Rīga in Latvia - trip report: BNE-HKG-HEL-RIX
“So, you’re flying to… where’s THAT?” says the check-in attendant in Brisbane airport, looking at my final destination of RIX.
Brisbane International Airport is in even more of a rebuild than it was last time; more hoardings hiding work, more diversions, more closed shop units. Shortly they’re going to close the Qantas lounge airside, making it landside for six months or something. It’ll probably be worth it - the airport was beginning to show its age - but it’s not a brilliant space to be right now.
I booked this flight with Finnair a while ago. My first leg is with Cathay Pacific. Finnair wouldn’t let me choose a seat (“Please contact the operating airline”); Cathay Pacific wouldn’t let me choose a seat (“Please contact the marketing airline”); and battling through both airline’s AI assistant to get a human, neither airline wanted to help me find a window seat, both adamant that I had to contact the other. I thought that OneWorld knows I like window seats, so I wasn’t too concerned; but on checkin, I’m given an aisle seat towards the back of the plane, and there wasn’t any option for anything else. I’m a bit sad about that.
CX150 BNE-HKG
I’m in an eight year-old Airbus A350-900. I’ve done this route four times already - twice with Cathay Pacific, once apparently with BA (I assume a codeshare), and once with Qantas. I’m given a warm Platinum welcome before takeoff, and asked to choose the food I want (before having sight of the menu), and a drink. We leave 27 minutes late, but we’ll get there just fifteen minutes late.
It turns out that if you’re OneWorld Emerald, then your order is delivered to you before anyone else. You then eat it, and drink your beer. And then they come and pick up your empties. And they offer you a coffee or something. And then, and only then, do they start serving the rest of the passengers. If I was sitting next to me, I’d think I was a right wanker. And I do feel a little self-conscious, to be fair. The food is fine, the aisle seat isn’t too awful, and I get some work done on the slowest wifi you’ve ever used (slow, but reliable; it took about 45 minutes to upload the 80MB of assets for my day job.)
HKG
Wow, the transfer space is a bearpit. I didn’t remember the transfer space in HKG being quite as bad as this, but it appears to be lots of queues and shouting.
Out the other side, I manage to get a Dan Dan Noodles in the Cathay Pacific lounge (I go to the relatively quiet Pier first-class one). These are excellent. I don’t have particularly long, which is OK with me: best to get through and onwards.
AY100 HKG-HEL
My first time for this route, and it’s fine. Really not much to say other than “it’s fine”.
It goes a long route though. Nowhere near the middle east’s little disagreement, but it can’t fly over Russia or Ukraine after their little disagreement, so it does a great big loop over the end of Ukraine over Romania, and then loops back on itself. I wonder how long this would take if we didn’t have to do that?
In HEL
Oh dear.
“Do NOT walk! WAIT! Now walk!” shouts the lady in front of the boarding pass readers in the transit area in Helsinki airport. It’s absolute bedlam. Alarms are going off (as people walk, instead of not walking, not me though, I know when to walk and not to walk). There’s a massive queue. It easily takes 40 minutes to snake through. This is for security, and the security queue takes incredibly long - longer than I have ever experienced anywhere, and I’ve flown from Brisbane Airport in the bad old days.
This is surprisingly bad, and it’s not over yet.
A short walk and then another massive long queue for passport checks. This easily takes 40 minutes as well. I have a one-hour forty-minute layover here in Helsinki, but we landed twenty minutes late as it is, so I literally get to queue and be shouted at, then queue and be shouted at, so it’s all a bit worrying in terms of timing. In the end, I have five minutes spare.
I then walk onto the smallest plane I was expecting.
AY1071 HEL-RIX
It’s a tiny little ATR 72, and I know you don’t know what an ATR 72 looks like, so I got a picture for you, look. It’s two-by-two inside. It has propellers. I learn that it’s called the ATR 72 because it normally seats 72 passengers. It’s made in France and Italy, so it’s probably faulty.
It’s nice and warm though, which is good because it’s -1°C outside and we have to stand outside to climb up the back stairs because the front bit is where my luggage hopefully is. It’s a 65 minute flight which is rather quicker than my 14 hour one. It gets sprayed with antifreeze first - the plane has been here overnight, arriving from Kajaani, Finland’s Sheffield (by geography).
Rīga, Latvia
The little airport is quite decent. It’s served by Ryan Air from a few places, including Leeds-Bradford Airport, which is probably why I hear a lot of Yorkshire voices while I’m wandering around the town.
Riga airport has a bad taxi tout problem, but the Bolt app is cheap and gets me where I want to go.
Riga has had many “owners”, including Poland, Sweden, Russia and Germany (including occupation by the Nazis in the war), but from 1944-1990 it was part of the Soviet Union. The use of the Latvian language was limited, and Russian was officially favoured. The city was a centre for manufacturing, but also a financial centre; and (under Russian rule) saw a lot of building at the beginning of the 1900s, replacing smaller wooden buildings with wide cobbled streets and taller stone and brick buildings.
The old town is a pretty piece of winding old streets, and pretty old buildings. The House of the Blackheads - seen here behind a Riga sign and someone else’s children - was built in 1334, and is the site of the first decorated Christmas tree in the world. As with much of Eastern Europe, the building you see here is not the actual 1334 building: destroyed in the war, this building is a facsimile of the original, but built in 1995. The Blackheads were a guild “for unmarried merchants, shipowners and foreigners”.
Much is a bit of a tourist trap. Above is the central market, one of four hangar-like buildings close to the train station (and, apparently, Europe’s biggest market). Part of the building used to be German Zeppelin hangars, I discover. Today, it’s - as with most central markets - full of eating places and tourist shops.
Walking round the old town, I saw a few places selling “50 shots for €25”, which probably highlights the town’s appeal for those wanting a stag do.
As close to a national drink, perhaps, is this - Kvass, a low-alcohol (0.5% to 1%) sweet malt beverage, not unlike a very sweet porter, made with rye. It’s rather good, and is marketed in some places as being a patriotic drink (rather than Coca-Cola).
One morning I walked to the Russian Embassy. There it is, above; with a street sign. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the Latvians renamed the street to “Independent Ukraine Street”, and on the museum opposite erected a big picture of Putin in a skeleton mask, staring at the embassy. The Latvians don’t mess around.
The plight of the Ukranians is never far out of sight; with exhibitions throughout Riga as well as fundraisers all over the place. This country knows what it was like to be occupied by Russian forces, and doesn’t want its visitors to forget that.
Anyway, after all of this, I headed back to the airport for the journey back.
To HEL and back
The Finnair first class lounge is really very nice indeed: and deathly quiet. I enjoy a reindeer burger (no, really), and a gin and tonic with some Finnish gin and bits of Finnish vegetation (some red berries and a green sprig of something or other). My trip back includes five hours in Helsinki airport, and I discover that there’s a sound-proof Framery booth, where I could do my work without annoying anyone else. What an excellent idea.
The good people in the Finnair lounge were also able to change my seat in the Cathay Pacific plane. I’d been given another aisle seat, but they managed to switch it to a window seat on the same aisle (with a spare seat next to me) which was good of them.
My 14 hour flight to Hong Kong left at 00:50, so keeping my eyes open in the lounge was quite hard - made a little easier by the rather chilly air-conditioning. Finnair has nice planes, though rather brutally pared-back food: one choice of main meal and that’s it; I was surrounded by a chinese school trip, but they all seemed relatively quiet.
A five hour wait in Hong Kong was made more bearable by enjoying a shower and, yes, some more dan dan mien noodles, before a return to Brisbane and a very quick whisk through security before an Uber home.