And so we took the ferry to Estonia. It was very smooth sailing, boarding and unboarding were fast and the cabin was very comfortable. We played a card game in the bar, went to bed and were awoken by the PA announcing our arrival in Paldiski, in the north-east of Estonia. We slowly make our way to Tallinn, stopping along the way at a couple of sights we took down from a roadside billboard. Near Tallinn we first replace our cooking gas, as we had again run out a couple of days before. Then we park on a giant lot by the stadium where we will also stay the night. We explore the city with an online walking tour and have dinner with soup and amazing pancakes after. As we kind of want to have a proper night out (Stockholm was too expensive for anything) we decide to stick around another day. We spend the morning in the Museum of Occupation and Freedom and do errands, like finally washing our sheets in a laundromat (we cook pasta lunch in the parking lot while we wait for our machine). We move to a hostel on the edge of the city that also houses campers so we can finally shower, though everything in the hostel is dirty and the place gives us the creeps. But beggars can't be choosers. After resting and a dinner we take a bus back downtown. Our plans are big but in the end we stroll around a lot and have drinks at different bars. Still, we are proud we get back on the bus after our usual bedtime.
We really Tallinn, it's a nice combination of classic and modern and small enough to easily get around. Also at night it feels very pleasant. Estonia as a whole is also to our liking so far. It has a lot of beautiful nature and everything is well-managed (everything is digital for example). The country is known for it's digital keenness. For reference, Estonia is about as big as the Netherlands but it has less than 1.4 million inhabitants. There is a national organization behind the nature parks which manages clearly marked trails and many free (but very minimal) campsites, perfect for us to free-camp around.
We spend a couple of days with hiking, seeing sights, driving little bits and parking amidst nature every night. We cross all the way to the west, where we see the town Narva, on the border with Russia. It's the most Russian-influenced town, as after the second world war the population was forcefully replaced with USSR citizens. We had read it was an interesting sight, but really we found it a depressing mass of concrete with some unnervingly shiny modern malls.
By then the weather had really soured. It was already chilly (around 18°C during the day, 9° at night) but the last days and nights the amount of rain was only increasing. We even got leakage of rain around our sliding door, having us wake up to water on the floor and around the kitchen. We then drove south quite a bit, where the weather was already predicted to be much better. And it was. We recovered for most of a day on a tiny sort-of-campsite with facilities and the sun out. We dismantled some of our door paneling hoping everything would dry fast enough. The next day we went around the Onion Tour, a set of sights here along the Peipsus lake. Centuries ago a sect of orthodox Russians moved here, the Old Believers, who kept a subculture alive until this day. We ate savory onion pies, bought more onions than we know what to do with from one of the many street-side stalls and bought jam filled ginger bread. Hiking around is a bit tedious now because the number of mosquitos out in the green is unbelievable.
We stopped in Tartu, a university town, where we did our usual exploration on foot. The town is magnificent, full of art and green parks. We also got a guy to better adjust the sliding door of the van. And now we moved on close to the border with Latvia, in a big national park. The plan was to bike a big loop but that was foiled by both us feeling rather unwell: we are very fatigued and have some belly pain. We considered having taken on contaminated water by accident, but the park ranger at our visitor center also said that Covid is going around a lot in this area, we don't really know. Now we rest and see what happens.
