Words:
Sarah Webster
#ShePaddles
Photos:
Sarah Webster
Pranas Gataveckas &
Dasha Surautsava
North Avon Canoe Club paddles… the rivers of southern Lithuania
We were driving back from a pool session when Dasha said to me, “I would like to organise a multi-day trip.” “That’s a nice idea,” I said, “where are you thinking of going?” Dasha was only 17 and had been paddling with the North Avon Canoe Club for less than a year.
I pictured her thinking of a paddle down the River Wye, perhaps from Ross on Wye to Monmouth, with an overnight camp on the way. “Southern Lithuania”, she said, mentioning a place, Druskininkai, that I had not heard of before. As a native of Belarus, Dasha had visited Druskininkai in the Dzukija National Park on family holidays but had never paddled the rivers. Now, she wanted to take a group of paddlers from the UK to see this beautiful part of Europe and make the club’s first descent of four Lithuanian rivers.
Maps of the area
The idea gave the club’s committee pause for thought, and there were some questions. How did this fit in with our approach to paddling trips abroad? How could we assess the risks? We decided to support Dasha in her ambitious plan. My first instinct was to get hold of some maps of the area. The key map at 1:50,000 scale had been out of print for a while, but we discovered an excellent series of 1:30,000 kayaking maps published by Briedis www.briedis.eu which we ordered from the Jana Seta map shop in Riga, Latvia, www.mapshop.lv, along with some bespoke printing of topographical maps.
The map room in the Cambridge University Library was also very helpful in coming up with older maps. We decided to limit the group size to six paddlers to keep it manageable, and Dasha prepared a risk assessment (including what to do if we encountered wolves and wild boar), which the whole group owned. Dasha organised accommodation and hired our kayaks from www.upiukelias.lt (‘The River Road’) – a canoe and kayak rental service owned by Pranas Gataveckas based in Puvociai in the municipality of Varena. Three of us carried out a recce before the rest of the group arrived in early September.
DzUkija National Park
The Dzukija National Park is Lithuania’s largest protected area, covering over 500 square kilometres, and includes the country’s most extensive forest – 91% of the park area is forest, mainly pines. The scattered villages within the park consist of traditional wooden houses and include the ethnographic reserve of Zervynos, which we visited at the start of one of our days paddling the Ula. The area is famous for its wild mushrooms – particularly chanterelles – with a ‘Mushroom festival’ in September when many Lithuanians come to gather these in large quantities. We gathered and cooked our own chanterelles from the forest one evening.
The boats
The kayaks we hired were much more basic than the ones that we are used to paddling in the UK. They were all made by Roteko, with plastic seats and cockpits so wide that we could not use any of the spraydecks we had brought from the UK. Each day, representatives from Upiukelias would collect us from our accommodation, bring the boats, and take us to the get-in. The access points were clearly marked with large yellow signs, sometimes with wooden shelters, interpretation boards written in Lithuanian and often with associated campsites.
The rivers
The four rivers we paddled are connected, with the Ula and Gruda feeding into the Merkys, which flows into the Nemunas. All the rivers are classed as Grade 1 to Grade 2 waters. We paddled each of the rivers to their confluence with the next until we reached the town of Merkine, which lies at the confluence of the Merkys with the Nemunas. Our navigation of the rivers was made much easier by the presence of wooden signs hanging from bridges in each of the towns that we passed through, announcing the name of the town. While we are used to tracking our location online using Google Maps or OS maps when paddling in the UK, we discovered that the online mapping app of choice in these parts is OsmAnd https://osmand.net/.
The rivers Ula and Gruda
We paddled the Ula from just below a weir in Rudnia, in successive sections each day, until its confluence with the Merkys. The Ula is characterised by its meandering nature and sandy cliffs, which are a designated nature feature, and large numbers of fallen pine and alder trees, which we were generally able to paddle under. A few fallen trees were impassable, so we had to get out and pass our kayaks over the top.
The submerged trees did not pose much of a hazard as the flow was pretty slow at the time of our visit, the only real rapid being by the railway bridge at Zervynos. We stopped to look at a spring Ula Akis (‘the eye of the Ula’) where the water could be seen swirling up through the grey sandy bed to feed the Ula, and Dasha tried out her Life Straw water filter (thereafter using it for river water!). The Gruda is similar but narrower and more meandering. We saw many kingfishers, herons and frogs on both rivers and often heard woodpeckers drumming. These shady rivers were noticeably cooler than the more open and slower-flowing Merkys.
The river Merkys
The Merkys is a much wider, mellow, straight-running river with occasional large, rounded boulders. With fewer trees in our way, we were easily able to cover over 30km in a day, although there were few obvious get-outs. Here, we saw an otter, an osprey, a great white egret and goosanders. We stopped to explore the historic village of Perloja, where there is a monument to Vytautas the Great (1350 -1430), a ruler of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and revered as a national hero. There is a slalom course where the Merkys reaches the village of Puvociai.
Slalom coaching from Lithuania’s National Champion!
To our astonishment, the person driving us to the river each day turned out to be the Lithuanian slalom champion, Mantas Atmanavicius. After our paddle on the Merkys, he returned in the evening and ran a slalom coaching session for us on the course.
The river Nemunas
The Nemunas is a major river that rises in Belarus and flows through Lithuania, then forms the border of Lithuania and Russia. It is Lithuania’s largest river and is navigable for most of its length. We paddled it for only a short distance after the confluence of the Merkys, ending our expedition at the ancient settlement of Merkine, a hill fort and the site of a 14th-century castle with extensive views over the river and National Park.
Reflections
It was a pleasure to paddle these relatively pristine, wildlife-rich lowland rivers, with a noticeable absence of plastic litter compared with many UK rivers. Our group was made up entirely of kayakers, although our club includes canoeists. We gave some thought to whether it would be feasible to paddle these rivers in a canoe. The large number of fallen trees and tight meanders on the Ula and Gruda would make this difficult. At the end of our visit, Pranas and Mantas told us that they wished more of their clients were enthusiastic paddlers like us.
The Spa Town of Druskininkai
At the end of our trip, the group spent a couple of days in the spa town of Druskininkai. This town boasts a swimming lake, a water park with slides of varying degrees of difficulty, several spas, an illuminated musical fountain, and a cable car ride over the Nemunas River – a fitting finish to our expedition.