When we arrived in Karklė was a saturday evening, and the first thing I noticed were the tall trees that surrounded the road, and the lonely houses who looked lost and forgotten by a disappeared mankind. Just later I realized that there was actually nobody: not a soul watching outside a window, not a car on the street. Just me, Isaac and the silence; and maybe, with some imagination, the sound of the Baltic Sea singing behind the forest.
Then some things changed, but the mistery remains.
We met some people, of course. Not many, I admit it, but I can assure they were human beings.
The first 
one was an old guy with a bicycle: he overtook us really quickly and then with the same simpleness jumped on a fence we were staring at, asking ourselves if we we allowed to trespass.
“Hey!”, I tried to ask him. “Is the sea on that way? Can we go?”
He looked at us with his blue eyes, and kept looking until I said: “Baltic?”
And then he, like he was activated by that word, answered: “Baltic?” And pointed his finger in a direction behind the fence.
“Baltic!”
So we kept walking, and in the end of the path…
Baltic!
And then we kept walking, and walking, and walking, and walking, because we didn’t know what else to do, but I also like to think that we were seduced by the spirit of the Sea. When we got back the forest had slightly changed, following the light in its daily path: apart from this, the houses were still silent; just some columns of smoke going out from the chimney witnessed the presence of people.
The smoke remembered us that we were hungry, but as we discovered later, in Karklė you can’t find real supermarkets (for small markets you have to wait for the summer season), and so we wandered through the 112 people town (according to Vikipedija, but some sources told me that in the entire area are almost 2000) until we decided to call the owner of the guesthouse where we’re living:
“Hi Owner, we need you help, we’re starving!”
And the owner came and took us by car to the closest bar/restaurant, a kilometer away, because every place in the world has got at least one bar. There we ate something, we bought water, we talked a bit to know each other. With a full stomach, everything is less scary and more comfortable.
To come back to the guesthouse we had to walk at the border of the long straight road, in the darkness. But it wasn’t complete darkness, because the stars, free from the light pollution of the cities, were glowing again like they should have in the past, when the Man knew better his place in the universe: Orion, Cassiopeia, Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, Taurus; I usually have to drive many kilometers to see this kind of night sky. And here, you just have to look out of the window.
This, more or less, is Karklė: houses inside the regional park territory, few people running in bicycles, forests, a bar in the middle of nowhere with plenty of beer qualities, a bus that it’s more a minivan, the 24, where the driver knows you and stops exactly where you live, a huge isolated tree who reminds us Africa and, hidden but so close, the wonder of the Baltic Sea.
It may seem boring, with no discotheques nor nightlife (nor actually daylife), but it’s the right place to think, and to discover yourself. Maybe after eight months I’ll change my mind, but it’s too soon to think about it. We still know really few of what this place could offer us; because in every place, when you dig, you find incredible treasures that are more precious than amber.
evsbirdwatchers 