concrete even more ugly than the worst we got used to in Russia nearly half a century ago.

And yet, we – at least I, Mark, perhaps because I speak the language and know Russia’s history and complex identities from my university and reporting days – love the place and its people.

So much so that we (well, Jutta reminds me more me than we at this point) are now planning (or at least discussing) a future tandem trip from Moscow to St Petersburg, perhaps next spring.

With fewer submarines (pix below repeated from yesterday’s Facebook post), and certainly less derelict German heritage.

However basic the technology, one would rather not be on the wrong end of one of these.

Fascinating to have arrived in Kaliningrad Region – looks, feels, smells even so much like the Russia/Soviet Union Jutta and I knew so well.

Our two-day slow route in mapped on the right, from Mauerwald with its crazy WWII bunkers, to Gusev/formerly Gumbinnen.

First, a couple of Garmin map links if you’re interested in our exact route, and speeds, and elevation and all the rest.

https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/embed/1909929009

https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/embed/1909906242

If you check, you’ll note that the first one suddenly picks up speed dramatically after Rozogi. And yes, from that point we were no longer trundling sedately along on Daisy, but aboard a VW Transporter taxi taking us both as rapidly as possible to hotel, bed and safety as Mark brewed, two days later than Jutta, the same Norovirus projectile vomiting bug.

Needless to say, no cycling got done yesterday either, which has meant that by the end of week one-of-four away, we’re already three days down on our original pedalling plans.

Hey ho, life is life, and we’re both now fine, and loving the Polish scenery – today the waterways of the Mazurian Lakes, formerly the southern part of German East Prussia and one of the loveliest holiday destinations imaginable (as long as the weather is as good as it was today.) Let the pix speak.

Tomorrow, we hope for our first, full, untruncated day’s ride, with neither VW minibus nor a boat to help us on our way, and with neither of us ending our ride with a mad, urgent dash for the loo…

We’re heading first thing out of Gizycko past Hitler’s latter wartime bunker in the forests at Wolfsschanze/Wolf’s Lair (the place where the July 20 1944 assassination attempt failed and which was blown up by his guards just before the Russians got here in early 1945), and thence to Goldap to cross into Kaliningrad Oblast, with luck, on Sunday.

Formerly an entirely closed military area, and we’re going through on a tandem. Could be interesting.

 

Experimenting with a Garmin map below of our first day’s cycling north from Warsaw – very nearly 100km before we had to stop with Jutta nursing a very sore stomach from eating something that disagreed.

She’s feeling better today as we enjoy an unplanned 24-hour pause at a delightful small hotel on our way towards the Baltic.

Until it wasn’t, yesterday was magic as we pedalled through an unspoiled, hot, late summer Polish countryside alive with storks and – compared with the contract behemoths that now work our English countryside – dinky, individually-owned combine harvesters and balers very much like those we used growing up in 1960s Norfolk.

Jutta’s already feeling much better, so with luck, the journey resumes in the morning.

https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/embed/1903141138