The final day in Lithuania was also the most stressful. Much like the previous day, we had to get up early and take one of the few trains that ran to the city of Šiauliai, in northern Lithuania. From there we took a local bus, which ran just once an hour to the middle of nowhere. It is made even easier by the fact that very few people in this place knew English, and we unsurprisingly didn't know Lithuanian or Russian. But nevertheless we succeeded in our plan, with a helping hand (well, eye wink) from a local who understood our plan, and we made it to the Hill of Crosses.


The hill is a pilgrimage site for Christians, and contains more than 200,000 crosses of varying sizes. Three times in its history it has been destroyed, but each time it has been rebuilt. Once there the site was full with tourists, however most of whom had arrived on coach trips (a pity that with a bit better infrastructure many more people like us could also visit). We also decided that as we had quite a few Litas left over we would purchase a Cross and place it with a message on the hill.

Afterwards we made our long way back to the bus stop to wait for the bus, where we met a couple from Huddersfield - although my sister didn't understand anything they said, and it turns out they were doing the reverse of what we were..and were on their way to Vilnius from Riga and the rest of the Baltic states.

Once we made it back to the centre of Šiauliai, we decided to buy with the rest of the Lithuanian money we had left, food for breakfast and lunch in our next destinations - however miscounting exactly how much we had at the end meant at the tills we were short by 8 sentimas (about 2p), which luckily we let off for before boarding our minibus to Riga.