19-Jul-2002 -- This confluence is close to the village of Malpils in Latvia. We tried to visit it on a very hot and sunny day. It wasn’t possible to come closer than 1.3 kilometres by car, so we had to walk, either through the forest or through farm fields. We decided to enter the forest, which turned out to be a bad choice… The road we followed did not really go in the right direction so we had to leave it. We were wearing shorts and t-shirts, yet another bad choice, because there were many insects and the undergrowth in the forest was very thick and full of stinging nettles.

We proceeded only slowly and after about half an hour we came to a small canal that was too deep and too wide to cross. We tried several alternative routes through the forest but couldn’t get any closer than 170 metres. At that point, we were so itchy and sweaty we decided to give up and walk back to the road through the fields. Strangely, most of the farm fields were not used, they were full of weeds (with beautiful flowers and amazing numbers of butterflies) instead of grain. On the field, our hopes grew as we thought that we might be able to reach the spot from this direction, so we did an attempt to get a little closer. Unfortunately, we came to the same canal again. According to our GPS, the confluence was about 120 metres away. A disappointing experience, but we didn’t grumble about it for long and drove straight to our next target: 57N 24E, in Riga.