You can’t really say you’ve been to Latvia until you’ve stood in a bog. I know how that sounds, bear with me.

There are two ways to experience the Great Ķemeri Bog. Your guests do both. The boardwalk is a wooden walkway that winds past mirror pools, dwarf pines and the observation tower. It’s beautiful, accessible to almost anyone, and absolutely worth walking at sunrise with a guide who knows where to look. Then there’s what the boardwalk can’t show you. Step off it, and the bog becomes something else entirely. The surface is a floating mat of living sphagnum, sometimes several metres thick, resting on water that goes down further still. Without the right footwear, you sink to your knees. With bog shoes on, you don’t. You walk across a landscape that almost nobody ever stands on. Some Latvians call it a quaking bog, because with each step the ground beneath you actually moves. The moss flexes. The pools beside you ripple. It is, in the most literal sense available, walking on water.