One of the travel podcasts that I listen to, the amateur traveler, has a number of summarising questions that he asks at the end of each interview. We decided that it might be nice to do this for each country or region that we visit.

What photo takes you right back to Latvia?
The frozen sea at Jūrmala – something that hadn’t even occurred to us that we would see.

Summarise Latvia in three words.

• Forests – Latvia seems to be covered in pine forests and from our experience they’re full of wildlife
• Architecture – from the Art Nouveau in Riga to the wooden buildings at the Ethnographic Museum and the castles in the Gauja National Park
• Cold

You really know you’re in Latvia when….
…you’ve gotten off the train at the wrong stop. This happened to us again, thankfully we were both off the train (just) before the doors closed. To get from Latvia to Estonia by train you have to get the Latvian train to the border town and then change onto the Estonian train. We both heard the announcement say ‘Valga’, the border town, and then there was a very faint announcement in English about having your passport ready so we got our bags together and jumped off, the train then started to move away and when we looked around we were at a station seemingly in the middle of nowhere… So we had to get a taxi to Valga which was just 5 minutes up the road (fortunately we’d kept a Latvian 5Ls note back ‘just in case’ so we could pay the taxi driver). Of course by this stage we’d missed the connecting train so we had to get the bus to Tartu.

What one item should you definitely pack when going to Latvia?
A good pair of gloves!