Kurische Nehrung

July 15-17


I spent the last three-isch days on the Curonian Spit. This is an amazing feature of land. One of its kind and a Unesco World Heritage Site since 2000, I believe. It’s a very long, skinny spit of sand, the southern half is part of the Russian Federation and the northern half belongs to Lithuania. Of course, in my family’s history it was East Prussian but it has been home to many peoples; the Balts, Curonians (?Kuren), Lithuanians, Prussians…seemed to be the main lot. They lived peacefully with each other, fishing being their main livelihood and their common enemy being the sand and the wind; in short, the elements. At one point in history they had chopped down most of the trees and soon discovered their mistake. The massive sand dunes invaded their homes, turning them into Pompeii of sorts. Once they realized their mistake they started to reforest to help preserve their livelihood and their dunes. But by then the town of Nidden/Nida had to be moved three or four times. It makes me wonder why people even bothered to live there if it was so hard.

Perhaps because it is terribly beautiful. The dunes are indescribable. Huge mountains of sand. When the wind blows, as it did the whole time I was there, the sand blows like snow would, causing drifts and covering things up. I spent a good part of a day wandering the dunes as far as I was able. Most of the landscape is protected and people are asked to stay only on the tracks. Most of them do. Today when I hiked up the big one at Perwalk/Pervalka it started to pour rain and I got soaking wet. Good thing my clothes from yesterday’s rain were dry.





I camped for the 3 nights at the only campground on the whole spit. I was reminded again that camping here is not like camping in national/provincial parks in Canada. Here one is camped so close together that one is practically living in each other’s tent or campervan. But I had found myself an itty bitty spot at the fence and faced my door to the woods so I felt that I was a little bit in the middle of nature. Last night it poured rain all night which wasn’t so pleasant. My tent stayed mostly dry. Otherwise it was quite comfortable sleeping there. The ground wasn’t quite so hard since it was all sand. And I managed to talk to some of the neighbours. There was a couple in an Irish car from South Africa and Lithuania. We had a big long conversation about the troubles of the world this morning. But we weren’t able to solve any of them.


Yesterday morning I spent at the Baltic Sea. The wind was quite strong and the waves were big and powerful. It was interesting to see how they pushed the sand up. It made it possible to imagine how thousands of years ago, wind and water formed the dunes. I walked along the beach all the way to the Kaliningrad border. There was a Polish family there too and we chatted and laughed together at the measly excuse for a border except knowing that were one to cross one would quickly be discovered, quite sure that someone in the tower off in the distance had pretty good binoculars.



The rest of the time I spent exploring the town of Nida/Nidden. It is quite a tourist town. The beautiful, old fisherhomes have been beautifully renovated and it seems that quite a few of them are used as holiday homes/apartments/rooms for rent. It was nice just to walk around a bit and be part of the atmosphere. There were some nice little cafés and restaurants. I had an amazing herring with red beet salad in one of the little garden cafés. There were many vendors selling amber. It’s amazing how much amber there is once wonders whether it really all can be really. Of course, the all claim it to be. The amber museum was very interesting. There was a lady giving a tour to a little group that I listened in on and there was a funny lady as part of that group that made it all quite comical and fun. Vendors and store employees are generally quite different to what I’m used to. They seem somewhat indifferent actually to the fact that they may have a customer. They mostly don’t greet you, or give you much of the time of the day. The few that seemed interested in a potential sale were then quite nice and I felt much happier buying something from them. There were three young girls working at one amber stand. They were very cute. They were enjoying trying out their English on me and were doing a really good job in trying to sell me something. I felt bad that they didn’t have anything that I could buy at that point. They were quite happy that I thought they were good salespeople.
The second evening I discovered that there was a concert in the old German church. It was an Edvard Grieg and other Scandinavian artists concert and a choir from Vilnius sang. They were amazing. I heard them in rehearsal and stayed for the concert. They were all students at a music school. They did one piece in German “O komm du süßer Tod” which they did as surround sound, as in they surrounded the audience. The first verse was in chorale form and then the other verses were very modern, dissonant harmonies. The effect in surround sound form was amazing and so wonderfully fit the sentimentality of the song and the history too of many lives on this formidable piece of land. The audience loved it and gave them a standing ovation and they had to do encores before the concert was even over…which meant they didn’t do their encores at the end! The concert was very great.