Troutworthy's Travel Blog: Into Lithuania

A representative view from the train.

A bright and early start: there's only one connection from Warsaw to Vilnius each day, and it leaves at 7:55am. My conveyance is a comfortable, spacious loco-hauled beast, the brontosaurus of trains. Though stopping regularly, it powers along to Białystok in a couple of hours, but then stops there for over half an hour (“for technical reasons”, as the website has it). After that, its progress northward is notably slower, and it repeats its lengthy stop at Suwałki. But nothing can stop it as it lumbers towards and across the border. The scenery is much like what I remember from the Riga-Valga train: plains, mostly forests (alternating evergreen and birch), some farmland, occasional marshes, and even a few hills near Suwałki. I've been reading about the Battle of Grunwald/Tannenberg, a significant defeat for the Teutonic Knights against the combined forces of Poland and Lithuania in 1410, and it occurs to me that it must be around here somewhere, but when I check my maps it turns out that we're far too far east for that (close to Belarus).

I've been to Lithuania before, but only on a technicality: when I was travelling back by coach from Riga to Warsaw in 2019, I stepped off at Šiauliai bus station to stretch my legs for about twenty seconds. My quest to visit all the countries of Europe before my fortieth birthday will end in respectable failure: all the remaining countries – Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Cyprus – are currently out of reach for various reasons. So this trip to Lithuania is intended to set the record straight by doing (more) justice to the country.

It feels absurd to be winding my watch forward an hour while trundling through the woods. It strikes me that flying is the ultimate form of transport for the nation-state, allowing one to imagine a clear discontinuity between point of origin and point of arrival. Borders, paradoxically, are a lot more concrete and well-defined when you don't have to actually cross them on the ground.

Mockava.

A through train is not possible due to the switch to broad gauge, and so we have to stop at Mockava, whose station is a nowhere place in the forest. The change is easy – from one side of the island platform to the other – though it's a bit chilly. After a while the Lithuanian train comes in, a DMU, more of an allosaurus.

Lithuanian train.

Both trains are warm and welcoming inside, with power sockets, and catering. This one even has wifi, and is in more of a hurry. After Kaunas, it runs non-stop for over an hour before reaching Vilnius. Here I'm met by the kind and indefatigable A., who takes me in his car for a quick tour of the capital of Lithuania – but that's the topic of another blog post.