The final part of this saga picks up when we pulled into Liepaja at the end of the worst day (and a bit) in the history of touring. We were pretty damn shattered, and our meal with Edgars, Skippy and Louie Fontaine was subdued. Louie, as readers of my first Latvia diary will recall, is the owner of Fontaine palace and something of a character. This time round he seemed to be being faithful to his medication or something, or maybe it's just that we were tired. Who knows. It was a beautiful evening, so we decided to go for a stroll around town. Liepaja is on the coast, an old Soviet military base, so we headed for the beach, which was lovely. On our return walk back to the venue we came across a pretty deserted but open fairground. We decided to go on a ride, not least because it was about 15p a ticket (a nice change from the £400 or whatever that it costs here). At first the ride was pretty tame, and we were the only people on it. As it went on, it got more exciting, in part because the rotations got more severe and in part because we all remembered that health and safety are not familiar concepts in Latvia, especially not in run down former naval bases. We made it to the end and staggered back to the club on shaking legs. At the club we ran into Ilse and Austra again, as well as a few familiar faces from our previous visit to the town. Another band played, whose name totally escapes me now, and then I strutted my stuff. To be honest I was so knackered by this point that I don't really recall whether it was a good show or not, and once we were done I started making noises about the possibility of heading to our crash-space, which we did, after bidding Skippy a fond farewell. This turned out to be a room in a hostel-cum-art-collective place, which was nice, but which was also about 4000 miles away, on the other side of another town (as far as I could tell). When we finally got in I collapsed into the bed and was out like a light. In the morning we (Jamie, me, Ilse and Austra) got up and made our way back into the centre of Liepaja, which took ages and involved a pretty gnarly bus ride. Once we were there, we needed food, and, remembering what happened the last time we were there, Jamie and I led the way like bloodhounds to a certain restaurant which not only had menus in English, but which also featured one of our favourite hit vegan meals, Vegetables-On-Lava-Rock (right)! Faces were stuffed, bills were paid, and tracks were made for the bus station. Our destination for the day was a town in Lithuania called Palanga. The running track record for this tour with Lithuania wasn't great - in fact we were pretty sure there'd been divine opposition to me playing at Darom - so we were relieved when the bus was on time, not too expensive, had free seats, and was generally hitchless. Palanga is a beach town, which had a pretty similar feel to Newquay - complete with long amusement-lined promenades down to the beach, quaint wooden architecture and sand fucking everywhere. We were met by the promoter at the bus-stop and taken to the venue, which was called Ramybe. This roughly translates as "chill out" in Lithuanian, and it was part of a little complex, which included a hotel as well. It was all pretty cool, if a little frayed at the edges. In the afternoon there was a children's movie being shown in the venue, so we ad a wander around town and got some food. Lithuania is different to the other Baltic states - because the people are more Slavic and their culture is closer to Russia's, there was a lot less Russificationin the Soviet era. This results in a strage mish-mash of things feeling really Eastern, but not quite Russian. It's hard to describe. Anyways, after a wander and some food, the show went ahead. It was a really nice venue - an old hall with a high ceiling and seated tables. There were a lot of people in at the show, but they were mostly old types, and it felt more like I was the music in a theatre bar, rather than it being like a normal gig. A weird one, but it did give me a chance to try out some new tunes and generally stick to playing quieter stuff, which was fine by (still exhausted) me. After playing two sets (and having to turn down an enthusiastic wrinkly who kept demanding Beatles covers) we crashed out, the bedrooms we were sleeping in being conveniently located about 3 metres away from the stage. We slept well. We were up bright and early the next morning to get the bus back to Riga for the last show of the tour. It was a long bus-ride, going north along the coast back to Liepaja before heading East to Riga. We just about made it onto the very full bus, which was lucky because the next one wasn't for about 10 hours. After an uneventful bus-ride we got back into Riga and headed back to Andzs flat to chill out for the day. En route I realized I'd been a total git and left my passport on the bus, and so turned and sprinted back to the bus station. In the end the low frequency of buses turned out to be a blessing - our coach was still there, and after much frantic guide-book searching and hand-gesturing, I managed to get the driver to let me back on. When I produced my passport he cracked up and sent me on my way with a hearty Russian slap on the back. The show for the evening was planned for the Riga New Theatre - we'd announced it on the night of my Depo show, and entry was a donation to the cause of my tour fund (a little underweight at this point due to the no-show at Darom). As it was a nice evening, Nemo (the promoter) and I decided that it'd be cool to play outside in the theatre courtyard. We set up a little stage and a PA in the space, which was very European - all high buildings, tattered brickwork and fire-escapes. A good crowd showed and it was really nice to run through a set as the sun went down with most of my Latvian friends in attendance. After the show, for our last night in Riga, a Sunday night, we were essentially looking for anywhere that was open, and a small group of us found a bar in the centre of town after only a small amount of aimless wandering. A pretty relaxed session of setting the world to rights ensued, followed by bed. On the day of our flight, we didn't need to be at the airport until about 9pm, so we had a day to kill. Jamie, it turned out, had rather more of a hangover than I did, and needed some personal time to recover. Andzs' coffee-making efforts didn't go amiss either. I left him to recover and spent most of the day hanging with my new friend Jenni-Liisa, a Fin who was on holiday in Latvia, en route to India (I know, it gave me a headache too...). We did furiously erudite things like discuss books, go on a boat-ride, and try and find this art-collective place down by the docks that she knew of - turned out to be pretty deserted on a Monday, but it was a cool place, a set of buildings scheduled for demolition in a few years which a group of artists have taken over in the meantime and turned into a hostel, a gallery and a bar. It would have been nice to see it in full swing, but never mind. After meeting up with a fully recovered Jamie, we went to get some food in a vegan/ Krishna place, which turned out to be a massive waste of time - after waiting for our food for over an hour we had to leave anyway to get our stuff and head to the airport. This we did, after saying goodbye to Andzs, Edgars and Jenni-Liisa, and we hopped into Ilse's car for a lift. We got to the airport, bought shitloads of cigarettes, which we crammed into a bag to fill the space left by my crappy half-size sleeping bag. I'd bought this sleeping bag in Woolworths just before we left, for a fiver. The first time I'd had cause to get it out of its bag and use it (in Finland), I'd discovered that it came up to my waist, just, when I got into it, making it probably the most pointless sleeping bag in world history ever. So it had been jettisoned and replaced with fags, which seemed fair to me. Fuck you Woolworths. We then checked in and boarded our flight (next to an obnoxious group of stag party / sex tourist Mancunians, who were all celebrating the fact that they didn't get robbed by any dirty Latvians - I fucking hate my compatriots sometimes). We got into Standsted late and tired, but managed to make it back to Jamie's place in Finsbury park without serious incident (I did catch myself talking slowly with hand signals to the guys in the chippy at Manor House, but managed to stop before they knifed me). The next day was the day of the Barfly show in London, a sold out gig which pretty nicely capped off the tour. So that was my second solo jaunt to North-Eastern Europe. I saw a lot more of it this time, and had a lot of fun. As well as the shows, the friends old and new, the alcohol, the beautiful women and so on, it was interesting to go through the ex-Soviet states and Russia continuously, to see the similarities and differences in history, language, culture, and ways of saying "Cheers". I'm definitely planning on going back, even on risking divine wrath by attempting to return to Lithuania. This was pretty much the most eventful, weird and wonderful tour that I've done. So it only remains for me to thank all the promoters, all the people at the shows, everyone who put us up, Edgars, Atis, Skippy, Vetal, Kirill, Natasha, Jarkko, Rita, Ilse, Austra, Magala, Dmitri, Felix, Tasha, Alvils / Elvis, Augustinas, the wildlife of Lithuania, Jenni-Liisa, and most importantly of all, Andzs, the legend of Latvia. Till next time.