From 'A' to 'B' by bus...Baltic-style

  • 2005-03-02
  • By Peter Walsh
RIGA - One of the nice things about living in Riga is the fact that it's equidistant from the other two Baltic capitals. You can swing either way in the space of just four or five hours (given the elements). Except that I am one of those many unfortunate people who is forced, through the lack of something called a car, to make the journey by bus. And what a journey it invariably is.

Bus travel in the Baltics is one of the best ways to get a good, in-your-face glimpse of what life is really like in this part of the world. For many people it's the only convenient and accessible way to travel between the Baltic states.

Inter-Baltic plane travel is still too expensive to be anything other than an extravagant luxury for most people, and not everyone has a car or a ride they can hitch. As for the Rail Baltica project, don't hold your breath. It may be number 27 on the EU's top 30 list of most pressing new transport projects, but the first part of it (Kaunas 's Riga) isn't due to be ready until 2014, if at all, given the logistical problems and lack of initiative involved.

But that still leaves the good old-fashioned Baltic bus, which over the years has faithfully carted hundreds of thousands of people between Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius, bringing together friends, lovers, tourists, petty criminals, students, pensioners, weekend prostitutes and all the other assorted outcasts and impecunious misfits that you see waiting around to catch a bus at the grim central stations.

Hazardous business

If you've ever taken a bus from one Baltic capital to another, you'll know that they're almost always full. There's always something of a crush to get on them, as people push their way along the narrow aisle, desperately looking for their seat numbers and trying to stuff their luggage into the ridiculously small overhead storage compartments.

And then there are always a couple of people who turn up without a ticket and nervously wait to see if there's a free place for them. Meanwhile the driver squeezes in a couple of last-minute pre-journey cigarettes.

This is the most nerve-wracking moment of the journey: waiting to see who will end up in the free seat beside you. For my part, I put anything I can there to try and deter people: a book, a bag, my hand, anything to hand. But inevitably someone steps on board, frantically looks for a free seat, sees the one next to me, and snaps it up with his behind.

The first part of the journey is a curious mixture of excitement and frustration. "We're off," you foolishly think as the bus driver revs up the engine and starts to reverse at an awkward angle, but then you spend half an hour crawling through traffic, and jolting to a stop at every traffic light. But the Baltic capitals aren't all that big and it isn't too long before you're clear of them.

Once you hit the big open road, you start to relax. You mark the time on the red digital clock at the front of the bus, you notice the first signpost along the road telling you how many hundreds of kilometers it is to your destination, you do a little mental arithmetic, until your thoughts suddenly trickle to a halt. It's then you realize that the bus has been crawling along behind a Soviet-era truck for the last five minutes.

I am probably more afraid of traveling by bus in the Baltics than I am of flying. Bus drivers seemingly have no regard for the safety of their passengers. When a double decker Ecolines traveling from Moscow to Riga skidded off an icy road in December, killing nine people and injuring dozens more, this fact was made seriously apparent. No doubt the bus companies have all sorts of safety regulations that drivers are supposed to adhere to. But the fact is they don't. They overtake on narrow roads, they speed, and drivers have frequently complained that they work back-to-back shifts and stay at the wheel for hours at a stretch.

I have been on several buses that were in a near collision after trying to overtake a vehicle on the narrow country lanes that double up as highways in the Baltics. All you can do as the bus swerves out of its lane and you nervously grip your armrest is reassure yourself that you have a better physical chance of surviving a bus crash than a plane crash.

By the time you get to the border you feel a sweet sense of relief. If ever there was a tangible effect of EU membership, it's at the border. The guards, who have doubtless gone through many a Schengen Treaty-implementation course, stroll along the aisle with a friendly smile and look at your passport photo with a skillfully trained eye that can instantaneously superimpose your embarrassing eight-year-old passport photo onto your present facial incarnation. Naturally, a few Russians and the odd American hold things up a little, but before you know it, you're off.

Onboard entertainment

One of the most fascinating things about bus travel in the Baltics is that it's different every time. Drivers manage to get an amazing amount of mileage from these well-traveled routes.

If you're very unlucky, the driver will decide to play a video. These are invariably dubbed into Russian and are played at a volume that simply cannot be ignored. No matter how hard you try, you are forced to listen to such dramatic sentiments as "Masha, bolshe ne mogu!" and watch men drive around in jeeps to avenge someone or another.

I was recently on a bus going to Estonia and the driver played "Mission Impossible" in English with Estonian subtitles. Anyone beyond the second row could barely see the screen, much less the elaborate Estonian language in miniature white subtitles.

But the best entertainment normally comes in the form of people. I once witnessed fellatio being performed on a night bus back from Vilnius to Riga. At first I thought the woman was merely sleeping with her head on her boyfriend's lap, as I mistook the soft noises I heard coming from them for snoring. But I soon realized that the snores were more like snorts, and I peeked over to see a sight that I shan't easily forget.

Drinking is supposed to be prohibited on the buses, but I have rarely taken a bus without seeing at least one drunk person on it. A month ago I was returning from Vilnius to Riga when the bus stopped seemingly in the middle of nowhere and a drunk Russian guy got on board along with a painfully shy-looking young Japanese woman. He spoke to her in loud, slow, slurred drunken syllables in between taking sips from a bottle of vodka. She replied by bashfully nodding. I was afraid she was some sort of sex slave and when the bus got to the Latvian border I hoped the border guard would see something suspicious about him and separate the two of them. But he didn't.

It wasn't until the bus pulled into Riga's Central Bus Station at about 11 p.m., smelling a whole lot worse than when it had left Vilnius five hours before, that I realized they weren't actually together. The Japanese woman thanked him for his help and then hurriedly shuffled off the bus. God knows how she'd ended up in the middle of the Lithuanian countryside at that time of night, but she had, and the drunk Russian man had merely been helping to get her to Riga.

Such human drama has helped me pass many an entertaining hour on buses in the Baltics, even if I do tend to frequently mistake tragedy for comedy.