Backtracking to Vilnius

I arrived in Riga with two weeks to kill before heading off back to oz. After a week or so I felt I needed to do something else before heading back so t square and I decided to backtrack to Lithuania to have a better look at the country I’d travelled through at night and spent five minutes in. Vilnius is a five hour trip from Riga on either a day or night bus. Die hard backpackers catch the 10 PM bus to avoid a nights accommodation fee but the idea of landing in a city at 3.00 AM didn’t have a lot of appeal so I headed out at 10 AM.

Again the bus trip was not too eventful. Sometimes you almost wish some crazy would get on just to break the trip up a little and provide a bit of humour. The bus was fairly hot. I seems drivers here are reluctant to switch on the AC. Maybe it’s because for a large part of the year these countries have below zero temperatures, like minus 20 or more. Apparently in winter you can walk from Finland to Estonia which is two hours by ship to give you some idea of how cold it gets here. Or, maybe as these countries are known for their fondness for saunas that sitting in a sealed bus sweating with a group of people is not such an unpleasant or foreign activity.

After an hour or so another passenger persuaded the driver to turn it on and the slightest of breeze could be felt coming through the system. After drinking a fair amount of liquid in the interim and now starting to feel the call of nature I noticed a Japanese backpacker head down to the toilet. After a few attempts at opening the door and realising it was locked he walked politely back to his seat and sat down resigned to the situation. After a few more minutes I realised I wasn’t quiet as accepting and decided to walk down and ask the driver for the key. With the universal visual queue of twisting two fingers and saying toilet at the same time I was sure I would not have too much trouble conveying my request whatever the drivers language which as a passenger you don’t necessarily know as these bus generally travel through a range of countries. ‘Aaaaahhh, too ilet! he exclaimed. Now I am not particularly good at Latvian, Estonian or Lithuanian. Indeed I can’t put two words together but I could tell from this drivers response that he considered the toilet on his bus as the bane of his life. Perhaps he was thinking if only there was an attendant on the bus charging a zloty every time someone wanted to use it you wouldn’t have so many people walking up and down the isle using the free toilet would you? ‘Free toilet’ who ever heard of such nonsense! You could tell that as far as this driver was concerned he’d weld the door shut permanently if he could. After watching the driver tap his pockets a few times which is another universal sign for, ‘hell, I don’t know where the keys are’ I thought for a couple of moments and realised I would have to take a different approach and a little mischievously turned to the stair well and indicated that I could always pull my fly down and do it there. He looked at me a moment considering the gesture and perhaps the incomprehensible nature of westerners that uttered, ‘something, something toilet!’ before pulling the bus over and unlocking the door. I braced myself well half expecting him to hit the brakes hard as I stood to relieve myself but no. Interestingly the Japanese man then a steady tide of people soon were heading to the convenience. As we headed towards Vilnius perhaps the bus driver was thinking, ‘this would be a good job except for the passengers!’.
Fun now over I put my seat back content to count cows, hay bails and watch the world go by and soon found myself in Vilnius.