Vilnius; Thursday, 31 May, 2007

The most sensible time to go on a guided minibus tour of a city is when you arrive, lets you know where everything is and builds a map of the city in your mind. But I’m not one to do things the easy way. After packing my bags, leaving them in the luggage store and checking-out of the hotel, I waited in the lobby to be picked up for the Vilnius city tour, which I had booked the previous day.

The tour takes you around the man parts of Vilnius, starting at the Cathedral, then driving round the city, stopping at several of the largest churches, including the spectacularly over the top St Peter and St Paul (one of the other tourists described it as looking like an over engineered wedding cake, and I could see her point.)

The tour returned to the Cathedral square and then we walked the short distance to the presidential palace (in the meantime the bus goes off to act as a shuttle service for people on the full day tour to Trakai.) By the time we reached the palace the lightning was streaking across the skies and the rain was starting to fall. We briefly sheltered under a couple of trees (possibly not the most sensible thing to do!) until the bus turned back up and we could sit inside it and get the full description. The tour then continued through the old town, up streets that were fast resembling major rivers there was that much water around.

We stopped briefly at the amber museum to have a look around, before continuing on to the churches of St Anne and St Benedict. A final drive through town took us to the gates of dawn and a short walk back to the tour companies offices.

The driver, very kindly, offered to drop me back off at the hotel. It may have stopped raining by then, but the rivers that were formally roads were still in full flood! Getting back to the hotel I picked up my luggage and caught a taxi back to the airport, in the process finding out that I hadn't been ripped off as much as I thought I had on the Friday night. 43Lt back to the airport, going a slightly longwinded way, but avoiding the city centre which was almost at a standstill.