Photos - Latvia

After a week in Estonia we moved on to Latvia, the middle one of the three Baltic countries. The first camp site where we stayed was on the banks of the Gauja River near Sigulda. From Sigulda we drove to the Latvian capital Riga where we stayed on the city camping very close to the centre. We visited some great museums and shot a lot of good photos.

From our Sigulda camping did we undertake a 25km canoe expedition trough Gauja National park, with great scenery and lots of wildlife. Near the camping are the biggest Ski Slope of Latvia and Bobsled track were the Soviet team trained for the Olympic Games in Sarajevo. Cesis is the main city in the area with an old castle were the removed Lenin statue from the main square is on display in a crate. From Sigulda we drove to Riga were we camped on the City Camping on Kipsala Island, very close to the city centre. Latvia regards the years they were part of the Soviet Union a period of occupation but there are still many interesting things that relate to that period. Some Soviet era monuments are still standing like the Victory Memorial to the Red Army, Latvian Riflemen Statue and the Monument to the 1906 Revolution. Riga also has some great Soviet architecture like the Shroud Bridge, TV Tower and the Stalinist wedding cake building of the Academy of Sciences. Finally features Riga some of Eastern Europe’s fines museums like the Aviation, Automobile and Railways Museums and the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia 1940-1991, dedicated to remembering the crimes of the Soviet Union against the Latvian people.