Sigulda, Latvia
After some time without having done any hiking, I finally got to do some around Sigulda. A bit of a holiday town only 50 km away from Riga, on the edge of the Gauja National Park, it is known as the ‘Switzerland of Latvia’. Most of the Baltic states are pretty flat, so it was a surprise to come across a valley with a couple of hills around it.
One day I spent the morning visiting the pretty town of Cēsis — its picturesque centre containing two different castles. I returned to Sigulda in the afternoon to take the cable car across the Gauja River. The river cuts through a valley lined with sandstone caves and, as the rock is easy to cut into, there is a lot of graffiti. The modern trend is to just etch your name and the date, but some goes back to the 1800’s and is much more ornate, often including a coat of arms.
The trees had just started to turn for the autumn, so it was beautiful to walk amongst them. I managed to visit three more castles while walking through the forest, which made a new personal best. After the two in Cēsis, I’d visited five castles in a single day! This was even without revisiting the two in the centre of Sigulda itself. Maybe I should have upped the total to seven.
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