Day 517: Curonian Spit

Long day today. Up early and on the road heading out of Vilnius, north-westward towards the coast. Our destination was the Curonian Spit, a long and skinny peninsula on the Baltic sea, shared jointly between Lithuania and Russia. It's about 100km long and only a couple of km wide at most points, and it's largely made up of sand dunes.

The drive out there was quite long, about 4 hours including a brief ferry out to the island, and we were quite tired just from the drive before starting to look around the site. It's quite odd too, because the details from UNESCO mainly talk about the sand dunes as the most important feature - they're the largest sand dunes in Europe. But at the same time, they didn't find it of "Outstanding Universal Value", instead it's inscribed on the basis of the small fishing villages that have existed along the spit for centuries. Go figure.

We filmed both areas, sand dunes and villages alike. They had some interesting weather vanes which in times past were all attached to fishing boats. All were painted in a unique way and had several key identifiers, making them sort of like car licence plates except also able to tell wind speed and direction.

We drove up and down the peninsula, though turned back at the Russian border naturally! Finished up fairly late, around 6pm, then headed back to the mainland where our accommodation was in the city of Klaipeda - Lithuania's second city. Not much to see here! Our room was nice enough though, just a room in a small guest house.

Another torrential downpour and thunderstorm meant that we were fairly stuck for dinner options, particularly since we had no cooking facilities. Not wanting to eat McDonalds twice in one day, we managed to find an open kebab shop. It looked a bit dodgy, but the kebabs were absolutely excellent, probably the best we've had since leaving Australia!Read more