Ligo is Latvia’s almost-summer-solstice celebration that is held over June 23rd and June 24th. It celebrates summer with women wearing flower wreaths on their heads and men wearing green-leaf wreaths. Many cars are decorated with greenery as well, including some on twenty-something-year-old guys’ cars. One hotel receptionist told us that Ligo “is a bigger holiday in Latvia than even Christmas.” It’s kind of a big deal here.
As such, I didn’t hold out much hope for tourism stuff today. I had confirmed that the cat-themed restaurant/bakery was open until 6:00 pm, so I knew we wouldn’t go hungry, but I wasn’t sure how much other stuff would be open. My initial checks showed that the major cultural stuff was all closed, but then I checked the tourist-amusement stuff, and that was the jackpot. Several things were open on shortened hours. The day was set around what was open.
Since it was a major holiday and I wasn’t expecting too much to be going on, I let us sleep in this morning. Add in going to get breakfast at the cat cafe and coming back to the room to put tomorrow’s breakfast in the refrigerator, and we didn’t get going for the day until 11:30. But we had places to go!
The first place that was still open was a cable car across the valley. Latvia is fairly flat (the highest point in Latvia is about a thousand feet). But it does have a pretty major valley here in the national park with the Gauja River running through it. And that river has a couple of bridges over it in the valley, but for elevation-resistant hikers and tourists, there’s a cable car across the valley. Each way takes about seven minutes. Since very few things were open, and today was a national holiday, the first car we could get on was a little over an hour out, at 12:40. So we took that as an opportunity to walk toward the other open tourist trap – Tarzan Park.
Tarzan Park is an “adventure park” with things to do for the kids, but also had yet another alpine slide in this flat country, along with a chair lift to get you back up out of the valley. We were going to check that out, but I got distracted by a hiking trail that had a viewpoint symbol at the top of the trail. At the top. As in it went down. All the way to the river, as it turned out. I somehow missed the twenty-seven-percent-grade symbol that was posted there (stairs have a grade between thirty and fifty percent, so imagine a three-thousand-foot-long staircase, and you get the idea). At least it was paved with bricks, and it was a pretty day. Still, my wife really clearly loves me. There were some grand views across the river, but the best views for the trail were actually down at the riverside.
By the time we got back up to the top and got back to the cable car, we only had twenty minutes to wait, so we used the restroom and looked out over the valley. The actual cable car ride was very pleasant. You could see a huge manor house, and you could see two castles, including Turaida Castle (where we were a couple of days ago). The ride over takes seven minutes, and the car runs every twenty minutes, but I had nothing particular to do on the other side, so we came right back on the same car. We had to get to Tarzan’s.
We walked back over to the park and got tickets to go down. Usually with alpine slides, Mer and I do a scenic run and a speed run. We thought that that would be the case here, but the track had other ideas. The track weaves in and out of trees, so there isn’t much to see for a scenic ride. Plus, the thing is so darn kicky that you need to pay attention to the track. It is really fast, and the corners are sharp and not terribly smooth. It jerks you around quite a bit. So the speed run of letting the slide go full-out really didn’t happen either. It was still a great ride, and we did it twice. As a bonus, we got to ride up the very peaceful chairlift, which goes over sections of the slide track, so we could see others zooming down the hill.
Having finished our third downhill ride outing of this trip, we got back in the car and drove over to Sigulda’s new castle, which is conveniently next to the old castle. The new castle is set in a pretty, enclosed, small park and we checked that out. The castle was closed today, but you could still go on the balconies, which had great views across the valley and good views of the old castle. The old castle was just open today – no entry fee. There were workers in the castle area setting up for the town’s Ligo celebration (including an eight-foot-high woodpile for a bonfire that I’m not going to leap over, no matter how much luck I’d receive), so I guess they must have just figured to let anyone in. So we went in to check it out.
The old castle was partly restored in the twentieth century, but that seemed limited to the front wall and tower of the castle. There are no intact rooms, and really only the front and part of one interior wall are standing (and a small tower at the back that was closed). But the castle did have great views of the manor over the valley on one side of the castle and Turaida Castle on the other. We were very pleased to have seen it.
We left the castle and went the short distance over to the town’s Lutheran church. The steeple was oddly large for the church, and we had noticed that style in Lithuania two years ago. Happily, the church was open (in your face, pagan ritual holiday!), so we went in. The inside was painted to look sort of like colorful marble, and the effect worked really well. The church looked as if it could easily hold a couple of hundred people, and the decorations were mainly limited to the altar area, with a large painting of Jesus praying, looking up to heaven. The choir/organ area was open, so we went up there as well, and there was a display of about a dozen nature “paintings” made of colorful shirt buttons. It sounds odd, but it worked quite well in an impressionist way – if you stood back a bit, you could easily see the flowers or trees or the like.
By now it was getting close to 4:00 and was starting to rain, and I didn’t want to risk missing a chance to eat, so we went back to the car, preparing to find some food and to wait out the rain. The first two places we tried were closed, and the third place was mobbed with people, so we just went back to the cat cafe and had a very good meal for fairly cheap. Always trust the restaurant with a resident cat.
Since it was still raining fairly hard when we finished, we went back to the room for thirty or forty minutes. Mer read, and I tried to find things to do in Riga tomorrow when it’s going to rain AND almost everything is going to be closed. The rain stopped, so we headed back out to go hiking. I really wanted to see Paradise Hill.
On the map, you could park near Paradise Hill and walk to it. Or you could park some distance away and walk a trail to it, seeing several sights along the way (caves, an old castle hill, etc.). I elected to do that to extend the hike on this fine evening.
We set off with our town-provided map in hand. It didn’t show every detail of the trail, but had certain sights marked on it, so I could just look for signs to the sights. Except when the signs to a particular sight weren’t posted on every signpost. Or when one of the sights shared the same name as other sights except for a minor second word. We found a very pretty small sandstone canyon, but that was a dead end we had sidetracked to deliberately. On our hike to Paradise Hill, we went down approximately 3.7 million wet, slanted, and sometimes mud-covered wooden steps. We had to cross three downed trees across the trail. We saw a pretty stream and followed it along until we started to go back up out of the valley, which was a great sign for an upcoming hill. Until it wasn’t. As we emerged from the trail into a meadow about forty-five minutes later, Meredith declared, “There’s the haystack we saw earlier.” We had somehow completed a loop without my knowing it from my map.
We drove over to the Paradise Hill parking lot.
From there, the trail to Paradise Hill was wide and flat and in excellent condition. In ten minutes, we were at a large viewpoint that had wonderful views of the river valley and of Turaida Castle. There was even a two-person swing. We lingered there about twenty minutes enjoying the birdsongs and the cool evening. It was worth figuring out how to get there.
After leaving Paradise Hill, we went back to the car and went home. Tomorrow we have to leave early to return the car before we spend our last three Latvian days in Riga. I need to get to work on finding tourist trap things that might open late tomorrow.
