Changing Plans, or the Baltic/Balkan Conundrum

So last I explained, my partner David and I had cancelled our plans to road trip around Tunisia due to some the terrorist attacks targeting tourists in Tunis and Sousse.  While I was upset to cancel my plans to see the North African nation, I was also secretly excited to plan an entirely new trip to a new destination.  For me, much of the joy of travel comes in the pre-work.  I am a meticulous researcher and am prone to map comas – and the need for a location change provided me with an opportunity for both.

Of course, by the time we cancelled our plans to spend the first week of our honeymoon in Tunisia, I had already come up with several potential destinations.  I had quickly identified several possible destinations for the first 8 days of our honeymoon based on the key needs we wanted met by the trip.  Those were:

• A place neither one of us had traveled before
• Cool architecture (Soviet/post-Communist preferred…both, if possible)
• Nice weather
• Direct flight from Frankfurt
• Flight(s) to Malta can require stopover, so long as we don’t waste a day in transit

So I started to build potential flight itineraries using the rule of “pay the difference” with Expedia – making sure that all of my other flights remained the same, and that the only flight changing was a switch from FRA > TUN to FRA > magical new destination!  Without consulting my partner (does he get a say anyway?), I landed on the following as potential destinations:

• Bulgaria: The flights were easy on both, and there are a ton of communist era monuments I am dying to see there (take a look at Yomadic’s post on them here – his photography of these monoliths is so stellar), as well as cool traditional towns of Plovdiv and Veliko Tarnovo. I could easily spend a week there.

• Romania: Flights again, were easy, and I’m captivated by Romania’s more recent history under Ceaucescu. I figured the language could be fairly easy to pick up, being a Romance language and all.  There is less interesting brutalist architecture there (as far as I know), but the medieval fortified Saxon/Transylvanian towns of Sighisoara, Sibiu, and Brasov look totally rad.  I’d also be keen on heading into Moldova and the breakaway region of Transnistria, if time allowed.

• Estonia: Thank god for Lufthansa, and easy flights around Europe – again, no problems there. My boss actually served in the Peace Corps in Estonia in the early 90s right after the fall of communism.  Tallinn looks lovely, and we could theoretically take day trips to Helsinki, or perhaps drive south to Riga as well.  It also keeps in my most recent obsession with post-Soviet nations.

• Latvia: Like Estonia, Latvia is a post-Soviet state in the Baltics. Riga has some stellar examples of Art Nouveau and Stalinist architecture (I am particularly smitten with its TV tower and Academy of Sciences), as well as rural manor architecture that seems primarily from the Romanov Era.  From my experiences, the Latvians, as a people, have a very strong sense of national/ethnic pride.  Having lived in Korea and Japan, I am quite interested in countries with nationalistic spirits, and Latvia seemed to fit into that mold – and I want to know why!

We ended up deciding to combine our Baltic aspirations together into a single trip, and even tack on Lithuania at the end.  We’ll be flying into Tallinn, and out of Vilnius in Lithuania, with parts of Latvia sandwiched in the middle.

Truth be told, I have had a greater interest in seeing Bulgaria and Romania than the Baltic States, but I felt that to only give them a week would be an injustice – an injustice that I am happy to impart to the Baltics, apparently.  Really, the issue is that we hope to do a larger scale trip down the road, and it made more sense to see Romania and Bulgaria as part of a greater Balkan/European/Round the World trip.  I have no doubt that I’ll make it to those nations, it just won’t be this year.

So we’re thrilled to be heading to Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.  We’re renting a car to take us between all three main capitals with some side trips as well.  Helsinki turned out to be a little on the expensive side, but we’re too young for a real first world destination anyway – at least that’s what I tell myself.  I’ll likely be 65 and still refusing to go to Paris in favor of places more off the beaten path like Mozambique, Paraguay, or Burma, insisting that Paris and the Western European set of travel standards are “for people that can’t travel harder!”  But yes, we’re excited to expand our European travel repertoire to include four more nations on our respective lists – still nowhere near the conventional travel locations, but Estonia and Malta are closer than Georgia and Armenia, at least.  Right?

Have you been to Estonia, Latvia, or Lithuania?  What did you think?  What are your favorite spots in the region?