Kaunas sits where Lithuania's two greatest rivers, the Nemunas and the Neris, meet, and that gives the city its shape: an old town on a tongue of land between the waters, a newer town running east along a long straight pedestrian avenue, Laisvės alėja, and green hills on every side. Between the two world wars, when Vilnius was held by Poland, Kaunas served as the provisional capital of independent Lithuania, and in those twenty years it filled with ambitious modernist buildings, whose white, clean lines have now been recognised by UNESCO as a World Heritage site.
The old town has a quieter charm. The brick castle, with its stout tower, guards the confluence, and the town hall, nicknamed the white swan, rises above the square with its tiered white tower. Just outside the centre, the Pažaislis monastery, a baroque masterpiece in white stone on the shore of the Kaunas Reservoir, was built in the seventeenth century and has a fine fresco-covered interior. The city also has a mixed, sometimes painful past, and the Ninth Fort, a former tsarist fortress that became a site of mass killing during the Nazi occupation, is a sober place to visit.
As a starting point for riding, it is easy. The A1 motorway leads east to Vilnius, about a hundred kilometres away, and the road is fast and smooth, with long straights through forest and farmland. Smaller roads alongside the Nemunas, however, are more attractive, running through pine woods, past villages with wooden houses, and over low hills that give a modest sense of curve. Lithuania is a gentle country, with its highest point only about three hundred metres, and the pleasures are in the light, the lakes and the forests rather than in dramatic bends. Summer evenings are very long, and in June it hardly gets dark. Winters are cold and snowy, so most riding takes place between May and September.
Food is hearty. Cepelinai, huge potato dumplings stuffed with meat and served with sour cream and bacon, are the national dish, and cold beetroot soup, šaltibarščiai, a vivid pink, is welcome on hot days. A strong dark rye bread and a glass of local beer round it out. Fuel is easily found everywhere in the city and along the main roads, and the suburbs of Aleksotas and Šilainiai have supermarkets and stations. Speed limits are enforced, and headlights must be on at all times in Lithuania.