Last week I visited the Baltic countries, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. I’ve been interested in visiting them for a while since they have such a fascinating history, and they are three countries that are as similar as they are different. Lithuania in particular was interesting to me because the language, Lithuanian, is one of the oldest and most archaic of all the Indo-European languages.

For this journey, for the first time in my life I actually booked an organized group travel via Intrepid. There are plenty of similar companies that offer such tours, such as for example GAdventures and WeRoad. I ended up choosing Intrepid because their itinerary looked most interesting, and it seems to be one of the oldest and most established companies that offer such tours.

Why though? Well, I’m not getting any younger, and especially since Covid my frustration threshold has become really low when it comes to planning vacations. Things have just become insanely expensive, and I really didn’t feel like browsing hotel websites for hours to find the least shitty hotel that is still overpriced… that was part of the reason. The other part was that I just wanted to try out this experience, and if it was a good experience, I’ll go back to Intrepid (or similar companies) and book journeys in more adventurous regions where I don’t really dare to go all by myself. The Baltics seemed like a good and easy testing ground for that.

Well, now that the journey is over, I have a lots of thoughts about this experience!

First of all, the group was really great and surprisingly small. We all met in Vilnius on our first day there in the evening. As I approached I saw only 4 people and was surprised, and indeed the group consisted only of 5 travelers (including me) and our leader. We were a very mixed group – a young woman from England, a middle-aged guy from Canada, and an older couple from Australia. The leader was English as well. Everyone was super nice, and we had a lot of fun and interesting discussions during the entire week.

One thing that I was a bit disappointed in was that our leader was not a local, as was advertised on the websites. She was a great leader and did a marvelous job, but I feel like it’s not the same as having someone who actually comes from one of these cultures shoo/show you around. From what I understand, the leaders that do the European tours are usually some kind of European, but that’s as far as “local” goes mostly. We met another leader in Riga doing the Baltics who was Dutch. I don’t know how it is in other countries, especially Africa and Asia though.

Intrepid as a travel company has set itself goals to try to be as climate-friendly as possible. Therefore, they use public transport where they can. On this trip, we used public transport as in coaches (in our case the Baltic bus company Lux Express, similar to Flixbus) to get from Vilnius to Riga, and from Saaremaa to Tallinn, as well as a private minivan with a driver from Riga to Saaremaa. Other Intrepid tours also use trains, for example. The coaches were pretty alright, but obviously this kind of travel limits you and you can’t stop on the way for sightseeing.

The itinerary of the trip was good, but in hindsight I would have preferred to have another day in Riga instead of visiting Saaremaa. It was a lot of driving to get to and from Kuressaare on Saaremaa just to see a castle (which was cool, but still). I would also probably recommend to come a day earlier and leave a day after the scheduled start/end of the trip.

All of the cities that we visited on this trip were interesting in their own unique way. Vilnius in Lithuania was perhaps the most interesting to me, and the one I found the most fascinating. It was also the least crowded and least touristy of all places. Very eclectic mixture of architecture that speaks volumes about the history of the country. The people here were very reserved though. The food was really unique as well. I would have liked to have more time to explore, especially since I was here on a Monday and the museum were closed.

Riga in Latvia was something completely different. This harbour-town lies in the middle of the three Baltic states, and once again, it’s history is written all over it. In Riga you can especially see that this city was German at several points in history. Allover, the vibe of the city was kinda loud to me, probably because every pub and restaurant was blasting music into the streets. Apparently Riga is popular for stag/hen parties. I would have liked to explore more outside the city center, but our 1 1/2 days here were brief. Latvians seemed a bit more open to me than Lithuanians.

Tallinn in Estonia is definitely the most touristic of all these places, and it essentially felt like mini-Finland to me. Tallinn has an absolutely beautiful medieval town center with lots of interesting buildings and sights. But as with most touristic places, it felt not as authentic as other places. All the souvenir shops sold the same stuff. I didn’t really see any restaurants that advertised anything typically Estonian (if that’s a thing). And to make things worse, I was there on a Saturday and the city was absolutely overrun by cruise ship tourists. On the plus side though, I felt like the people here were really nice. Especially the old ladies in all the shops and restaurants and museums I visited were super nice and really helpful.

To summarize, I think the Baltics are well worth a visit, and each of them are very unique in their own way1. If you want a more authentic experience, I’d probably recommend to spend a bit more time in Lithuania and/or also visiting other, smaller towns. But I also think that this is not something that needs to be done in an organized group, it’s probably more affordable to book everything yourself.

But still traveling in a group was an interesting way to travel for me. I usually either traveling by myself or with a partner. In both cases I’ve done some pretty long journeys, like for example my trip to Scandinavia in 2018 when I traveling from Copenhagen to Gothenburg to Oslo to Bergen to Stavanger (by various trains, busses and ferries). I definitely enjoy the freedom that comes with traveling by myself, and it gave me plenty of opportunity to go out in the evenings to meet locals at board game nights (I tried to find something like that in the Baltics, but they don’t seem to play so much there).

It can be nice though to have a tour leader show you around and give you recommendation, especially if you’re too lazy to do your own research. The older I get, the more easily I get overwhelmed with planning long trips like that, so I can appreciate the convenience of it, even if it might limit me a bit. There are certainly a lot of pros and cons to both ways of travel, but honestly, I’m ready to book more adventures with group tour providers. I’m getting tired of Europe and I feel like I’ve seen everything here that there’s to see. I think it’s time to finally venture deeper into other continents – places where I would definitely much rather travel with an organized tour than all by myself.