Aukštaitija National Park is the lake district of Lithuania, in the northeast near Ignalina, 126 glacial lakes linked by streams and channels that a canoe can follow for days, under pines two hundred years old and past timber villages, the country's oldest national park, born in 1974 as the Lithuanian SSR National Park and holding 59 percent of the plant species recorded in the country on less than one percent of its land. The lakes lie in the hollows the glaciers left, split by wooded ridges, and a few minutes up the hill of Ladakalnis, 176 metres, puts six of them in front of the walker at once, a sacred hill by tradition where offerings were made to Lada, an old goddess of life; rental canoes from the village of Palūšė turn the channels into a route, paddling from lake to lake and carrying the boat over the short gaps, with camps on the shores, and the church of St Joseph at Palūšė, the one printed on the old litas banknote, stands a few steps from the water with its timber left bare inside. Of the park's six watermills the one at Ginučiai is the only one that still has its works inside.
The villages are the other half. Šuminai, on Lake Baluošas, is a protected village of wooden houses where fifteen people live and all of them are called Šuminas, and at Stripeikiai an open-air museum of beekeeping sets the hollowed tree trunks that Lithuanians used as hives for five centuries along a wooded slope, watched over by a carved figure of Babilas, the bee god; before hives were built the bees were kept in hollowed trunks high in the pines and the keepers' hardest job was defending them from bears. From late September into mid-October the birch, aspen and alder turn gold along the shores while the pines stay dark, and geese, swans and cranes mass on Lake Kretuonas on passage. Aukštaitija is a country of lakes joined by streams, and the canoe is the road between them.