Aukštaitija is Lithuania's lake district, and it is a small park carrying more than its share. There are 126 lakes in it, lying in hollows the glaciers dug and divided by the wooded gravel ridges the same ice left behind. One of those ridges is Ladakalnis, 176 metres and a few minutes up, and from the top you have six lakes in view. Near dawn the mist is still on the water and they separate one by one as it lifts. Tradition makes it a sacred hill, where offerings were made to Lada, an old goddess of life. Less than one per cent of the country lies inside this park, and fifty-nine per cent of the plant species recorded in Lithuania grow in it.
Streams and channels join enough of the lakes that you can paddle for days without meeting a road. Renting at Palūšė, you carry the boat over the short gaps between one lake and the next, with reed beds close enough to hide herons and the odd beaver lodge. St Joseph's stands above the harbour there, the church printed on the old one-litas note, its timber left bare inside and the lake a few steps from the door. Of the park's six watermills only Ginučiai still has its works inside: millstones, shafts and wooden cogs where they stopped when it ground its last grain in 1968. At Stripeikiai hollowed tree trunks are set along a wooded slope, the hives this country used for five centuries, and a carved Babilas, the bee god, watches you along them. The bees lived high in the pines, and their keepers' hardest work was fending off bears. From late September the birch and alder turn gold at the waterline, and geese, swans and cranes mass on Lake Kretuonas on passage. Fifteen people live at Šuminai, on Lake Baluošas, in log farmsteads under a pine two or three centuries old, and every one of them is called Šuminas.