Special: Walking the coast of Lithuania: LIT3 Klaipeda to Juodkrantė

September 2026 Yesterday I followed the coast of Lithuania south to Klaipeda. To continue along the coast I now need to take a ferry. The reason being that at the mouth of Klaipeda harbour is the Curonian Spit. This is, as the name suggests, a sand spit, but it’s a huge one. It is 98 kilometres (61 miles) long. Behind it is the Curonian Lagoon. However half of this sand spit is in Lithuania and half is in Russia, specifically the Kaliningrad Oblast region of Russia. It is an exclave of Russia and has been since 1945. (It was previously called Königsberg and part of Germany and renamed Kaliningrad in 1946). It is the landward end of the spit that is in Kaliningrad. Due to the war between Russia and Ukraine, the border between Lithuania and Kaliningrad is closed so it is not possible or legal to cross (even if it was open, obtaining a Russian visa is a time consuming and expensive process). That means that geographically it’s a spit. Politically, it is an island. That means the only way…