Railway Dog

Only one train a day goes to Lithuania from Poland, the only Interrail country to the south. But that’s actually good for here. In 2020 it was one a week. During the pandemic and until May 2022 there were no border crossings by train at all! I want to head to Latvia and Estonia after, but trains between are completely non existent currently, and the buses don’t allow dogs, so watch this space….

From Elk to Suwalki is a long 3 sides of a rectangle train journey, taking many hours. Or a 1 hour car journey. So I decided to use BlablaCar, the ride sharing app, to get me to the Polish side of the border with Lithuania. It was my first actual use of it, although I’d looked at options several times, particularly in Croatia.

A BlablaCar hack: I accidentally found that if you log into the app in the local language, lift share options come up. In any other language they rarely do. To change language, you go to your phone’s app management, select the BlablaCar app, and delete data. Then you log back into the app and select country nationality (it is a far from a comprehensive list but has Poland and Croatia). You have to guess or screenshot photo translate the app pages, and message drivers to tell them you what languages you actually speak, but it works to find lifts. Magdalena turned out to be lovely, and prompt too.

We had some time to kill in Suwalki before the daily train to Lithuania, which has wide and lengthy footpaths and cycle ways. 12 minutes walk from this dead station is a shopping centre complete with a 2 storey slide and an ice cream shop. So the two had to be combined! A top Interrail experience has got to be a detour to slide down a dark corkscrew tube, ice-cream in hand!

Once on the Polish train at last at Suwalki, it was hot and stuffy. However, we were soon at the border change station of Mockava to experience lovely Lithuanian trains just across the platform (which waited despite a delay).

The Railway Dog can sense when everyone is going to get out even when most remain seated, including me. He feels the increased intensity of people fiddling with their stuff and going to the toilet more at the end of the line. It makes him want to get out from his place in the footwell to the corridor. Not a minute more than necessary should be spent on a train. Even a change is good.

At the non-contentious low migrant border from Poland to Lithuania, there were no police checks on the train, and no document checks. A true Schengen area border. That’s not to say they don’t have a lot of Ukrainian refugees of late, especially in Vilnius, a law student on the train told me. Many have been welcomed here.

At Kaunas there were minutes to go to get on the train to Siauliai (‘shaulii‘), but the conductor wouldn’t let me on as I didn’t have a reservation. I showed her in the Rail Planner Interrail app that it didn’t say it was necessary. She reluctantly allowed us in the flap-down seating area where wheelchairs go, and the doors snapped shut behind us. Feels like being on the naughty (very hard) seat, but the Aircon and WiFi are good, so I’m not complaining.

On the plus side she said nothing about Baspie Dog needing a ticket. In Lithuania they should pay half child fare, but I hadn’t had a chance to buy one yet, given I was coming from Poland and due to delays the changes were short. Seems like a dog ticket may be a bit of a fuzzy area. Maybe because they can see I’ve come from Poland and it is a very busy end of a sunny weekend for them. Trains are packed!