Baltic Discovery

Vilnius is the largest surviving baroque old town north of the Alps, and the first thing to do with it is nothing in particular. Your guide-driver meets you inside the arrivals hall, takes the bags, and has you at the hotel in about twenty minutes. Check-in is held from early afternoon. What is left of the day is deliberately unplanned: the old town starts at the door and the best introduction to it is an aimless hour before dinner, when the light comes in low along Pilies Street and the courtyards open off it one after another. We book a welcome dinner within walking distance and your guide talks through the twelve days over it, so the plan is in your head rather than on your phone.

The morning is the proper introduction: about three hours walking, at a pace that allows for stopping. You start at Cathedral Square, go inside for the St Casimir chapel, and climb or skip the bell tower depending on how you feel about steps. From there into Vilnius University, founded in 1579, whose thirteen linked courtyards are the quietest place in the city centre on a weekday morning. Down Pilies Street to the Gates of Dawn, the last of the old city gates and still a working shrine, then across the Vilnia footbridge into Užupis, the district that declared itself a republic in 1997 and nailed its constitution to a wall in twenty-odd languages. Your guide leaves you there or walks you back, and the afternoon is yours.

Trakai is half an hour from the city and looks exactly like the postcard, which is not usually a compliment but here it is: a fourteenth-century brick castle on an island, reached by a wooden footbridge, with the lake on every side. You go in and through the courtyards and the duke's chambers. Lunch is kibinai, the baked pastry the Karaim brought here from Crimea in the fourteenth century and have been making on the same street ever since. The afternoon goes north to Kernavė, which almost nobody visits: five grass hill forts stepped above the Neris river, the capital of the Grand Duchy before Vilnius took the title, and UNESCO-listed since 2004. There is nothing built there now, which is the point. You are back in Vilnius by early evening.

Lithuania is flat and green and the drive west is an easy three and a half hours with one stop. Klaipėda at the end of it is a different country in every sense that matters: it was Memel until 1923, the northernmost city of East Prussia, and the old town is half-timbered and Germanic rather than baroque. You arrive early enough to walk it properly. Your guide takes you through the warehouse quarter along the Dane river, into Theatre Square for the Ännchen von Tharau fountain, and out to the point where the Curonian Lagoon meets the sea and the ferries cross to the spit. The evening is free, and the fish restaurants along the water are the reason to be here.

The Curonian Spit is a ninety-eight kilometre sandbar between the lagoon and the open Baltic, half Lithuanian and half Russian, forested and shifting and UNESCO-listed. The ferry from Klaipėda takes a few minutes and then the road runs south through pine. You stop at the Hill of Witches, a wooded sculpture trail carved by Lithuanian artists since the 1970s, and at Juodkrantė for the cormorant and heron colony. Nida is the far end: a village of blue and brown fishermen's cottages with carved weathervanes, the Parnidis dune above it with a granite sundial on top and a view over sand into Russia, and the modest house where Thomas Mann spent three summers writing. Time on the beach on the sea side if the weather is doing its job. Back in Klaipėda for dinner.

This is six hours door to door and almost none of it is spent in the car for its own sake. The Hill of Crosses comes first, an hour and a half north of Klaipėda: a low mound outside Šiauliai carrying more than two hundred thousand crosses, left by pilgrims since the 1830s, bulldozed three times by the Soviet authorities and rebuilt each time within weeks. It is quieter than the photographs suggest and worth a slow half hour. Then across the Latvian border to Rundāle, built in the 1730s by Bartolomeo Rastrelli for the Duke of Courland before the same architect went north to build the Winter Palace. The gilded hall and the restored formal gardens take a couple of hours. You are in Riga by early evening, checked in on a quiet old-town street with the night free.

Riga is the biggest of the three capitals and the old town is compact enough to cross in fifteen minutes, which is misleading, because the detail is the point. You start at the Dome Cathedral, begun in 1211 and holding an organ that was the largest in the world when it was built. St Peter's next, and up the spire for the one view that makes sense of the layout: the old town below, the Daugava wide and grey, the Central Market pavilions beyond it. The House of the Blackheads and the guild houses on the square, then the walk out of the old town into the quiet embassy streets around Alberta iela, where Mikhail Eisenstein covered whole facades in faces and peacocks and screaming masks between 1901 and 1908. Riga has the densest concentration of Art Nouveau of any city in Europe and this street is where it stops being a statistic.

Latvia is flat until the Gauja, which has spent ten thousand years cutting a wooded valley through soft red sandstone and is the closest thing the Baltics have to hill country. Turaida is the set piece: a red brick castle begun in 1214, rebuilt and climbable, with the whole valley laid out from the top of the tower. Below it is the Gūtmaņa cave, the largest in the Baltics, its walls carved with names and coats of arms going back to the seventeenth century, and the grave of the Rose of Turaida, who according to the story died in 1620 rather than be taken by a soldier. Across the river are the ruins of Sigulda castle, and a cable car over the valley if you would rather have the view without the walk. You are back in Riga in time for dinner, in the same room you left this morning.

The drive north crosses into Estonia about two hours in, and the landscape changes with it: more bog, more pine, fewer farms. You stop on the way, either at Pärnu for lunch on the promenade if the weather is good or at the Lahemaa forest edge if it is not, and reach Tallinn in the afternoon. Tallinn's old town is the best preserved in northern Europe and one of the few that never had to be rebuilt after the war: two kilometres of city wall, twenty surviving towers, and a merchants' lower town beneath a fortified upper town on the limestone hill. You check in inside the walls with the evening free, and the walk up to the Toompea platforms at dusk is the right first move.

Tallinn splits in two and the walk follows the split. Toompea, the upper town on the limestone outcrop, was where the bishops and the nobility lived and looked down: the Alexander Nevsky cathedral, onion-domed and Russian and deliberately provocative when it went up in 1900, faces the parliament across the square, and the Kohtuotsa and Patkuli platforms give the red-roof view that ends up on every cover. Down the Long Leg passage into the lower town, where the merchants lived: Raekoja plats and its 1404 town hall, the Great Guild, the clock on the Holy Spirit church. You walk a section of the wall itself between the towers. Your guide leaves you in the square and the rest of the day is yours.

Eleven days in, a free day is worth more than another guided one. Kalamaja, just beyond the station, is the wooden-house district where Tallinn actually lives: painted timber houses from the 1920s, the Telliskivi creative yards in the old rail works, and the Balti Jaam market at the edge of it. The Seaplane Harbour is fifteen minutes further, a 1917 hangar holding a whole submarine and an icebreaker moored outside, and is the best museum in the Baltics by some distance. If you would rather leave the city, Lahemaa national park is an hour east and its bog boardwalks are at their best in late May. Your guide-driver is available if you want him, and stays out of the way if you do not.

Tallinn airport is unusually close to the city, about fifteen minutes from the old town gates, which means the last morning does not have to be a scramble. Breakfast is unhurried and bags can stay at the hotel while you walk. If there is time, the market at Balti Jaam or a last coffee on Raekoja plats is the right way to finish. Your guide-driver collects you with enough margin for the flight and sees you into the terminal, twelve days and three countries after he met you at the other end of the Baltics.