Latvia & Lithuania 2023 – The Back To The Baltics Tour

Highlights From This Trip

• 8 Days
• 28 Locations Explored
• 1400 miles driven
• ~400 photos
• Soviet relics: schools, sports halls and bunkers

It has been a few years since my first trip to the Baltics; a memorable road trip back in the winter of 2019. This was a last minute spontaneous adventure, packed with fascinating locations and wonderful wild camping. In the late spring on 2023, it was time for a belated Back To The Baltics Tour!

This time, I had more time to plan! I had the luxury of enjoying several months of preparation; there were many late nights researching locations until the small hours of the morning. In the week before my flight, I finalised my route plan in my usual fashion. Drawing a route connecting my favourite location points of interest, forming big loop around Latvia and Lithuania. I explored schools, churches, sports halls, bunkers, culture centers and factories. I also explored an abandoned wooden bobsleigh track in the forest.

I didn’t make it to Estonia on this trip, so I will be back again in the future. I feel it only right to sample the full Baltic trio, perhaps next year!

Abandoned Soviet Schools with beautiful murals

I very interested in Soviet murals, and the Baltics still has many lurking inside abandoned buildings. These are a relic of the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic (Latvian SSR); Latvia was annexed in 1939 by the Soviet Union and was part of the USSR until it asserted its independence in 1991.

My favourite location of the trip was an abandoned school, with the most adorable mural I have ever seen! Inside the sports hall is a painting of bright eyed, big eared bear. He is proudly holding a torch, inscribed with cyrillic letters. This little bear is Misha (Миша), the mascot for the 1980s Moscow Olympic Games. This large site had several other sports-themed murals as well as some other interesting parts, all of which I snapped away at enthusiastically over the course of several hours.

A second school held another beautiful mural. This covered the walls behind the benches in an old science lab, featuring a large artwork celebrating science and the space age.

Going underground – Exploring nuclear fallout Bunkers

I was very excited to explore some nuclear fallout bunkers, my first time! They are relics from the Cold War Era, when the threat of nuclear war loomed. These bunkers were built under large factories, to provide refuge and medical supplies to the factory workers. Inside were crates of gas masks and medical supplies to counteract the effects of radiation sickness. One of the bunkers was flooded, but thankfully a friend was on hand to lend me some Soviet rubber boots from their collection!

Shooting Film photographs – Old faithful Zenit-E, and a new “little brother”

Another trip for my grandad’s Zenit E, fitted with my Mir-1b 37mm lens and loaded with some Kodak Ektar 100. Hopefully the saturated colours and warmth of this film stock with work well with the colourful murals!

I acquired an interesting camera earlier this year, a Kiev 30 (Киев 30) produced in the USSR between 1974 and 1983. This tiny subminiature camera is often called a “spy camera” (evocative, but maybe not to be taken too literally!). This petite camera is a little quirky, and requires custom cut 16mm wide strips of film. To make it even more fun, I have to spool into cartridges in my “darkroom” (my bathroom, at night). For this trip, I had prepared two cartridges of Kodak Portra 400 which I hope will give me around 38-40 shots.

More behind-the-scenes photos from my Baltics 2023 Road Trip

Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoyed this road trip blog! Here are the rest of the behind-the-scenes snaps and preview photos from this trip, see you next time <3.