While milking what it can from the Soviet era, Latvian tourism does a brisk business in palaces from the much more enduring feudal period. The palace at Mezotne, completed in 1802, is believed to have served as the prototype for Buckingham Palace, while the Rundale Palace, a huge and magnificent edifice with baroque and rococo elements, as well as a vast French garden, shared its architects with those of the State Hermitage in Saint Petersburg. It surely must be at the top of anyone's list of great castles. But it's hardly only about the past. The entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well, nowhere more so than in Ogre, Latvia, where we visited the workshop of OSCar. Andris Dambis, an automotive engineer, and his two sons, Kaspars and Kristaps, meticulously restore Soviet-era RAFs, a sort of Iron Curtain Volkswagen Microbus, for wealthy customers, while designing, fabricating, and racing their own highly specialized Paris-Dakar rally machines. Their first effort turned a wheel in 2004, but they've refined their brutal yellow machines year after year. For 2012, they'll be back with their most ambitious effort yet, a series-hybrid (think Chevy Volt) racer with a Nissan V-6 charging its battery pack. The business model for making these fellows internationally rich is, they concede, unclear, but their ambition and enthusiasm are manifest -- our planned twenty-minute visit lasted for hours. They're confident they will make money from all they've learned, somehow, someway, and their thrifty and nifty ingenuity (they've borrowed heavy-duty electrical components from old Riga streetcars) is inspiring. Time constraints prevented us from seeing more of the two countries we'd already visited, and thus our stay in Lithuania was cut short. With less than twenty-four hours to spare, we were unable to venture far enough south to visit Vilnius, my grandmother's birthplace and the country's biggest city.

A hand-powered car ferry

On the other hand, the local tourist authority arranged for us to visit a local brewery, Rinkuskiai whose wares will soon be offered in America. From here, we drove fifty miles, the last seven of them on a dirt road that defied our navigation system, just beyond the village of Duokiskis, to spend the night at an otherwise vacant lodge that has been built to cater to large groups. Our host, an affable bear of a Georgian wearing a heavy-metal T-shirt, smoked like a fiend, day and night. Rising at dawn to cook our breakfast -- eggs, with giant chunks of smoky slab bacon -- he took us on a tour of the grounds, which feature a man-made lake, giant wood-fired saunas, and dance halls, all of it built by his family, by hand. He was particularly proud to show a trio of obviously savvy Westerners the new pole-dancing room they've opened, which apparently has a big following among corporate clientele. Before we left, he offered us a shot of the local cordial, a black liquor made of pine resin. We accepted the first one, to be polite, but declined the second and third, on account of the early hour (it was 7 a.m.) and our impending airBaltic flight out of Riga. Everywhere we went, we were impressed. We knew we liked the Jaguar, and it didn't miss a beat. After years of questionable reliability, the company's products have really shaken their reputation for shoddiness (well, at least we didn't have any troubles in our several days with the car). But the Baltic countries and their people surprised us in a way we'll never forget. As President Ilves, our favorite democratic leader of 2011, explained, "I think there is a fundamental prejudice against Eastern Europe that goes back at least 200 years. Today, the West likes to think of Eastern Europe as 'gray people living gray lives in gray apartment houses,' but we are doing the same things that immigrants did in the U.S. and everywhere. Countries like mine work harder, are more efficient, and are more fiscally responsible. "It's going to be another twenty or thirty years, but this whole East/West Europe distinction is disappearing. The future distinction, bizarrely enough, will be North/South, because Finland, Estonia, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria -- they're fiscally responsible." Politics, shmolitics. With that I bid the Estonian president adieu. Unable to remember the Leonia High fight song, I instead invoke Eagles. Take it easy.

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Writer's Bloc

No automotive journalist's trip to Estonia would be complete if it didn't include an audience with Margus-Hans Kuuse. In his early seventies now, Kuuse, more than anyone -- through dint of hard work, an engineer's mind, and an earnest but winning personality that brought him into unusual contact with Westerners during the Soviet era -- kept the Eastern bloc apprised of Western automotive products and racing developments at a time when the authorities weren't especially keen on alerting the public to all the fun they were missing. We quickly came upon an example of what Kuuse was up against when the inveterate literature hoarder presented us with an English-language, 1983 edition of Avtoexport Round-Up, a glossy, coffee-table Soviet magazine which contained exciting prose like: "Cooperation with the service and operating organizations of socialist countries in servicing Soviet-made motor vehicles is accomplished by AVTOEXPORT within the framework of the Comprehensive Program for Socialist Economic Integration adopted at the 23rd Special Session of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance." Take that, Ezra Dyer. Kuuse didn't let that slow him down. At one time he was read by more than 30 million people across the Soviet Union. But Tallinn was his home. "Tallinn was the U.S.S.R.'s racing capital, and the Estonian public was interested more in Western racing cars and racing per se than people in the other fourteen republics, maybe excluding Latvia," he told us over dinner in the walled city. The author of thousands of articles and several books celebrating the motorcars built in the capitalist West, Kuuse keeps an old Nissan sedan as personal transport but took the bus to join us. For a fan of the West, he is curiously ambivalent about Estonia's current free-market economy, which he said made retirement years uncertain for many, including himself. "You used to know you had something when you grew old." So this stalwart car lover can't turn on the cruise control yet. He continues to write, and we wish him well.

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Trip Notes

ESTONIA

Estonian Tourist Board
(www.visitestonia.com/en)
Ammende Villa
Sympathetically restored 1905 Russian art nouveau villa in Paernu, furnished in period, with manicured grounds, excellent kitchen, and fabulous waitstaff. We'd go back in a heartbeat.
(www.amende.ee)
KGB Museum, Sokos Hotel Viru
Soviet-style 1960s modern hotel isn't as charming as the hotels inside Tallinn's walled "old town," but the rooms are pleasant and the KGB museum is fascinating.
(www.viru.ee)

LATVIA

Latvian Tourism Board
(www.latvia.travel/en)
Riga Motor Museum
From a 1930s Auto Union grand prix racer to the mother lode of Soviet-era limousines, this modern facility, with a distinct German and Eastern European bias, won't disappoint.
(www.motormuzejs.lv)
Malpils Manor
Forty-minutes from Riga, Malpils Manor's main building -- one of thirty-eight buildings -- was erected in 1911 after a fire destroyed its predecessor. Luxuriant grounds, classical Biedermeier furniture, and Latvian artwork make for a memorable luxury hotel experience.
(www.malpilsmuiza.lv)
Igate Castle
The restaurant adjacent to the neo-Renaissance castle serves traditional Latvian fare, with barley prepared three ways and pork--a diet staple -- prepared one way: salty, smoky, and delicious.
(www.latvia.travel/en/igate-castle)
Ligatne Soviet Bunker
(www.bunkurs.lv)

LITHUANIA

Lithuanian National Tourism Office
(www.lithuaniatourism.co.uk)
Vieneri Vartai
A rustic farm lodge situated near a huge pine forest, surrounded by ponds and lakes, will accommodate up to 100 overnight guests and two pole dancers.
(www.countryside.lt/en/sodyba-vienerivartai)
Chaim Frenkel Palace, Siauliai
The mansion of a prosperous Jewish shoemaker in Lithuania's fourth-largest city, directly adjacent to his former factory and near a synagogue he built, is a prime example of modernist, secession architecture, slowly being restored after having been used as a hospital by the Nazis and then the Soviets. Not far away, the impressive Hill of Crosses attracts the greatest number of tourists.
(tic.siauliai.lt/article/view/1303/1/429)