The Curonian Spit by bike

Klaipėda was Memel until 1923, and the German bones show: Fachwerk warehouses along the river, a Prussian street grid, a theatre square where Simon Dach's Ännchen von Tharau stands on her fountain. It is the only deep-water port Lithuania has, and the ferry to the Spit leaves from the middle of it. The fitting takes about an hour. Come with the shoes you mean to ride in.

The path leaves the road almost immediately and stays in the pines. Around the twenty-fifth kilometre you pass under the grey heron and cormorant colony: about six thousand pairs in the treetops, audible long before you see them, and the forest beneath them is bleached white. The Hill of Witches above the village is a wooded sculpture trail of eighty carved oak figures from Lithuanian folklore, made by hand from 1979 onward.

The Nagliai dunes are called the dead dunes because the villages that stood here were swallowed one after another in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, after the spit's forest was cut for shipbuilding. The sand moved about twenty metres a year. Replanting from the 1820s stopped it, and what is left is a grey, unvegetated ridge you can walk out onto on a marked path. It is the quietest place on the whole route.

Mann built the house in 1930 with the money from his Nobel Prize and wrote most of Joseph and His Brothers in it, looking at what he called the Italian view: the lagoon, the dunes, the light. He used it for three summers before leaving Germany for good. The Parnidis sundial at the top of the dune was erected in 1995, knocked down by a storm in 1999 and put back up in pieces; the granite column is carved with the old Baltic calendar.

The crossing takes about an hour and is the only way to make this route work without doubling back up the spit. Ventė Cape sits where the lagoon narrows, and the whole East Atlantic flyway funnels over it: in a good October the station rings four thousand birds in a day. The traps are enormous, fixed and made of netting, and the ringers will talk to you while they work if you stand still and do not touch anything.

Rusnė floods most springs, which is why the older houses stand on stone plinths and the road in has a flood gauge painted on it. Aukštumala, a few kilometres east, is where the German botanist Carl Albert Weber published the first scientific monograph on a raised bog in 1902, the paper that started peatland science. The boardwalk loop takes half an hour. Bring something for the mosquitoes between June and August.

Šilutė was Heydekrug, a Prussian market town, and its main street still reads that way. North of it the land is farmed and quiet and the wind is usually behind you. The Dutchman's Cap is a twenty-four metre sand cliff above the sea near Karklė, the highest on the Lithuanian coast, and the path runs along the top of it for a while before dropping back into the pines.

The Tiškevičiai palace was built in 1897 and the family's amber collection became the museum in 1963: about thirty thousand pieces, of which four and a half thousand contain insects or plants trapped in the resin. The park around it was laid out by the French landscape architect Édouard André. The pier is 470 metres long, rebuilt many times, and the whole town walks to the end of it at sunset without hurrying.