Soviet trams and old fortress in Daugavpils, Latvia

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There is something about foreign languages that makes travel really sparkle.

You don’t have to be a linguist to appreciate the mystery of unfamiliar scripts and words. As I found today, even mundane place names can make roaming around town a much more enigmatic and electrifying adventure.

I say this because today was our first full day in Daugavpils, Latvia. I still haven’t gotten used to the name of this heavily Russian-influenced town yet, but I love it. “Daugavpils!”

I’ve always enjoyed this aspect of travel, but here in Daugavpils my appreciation of interesting place names was about to be kicked into overdrive – and we would see the gritty but profoundly appealing underside of the town.

After a load of laundry with the Scrubba in the room done, with thick cotton shirts hanging in the window to dry in the direct sunlight, it was time to go see what Daugavpils is all about.

First stop: Cietoksnis fortress

If you visit Daugavpils, you’ll probably get around the town by tram. Fortunately there is a stop right outside Hotel Biplan, and it goes out to the northwest edge of Daugavpils to a place with an even cooler name: Cietoksnis.

Cietoksnis was a Russian fortress begun in the 1770s, and is the only still-extant one of its kind that hasn’t since been radically altered. I could see from our Daugavpils map that Cietoksnis had a unique shape, but I also just liked the name. It’s pronounced something like “tsee eh TOKE sniss”.

Even getting to Cietoksnis is a voyage into an unsettling new world: you take the tram all the way out to its last stop, by which time most passengers have already disembarked in the busier parts of town. As we rattled along in the clanging metallic tram-car, we waited for someone to come collect our money, but nobody ever did.

Had we accidentally boarded some evil tram of dead souls? “The journey to hell is free,” I mused as we clanked along to ever more desolate areas, then tried to think about something else.

Besides us, only a couple of elderly passengers were left when we pulled up to the “Cietoksnis” tram stop. We all stepped out into a circular patch of grass by a highway; this was the middle of nowhere. The others dispersed, our tram rattled off whence it came, and we marched through a tunnel and across a roundabout to Cietoksnis.

The Cietoksnis fortress is a spooky place, especially here in October. I imagine that the tourist traffic is fairly light even in the high season; today it seemed to only be Masayo and I. Travel in the off-season, get whatever is open all to yourself.

Cietoksnis is made up of wide, straight streets and huge rectangular buildings, looking partially inhabited and partially abandoned. It was tough to pin down exactly what this place was, and what its level of life and vibrancy might be.

Everything hit us as contrasts: creeping ivy strangles rusty fences; dented pipes run along cracked buildings that have brand-new cars parked outside. The corners of hollow buildings full of rubble have new street signs attached to them. Roads seem to lead nowhere but the occasional car passes by.

We strolled around the quiet streets and around the buildings and a park with cannons in it, and I got flashbacks to Patarei Prison in Tallinn, Estonia that we visited last week. Cietoksnis gave the same impression of being recently curated but abandoned, and as both were Russian military complexes in places that are no longer Russia, I guess that makes some kind of sense.

Within the Cietoksnis area is the Mark Rothko Museum. And while I have no religion I must admit I listen to the travel gods; I watched a Mark Rothko documentary just a few weeks ago, having no idea that I would end up here, in the town where the noted painter was born before moving to America. Coincidence? Obviously not – it’s the travel gods, watching out for me.

Masayo wasn’t feeling well though so we didn’t see the Rothko museum, to my disappointment. It will have to go on the growing list of things we just missed and will have to return to see again someday. If you’ve done any traveling I bet you have a similar list. Think you’ll ever get to any of it?

We did pay the fare on the tram back to town, where we stopped at Veikals Kafejnīca, a functional little café where we got some coffee and chocolate cake.

Next adventure: Latviešu Māja

The next part of the Daugavpils day was the kind of thing that you only do as a tourist, when you’re unfamiliar with a place and getting lost is so easy to do. But getting lost is its own adventure, so you have to see the humor in it.

Masayo, feeling better, wanted to see something called Latviešu Māja, or Latvian House, a museum showing traditional Latvian home life.

I was excited about the š so of course I was game.

On our tourist map it was Item #11, and I saw that a tram would take us way out to the southeast part of Daugavpils to it.

We rode past the Hill of Churches, way out to our stop on a nice, modern, new tram where they definitely remembered to get our fare. Disembarking, it seemed we were in an unlikely part of town for a museum: all I saw was a big intersection, auto parts stores, giant abandoned-looking buildings, and old people sighing up and down the sidewalks in the overcast early evening.

Studying the tourist map again, I burst out laughing when I realized that there are two #11s on the map, one green and one purple; the Latvian House was back in town just a few meters from the tram we took to get here – this #11 was some hotel.

And so we got back on the tram to head back into town, feeling happy that we had been able to come see a part of Daugavpils that most wouldn’t see. In fact, why would they? I always feel proud when I can see something that other travelers don’t, whatever it is. It lets me pretend I’m an explorer. I’m sure Ernest Shackleton would be taking trams out to the edge of Latvian-Russian towns if he were alive today.

Detour on the Hill of Churches

Daugavpils isn’t big, so we hopped off the tram at the so-called Hill of Churches, which is a collection of different types of (guess what!) churches all situated near each other. The styles and colors and sizes of them are all wildly different – this one is small and pink, this one is white and tall, this huge one has gold onion-shaped domes. It’s an embarrassment of architectural riches and clean, stately, proud-looking structures. I hate to sound like a broken record, but it was especially nice that we were the only ones walking around them.

We walked back to town from there and found the Latvian House, which was by now closed of course. Sorry Mark Rothko and Latviešu Māja – we’ll catch you next time!

We stopped at a place called Grill Niko by the bus station for dinner to take back to the room; I got a Hawaiian pizza and water. We watched an episode of Michael Palin in his travel documentary New Europe while we ate, wherein he visits the Baltics, like us. There wasn’t much overlap between his trip and ours though. I don’t know how he missed Patarei Prison, that would have made for great TV.

So Day 15 came to an end. I had some BGs over 200, so it was a failure in that sense. I need to work on convincing myself to take more Humalog when I’m eating more; I’m just afraid of way overdoing it and passing out low. It frightens me a lot.

But at least I could drift off to sleep with the grungy but bewitching sites of this town swirling in my head. And of course those great words I had added to my vocabulary: Daugavpils! Cietoksnis! Latviešu Māja!

Do you notice the local languages when you travel?

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