Baltic Visitor

This afternoon the author of Bonjour l’Estonie posted an article on the British visitors brought to Estonia by cheap flights since October 2003. It starts off as mildly comical (indirectly comparing the British invasion to the 14th century arrival of the Teutonic Order), moves through being depressingly accurate (with its portrait of drunken Brits abroad) and ends up being simply depressing (as the author quotes statistics on sex tourism).

Part of me wants to protest that it is not just Brits who misbehave in the Baltics. A group of young Spanish and Portuguese men are currently languishing in a Latvian jail after being accused of damaging a flag in Riga. But the truth is that we Brits seem to be the main offenders. Last time I arrived in the Latvian capital, I dumped my bags at my hotel and walked out onto the Dome Square. The Stella Pub (shudder) was packed with British tourists on stag parties, drinking and watching the football. One was dressed in a woman’s corset, accessorised with stockings and bunny ears. It must have been about 5pm. This is of course not the most antisocial behaviour imaginable, and they had every right to enjoy themselves, but it did set the tone for the rest of the weekend. More than once I heard complaints about British behaviour in the Baltics, and was told that as a nation we are getting a bad reputation.

As the writer of a travel blog this is not the easiest of ground for me. I want to encourage my readers, many of them British, to visit the Baltic states. And it is not my place to tell anybody that they should not get drunk (people in glass houses…) There is more to travel than seeing churches and museums, and I risk sounding Puritan. I think it is fair to say, however, that many people in the Baltics are getting sick of the scale of bad behaviour which their capital cities have been witnessing. And I can’t in all honesty blame them. It is also unpleasant for other tourists, who if nothing else get tired of being handed flyers advertising the ever-growing array of strip clubs. And as the author of Bonjour L’Estonie rightly points out in his admirably provocative article, there are wider social issues related to the growth of prostitution in the Baltics.

I would love to hear from readers on this one. Have you been to the Baltics on a stag or hen trip? Are you a local with an opinion on the foreign hordes? Has there been a crackdown on drunken behaviour (as the arguably heavy-handed treatment of the Spanish and Portuguese men might suggest)? I would like to hear both positive and negative – after all, not all EasyJet and Ryanair travellers are troublemakers.

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