This wonderful Soviet-built sleep factory is the Hotel Baltika. Since it’s centrally located in the middle of nowhere, outside Kaliningrad city limits, it’s not exactly an ideal base for your visit to Kaliningrad.

How did it get here? Well, you have to remember that Kaliningrad was a closed town for forty odd years.

Probably, on those old [...]]]>

This wonderful Soviet-built sleep factory is the Hotel Baltika. Since it’s centrally located in the middle of nowhere, outside Kaliningrad city limits, it’s not exactly an ideal base for your visit to Kaliningrad.

How did it get here? Well, you have to remember that Kaliningrad was a closed town for forty odd years.

Probably, on those old collective holiday outings from factories in Tomsk or Minsk, this is as close as workers ever got to the Baltic coast without a military escort.

The Baltika bills itself as a conference centre. Certainly, the first floor appears perfect for Politburo AGM’s, with two halls full of red leather chairs. But for some inscrutable reason, Internet only works on Mondays. To help you feel helpless, this vast and isolated complex doesn’t have a bankomat or a shop either. All of which is rather a pity, since the staff and the restaurant are well above local standard. It seems to be the place large parties and receptions.

As tipped in the In Your Pocket guide to Kaliningrad, you can camp in the ‘garden’ behind the Baltika for 6 Euro a night. No real facilities here either, but they let campers have a key to a spare hotel room to shower and shave. That’s just as well, because the lack of facilities includes no water at all, except from the car wash down the highway.

A big reason not to stay at the Baltika is that you can’t drive into Kaliningrad without passing control.

Pictured here is the anti-tourist barrier on the Moscow highway. DLC is not Russian for TLC.

Camping four days at the Baltika I was stopped six times. Potentially, police shakedowns can add 50 Euro a day to your budget. Nice touch: after they’ve robbed you at DLC, they treat themselves to a cup of tea and a cake in the Lukoil station next door.

To be fair, the Baltika isn’t the only hotel blighted by militsi. I had intended to stay in Svetlogorsk, but you can’t drive into Svetlogorsk without passing a ‘local traffic only’ sign. (That’s a white circle with a red border.) Straf! Why these hotels bother advertising parking space I can’t imagine.

Kaliningrad by car is more for the intrepid than for holidaymakers. Wisely, the Baltika’s almost exclusively German guests all seem to come by coach.