May 01, 2013

Trip 51: Gauja National Park, Latvia

Trip date: Thursday August 23- Saturday August 24, 2012

Sigulda and Cēsis are towns located in Gauja National Park - Latvia's largest national park. Here we stayed in Sigulda, enjoyed the sights of the park and dodged the presence of a sneaky cat.

All in attendance: Kristen and Eric


We walked to a guest house in a residential neighbourhood from the train station. The adorable old couple only spoke Russian and Latvian but a few hand gestures and a Russian thank you from Eric was all that was needed.

The first night, we arrived late enough that we could do little more than stop at a grocery store. We ate a Cili restaurant - a chain we had seen multiple times throughout our trip. Highlights included impossibly delicious kiploku grauzdini - a sort of fried dark garlic bread covered in garlic goodness.

The walls of the bedroom had a tiger-carpet-print and we had access to 100+ channels on satellite TV but the only English channels were radical-evangelical-american broadcasts. We comfortably settled for martial art movies dubbed in Italian all the while trying to coerce the landlady's cat to come cuddle with us.

The next morning we started our day before any sort of tourist information center open and began our hike with only a cartoony-billboard map for reference. We had to walk along a highway for most of the time but ended up by the Erglu (Eagel's) Cliff where we had a quick lunch on a giant brötchen.


We continued on the mossy path through the park. Never in my life had I seen so many different type of  mushrooms! A lot of elderly people were at the beginning of the trail mushroom picking. I went on a personal mushroom safari and Eric was patient enough to wait for me to take unnecessary amounts of photos.



We saw the red Turaida castle at a distance and saw the Gutmanis Cave. The sandstone walls of the cave are very soft and it's easy to make inscriptions on it.




We continued through the park and stop to see the Sigulda New Castle at the end of the day. We stopped by a wasp infested cafe and rested our feet.


We stayed an extra night at the guesthouse where a cat, who wouldn't give us the time of day the previous day, mewed adorably at our door to come cuddle. Although Eric and I don't typically have cat allergies, there was something suspiciously off about this particular cat!