A new favourite: Estonia

I’ve been fickle before, and I’ll be fickle again, but right now my second favourite country in the world is Estonia. (First of course is our humble Aotearoa). Look, it has perfect lakes made by meteorites:And you can pretend to be local and go mushrooming:
(and then throw it all out because you don’t know what’s safe)

And check out fantastic autumnal scenery:
Or have the best graffiti I ever saw:
And take wonderful tourist photos like this:

And if you are stuck hitch-hiking at sunset, what better place to be than here: Isn’t it beautiful? In fact, it’s in Latvia. We never even got stuck in Estonia. This is partly thanks to our – well, only Tony had the balls to actually do it – new method of hitching: walking up to people eg. on ferries, in petrol stations, and asking ‘where are you going?’ then ‘can we come too?’ Worked almost every time.

Estonia was awesome. The Estonians were awesome. They all told us that Estonians are famous as cold, unfriendly, unsmiling people. If it’s true, we didn’t meet any typical Estonians! Everyone was great. We went on a road trip one day with our couchsurfing host’s flatmates to visit some forests and a Seto (an ethnic group from south east Estonia that I hadn’t heard of either) museum and drive to the Russian border to throw stones at it. We spent a couple of days hiking round Saaremaa Island. We partied in student-town Tartu for three days and as we tried to leave the pub at 3am made friends with some local celebrity who evidently had more money than us (not at all hard these days) and an apparent penchant for buying volumes of tequila for New Zealanders.

Then we started the long journey south again. We got to the Latvian border without any dramas, but things got more difficult from there. In the end we’d only reached Riga by dusk, so cheated and took an overnight bus all the way to the first stop in Poland. We’d decided to stop at a city called Olzstyn more or less because it wasn’t in our guidebooks and it proved a good choice. Getting there was ridiculously easy. We even got out of one ride and before he’d even driven away the next car had stopped! We spent a day checking out the city sights:Then the next cycling round the lakes of the beautiful nearby countryside. It was a long, tiring ride, which made us hungry enough to stomach (!) this soup for dinner:If anyone knows the word for the beef equivalent of ‘tripe’, let me know. Doesn’t taste bad if you’re not thinking about it.

Thumbwork continues further north

My last post was from Riga. We explored it for a few days. Most memorable was the Occupation Museum of Latvia where we learnt all about the nasty recent history. Similar enough to the KGB museum in Vilnius and the almost eponymous museum here in Tallinn… and all very interesting, a little inspiring, and above all, sad. Here’s a photo of some voting ballet from Soviet times. If you look very closely (or you’ll have to just trust me) you’ll see that there’s only one candidate, and that on some of the slips people have even crossed it out and scrawled eg. ‘comedy’ (in Russian) instead. Cool eh? And brave.

And here’s a poster in Latvian for NZ’s latest, Black Sheep:

We also got out to nearby Sigoulda for a day. This is a beautiful area, forested like almost all the Baltics in beeches and pines and oaks, and turning orange as autumn arrives. There are some castle ruins in various states of disrepair and it is a great place to wander round for a day. Here’s the most ruined castle. We found a snake nearby and chased him round for a while too!

And then got back on the road and made our way to Estonia. The first ride we got took us off course so it turned out to be a longer day than it needed to. But like everything, this turned out for the best. Our last ride gave a staccato history of Estonia, then invited us to a party out of town on an army base last night! It was awesome. They were having some sort of team bonding drinking thing in prep for going to Iraq, and Tony and I got to help out with the vodka and learn an odd variation on pool and ask ignorant questions. And the place was interesting too: not so many years ago the soviet subs were based there so it was a completely closed city. The previous ride was funny too. It was a Russian guy heading back to St Petursburg and we’d just crossed the border so he’d seen our passports. He raved for minutes: ‘You’re from New Zealand! What are you doing in this f%cking country? There’s nothing to see here. God lives where you live. You’re from paradise. Why did you leave? Why are you here’ etc. etc. Tallinn is another nice city, with the now usual old UNESCO-listed centre and various churches. (For the record, they’re changing rapidly from Catholic to Lutheran these days, with the odd Orthodox for variation and a reminder of the past.) I write ‘now usual’, but don’t think I’m getting blasé about it: amazing old stuff will always be amazing. Here’s Tallinn: