Shadows of the past…

Last few days in Estonia before moving on to Latvia, where the Scandinavian influence seems to be coming to an end. This week, we have explored the past with our pass through Russia and very visible remains of the Soviet era all over Latvia. It is a change of scenery, but it is equally incredible to be able to still explore “the shadows of the past”…

Our last two days on Saaremaa and Muhu were marked by a small storm (wind and rain with gusts of up to 90 km/h and a “background wind” of 50 km/h). We tried to orient Marvin so that he would offer as little resistance to the wind as possible, but… with his very aerodynamic shape, we didn’t succeed! 😁

Back to the mainland… (11/08/2024)

To celebrate our last night in Saaremaa, we had lunch at a small fish restaurant at the foot of the Sörve lighthouse. It was there that, in addition to eating very well, we recalled another anecdote from this part of the island: due to an administrative error during the constitution of the Republic of Estonia, the Torgu peninsula (southwest of the island of Saaremaa) was “forgotten” and therefore not included in the list of Estonian provinces. Taking advantage of the opportunity, and with a certain amount of humour, the inhabitants of the peninsula proclaimed the Kingdom of Torgu and, in the process, took the opportunity to elect a king, adopt a flag (which can be seen waving in the picture of the lighthouse below), an anthem and even a currency, the Torgu taaler, whose value is fixed at the price of a half-litre bottle of Estonian vodka “Viru valge” in the local shop in the village of Laadla. With no real desire for independence, this Estonian microstate officially joined the Republic after the constitution was amended and the administrative error was corrected, but locals continue to keep this history alive and proudly explain that their peninsula was, for some years, a small kingdom within the Baltic republics… More information about the Kingdom of Torgu here.

We spent our last day on the islands visiting the “capital” of Saaremaa, the charming village of Kuressaare and its small medieval castle. Honestly, the castle is probably less interesting than the two old buildings (one of them a hotel) and the reconstruction of a traditional wooden mill within the fortifications, and it is also much less charming than the town centre of Kuressaare and its old wooden houses. After a short walk through the craft market, we stayed for a while around the main square to watch a traditional dance show, before continuing our route to Muhu, where we spent the afternoon in the alvars (those meadows of fine, limestone-rich soil, where almost no trees or bushes grow, typical of Estonia and more specifically of the Muhu coast).

The initial idea was to spend the night on Muhu, but when we were about to buy the ferry ticket for the next day, we realised that there are no ferries on Sundays!… So we returned to the mainland on one of the last ferries on Saturday, and spent the night in Vitsu before heading southeast this morning. No more beaches for a while! And to celebrate our return to the mainland, we got wind, rain and hail!… So we took advantage of that rainy day to do some cleaning and laundry, before continuing on to what will probably be our last night in Estonia…

We did it!… (12/08/2024)

After our afternoon of cleaning and a moment of relax in front of Lake Vörtsjärv (the second largest lake in Estonia, by the way…), between two showers (the weather changes very quickly here…), we got back on the road that morning as soon as the sun showed the tips of its rays. We headed towards the south-east of Estonia, since we plan to cross into Latvia from there and then cross diagonally again towards the west, until we reach Riga.

And when you say “east” in Estonia, you mean… the border with Russia (we always come back to it… 😉). They say that the third time is the charm, so we convinced ourselves that we shouldn’t believe everything they say on TV or on the internet, that after all, the Russian border is a border like any other, that in the worst case, it would be the Estonian police who would stop us and that, therefore, the risk of being deported or sent to a gulag in Siberia was, after all, minimal…

Listening only to our bravery, we showed up at the border and… there was no one there! So we crossed (like “I saw there was light, so I came in”). Exactly one kilometer. This is the distance we traveled in Russian territory (before returning to Estonia and breathing again 🤣). It may seem short, but it leaves plenty of time to imagine a lot of movies, to prepare a lot of lame excuses in case we would get stopped, to think that after the recent prisoner exchange, we would probably have to wait a few months before being exchanged, and finally to breathe again with a big relief when we saw the barbed wire and the two posts (one red and green for Russia, one black and white for Estonia) marking the border…

Okay, okay… It was not exactly like that… It turns out that there is a place in the south-east of Estonia called the “Saatse Boot” because of the shape of the border there. Basically, Russia makes like the heel of a boot that enters Estonia in an area of ​​about one square kilometre. However, it turns out that through this square kilometre of Russia passes the only passable road that connects two Estonian villages: Värksa in the north and Saatse in the south. And since things have not always been as they are now and some diplomats sometimes put reason before other interests, instead of installing border posts at each end of this stretch of road (one kilometer long), Russia and Estonia came to an agreement for all vehicles coming from Estonia to be able to “freely” circulate through this part of Russia without a visa, provided that certain rules are respected: (1) Stopping on the Russian section of the road is strictly forbidden, (2) Walking or getting out of a vehicle for any reason is forbidden, (3) Taking photos of border areas or Russian territory (as if there were anything to see except trees identical to those on the Estonian side) is also forbidden. In fact, the Estonian police website (yes, we did some research before setting out…) warns that if a vehicle breaks down on Russian territory, its occupants must not get out of the vehicle and must contact Estonian border guards by phone as quickly as possible… The same website indicates that Russian authorities may patrol the area, and can, at their discretion, stop and check any vehicle passing through…

So yes, the “real” version is a little less Indiana Jones, but still… technically, and even if it was only for 1 km (about the same distance we traveled in Portugal, in fact…), Marvin entered Russia (and us with him…), country number 11 on our list, without any visa or special authorisation. And hypothetically, we could have been controlled (or even arrested for espionage and deported to Siberia by the Russian authorities, pending the next prisoner exchange with the United States and its allies…)!…

So to recover from our emotions, we went to settle in one of those RMK sites (already famous, as we have been talking about them for days now…) in the Voropi forest. In fact, unintentionally, we slept closer to Russia than ever as we were only about 400 m from the border. We also had a short visit from the Estonian border guards who came to make sure we knew the rules of the border area (i.e. no crossing, no photos and… no getting closer than 15 m to the border posts) before leaving us wishing us good night… I’m not sure they would have been so kind on the other side of the border… 😁

Shadows of the past… (13/08/2024)

There are images that leave a mark, and probably even more so when it comes to a place very close to where you are. Yesterday, while I was doing some research on today’s route, I found this photo on Google:

This is the Koidula border post where we passed by that morning, since the road that goes back west is also the one that leads to Russia, and it only deviates a few metres from the checkpoint (a bit like the roundabout before reaching the Andorran customs in Sant Julià). I don’t know the context of the photo, but it is from just a year ago and I can assure you that, apart from the snow, the atmosphere in Koidula this morning was not warmer! What strikes me most about the photo, apart from that Cold War atmosphere, is the presence of hooded policemen in the background. Was this a prisoner exchange with Estonia or just two people who crossed the border on foot to join their families on the other side? We will probably never know… What I can assure you is that when the GPS made us turn left towards the border (without knowing that we were going to turn right a little further on), we had a short panic moment and quickly checked that this was not a routing error… 😮‍💨

To forget about the border for a while and finish our stay in Estonia on a symbolic note, we set off to climb Suur Munamägi (literally: Big Egg Mountain), the highest point in Estonia (and even in the three Baltic republics) from the top of its… 318 m! Well, okay, we are a bit far from Mont Blanc… In fact, to make it more “aerial”, the Estonians built an observation tower on the top of the hill, which allows to have, at least, a panoramic view of the surroundings, hidden by the trees at the bottom of the tower… To make sure we didn’t miss anything, we sent the drone a few dozen meters above the top of the tower. That way, we had the view all to ourselves! 😜

We then headed to the Kõlakojad forest, where a group of art students had the idea of ​​installing giant megaphones between the trees to invite walkers to listen to the music of nature or simply to the silence of the forest. It was a nice link with the musical forest we visited in Finland…

And that was it!… no matter how hard we tried, we had seen everything there is to see in this part of Estonia, so we resigned ourselves to turning another page of this trip and heading to very close Latvia.

That was a change of scenery, since from what we have seen so far, while Estonia seems to want to forget the past and erase any trace of the Soviet era, Latvia seems to take things more philosophically. Not far from the border, in a large pine forest, we came across more or less wide “alleys” paved with concrete slabs. From time to time, an abandoned building more or less in ruins and covered in graffiti, some concrete warehouses covered by the forest, a stone stele marked with a red star and a text in Cyrillic and suddenly, at the turn of an alley in the middle of the forest, a huge head of Lenin next to a large stele written in Russian. The image was quite surreal, especially since the head was as big as Marvin and abandoned there, in the middle of nowhere, with two other busts and a damaged statue of other much less famous people (no, they are not Stalin and Putin 😁)…

We later understood, thanks to the few signs posted there, that this was a secret Soviet base whose four warehouses contained medium-range R-12 ballistic missiles pointed westwards and which could be equipped with 1-megaton nuclear warheads and made operational in less than 3 hours… The military base is now completely abandoned, which further reinforces this surreal impression that this place which was undoubtedly, one day, one of the most secret and best protected places in the entire Soviet Union, is today a wasteland that the forest has taken over again and where only this giant head of Lenin remains, impassively enthroned among the trees…

And for our first night in Latvia, we went to settle down near the Sëravots mineral water spring, apparently very popular among locals. We will make sure to stock up before we leave… 😉

Art-nouveau (14/08/2024)

A short leg of less than 200 km allowed us to cross half of Latvia from east to west. We arrived in Riga, the “Pearl of the Baltic” and capital of the country, and to get here we were treated with one of the famous features of Latvia: its roads… Boy! They must have a genetic aversion to road maintenance in this country! And we are not talking about dirt tracks (which are also in a deplorable state), but roads that are supposedly paved, but which do not seem to have been maintained since Lenin made his first communion! Even in the city centre of Riga, the potholes look like craters! And that is without mentioning the 55 km of dirt track that we also did, on “tôle ondulée” supplemented, from time to time, with large runoff fissures or dry puddles into which one could almost fall (if anyone had the idea of ​​venturing there on foot…). In short, a great change from the super good tracks and roads of Scandinavia or Estonia!

But the attraction of the day was Riga and its beautiful art nouveau buildings. It is hard not to find the old town beautiful, even if the maintenance of the buildings seems to be similar to that of the roads around here… But hey, this “old” touch certainly contributes to the charm of the city. It looks more “authentic”… 🤔

Everyone says that of the three Baltic capitals, Tallinn is by far the most beautiful, Vilnius is not far behind and Riga falls a bit short… This is certainly true. The city is beautiful and pleasant, no doubt, but it seems to lack the charming touch of Tallinn. Perhaps the tourism model chosen by Riga does not help much either (a weekend breaks city where tourists, preferably British, come to have fun and drink their fill)… We’ll see if Vilnius actually comes in second place…

In the meantime, we took our little tour of the city centre and wandered around the different architectural periods of the city (where some Soviet buildings and statues still stand between two red brick churches and art-nouveau buildings…). Then we went to the Central Market, a group of four hangars that, years ago, served as a garage for zeppelins (when people thought that travelling with a balloon filled with flammable gas above your head was a good idea…). The hangars have been preserved intact, but fish, fruit and meat stalls have since replaced the zeppelins (which is probably for the best)…

As for us, all we had to do was find a nice restaurant for our evening in the city, to enjoy the Riga atmosphere day and night. 😉 And for the little anecdote of the day, we bumped into someone who, seeing Marvin’s license plate, asked us if we were coming for the football match… It turns out that at that very moment we were in Riga, Andorra was playing against Latvia here in Riga!

Go west! (15/08/2024)

We can’t really say that our parking in Riga was the most beautiful place in the world, but we must admit that we were just a few blocks from the city centre, and the night was much quieter and less noisy than we had imagined. In fact, tourists are concentrated in the old town, and just a few blocks away, everything is much quieter…

In the morning, to enjoy the city a little more, we went to have a coffee and a croissant with raspberry jam at a nice café on the corner of our street. It was very nice to see the city slowly waking up, before hitting the road again for what turned out to be a real “Operation Departure” (since August 15 is also a public holiday in Latvia…)

It took us almost as long to leave Riga as it did to cross half the country!… It must be said that the number of cars, the construction works almost everywhere on the main bridges and avenues, and the cutting-edge technologies deployed to facilitate traffic do not make it easy, really. For example, Latvian motorways are paid for by a parking meter!… So every car has to stop and someone has to get out and press the buttons on the parking meter to pay and receive a ticket before being able to enter the motorway… We only wanted to leave by the last exit before the toll, but given the exodus of all the inhabitants of Riga who wanted to leave the city (and therefore had to pay for their motorway), there was a good kilometre of traffic jam blocking the access to our exit… And once off the motorway, we saw no less than three accidents in 10 km of the same road (the first accidents we were seeing since the beginning of this trip). It must be said that Latvians drive in a rather… sporty way!

In many ways difficult to explain, we were commenting on the road that Latvia feels much more like an “eastern country” than any we have been in so far, and unlike Estonia, which feels more like any Scandinavian country. Whether it is the architecture of certain bridges or monuments in Riga, the madness for illuminating fountains with kitsch lights that change color, the old trams or trolleybuses, the way of driving (without really respecting any rules), the type of cars (big, black and preferably of German make), the style of the houses (in grey briquettes) or the impressive number of buildings in ruines everywhere, it is the combination of a lot of small things that gives the feeling of being more in Georgia or in a country of the former Yugoslavia a few years ago, than in Stockholm or Oslo… But, in fact, this same observation applies to the landscapes. The further south we go, the more we find familiar landscapes of Central Europe and animal we normally see in our countries. Instead of a gradual change, the border with Estonia seems to be like an invisible limit of the Scandinavian influence (to the north) or the Central European one (to the south).

As for us, we continued our journey westwards through the fields and forests of Latvia, on roads and tracks (more than half of the country’s roads are unpaved) that must make Marvin’s shock absorbers miss Scandinavia… 😉 For our stop that day, we were at Lake Seglinu ezers, well settled in a fir forest on the edge of the lake, before reaching the Baltic Sea coast the following day for our little weekend break…

One last weekend on the coast (16/08/2024)

The first stop of the day took us to the widest waterfall in Europe, the Venta waterfall, in the village of Kuldīga. We were warned that Venta was indeed the widest waterfall in Europe at 110 m wide, but in terms of height, it is not really Iguaçu! And indeed, at 1.5 m to 2 m high at most, it looks more like a rapid than a waterfall… 😁

The good thing is that the Venta waterfall (and the river that goes with it) flow at the foot of the pretty little village of Kuldīga, which really justifies the detour! On one side of the river, a (tilted) observation tower allows you to gain a little height and admire the full scale of the waterfall with the village in the background. Then, you cross a pretty red brick bridge to reach the village, classified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site and, for once, there is not much to complain about this designation…

The centre of the village is made up of large wooden houses and stone ones, the streets are cobbled and everything looks like a postcard that you could walk through. In addition, Kuldīga has the best pastry shop we have found so far in Latvia (and probably since Scandinavia): The Marmalade, with its cinnamon and chocolate or condensed milk buns to die for. 😜

After a short walk around the village (to digest the rolls 😜), we headed back to the coast, passing by another iconic Latvian site: Skrunda-1. While the site was still open to visitors a few years ago, today it is completely closed and under the control of Latvian special forces who use it as a training site against urban guerrillas. During Soviet times, access to Skrunda-1 was also closed, but this was because the site housed one of the six Dnestr radars, the first generation of Soviet space surveillance and early warning radars, installed on the outskirts of the Soviet Union in the 1960s to alert of any ballistic missile attacks coming from different directions (but mainly the west… 😁). These were the main Soviet early warning radars for much of the Cold War and the Skrunda-1 site housed one such radar and a whole series of buildings intended for the military personnel involved in radar operations. All that can be seen today is a series of access roads closed off by barriers, and on the main one, a Soviet machine gun placed as decoration. The trees have grown and unfortunately do not allow any view of the Skrunda-1 site…

So to make up for it, we’re spending the weekend on Liepäja beach, one of the few sandy beaches on the Latvian coast and “THE” historical site par excellence in the region, as it is where the “northern forts” are located, these defensive batteries built in the 19th century by the army of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia before being abandoned 10 years later, even before they were finished… But we’ll tell you all about that in our next post, as we have the whole weekend to explore the area! The only problem is that all of Latvia also seems to have had the idea of ​​spending the 15th of August long weekend on the beach… It’s the first time that we have such a hard time finding a quiet place to settle down, but we finally manage to do so after 1h30 of driving along the coast in one direction and the other, exploring every dirt track… 😉

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In Estonia, as in Latvia, LEAVE NO TRACE!

– Always travel on public ways and respect the signs.
– Limit noise and interfere as little as possible with wildlife.
– Respect the other users.
– Leave rocks, plants and other natural features as you found them and respect historic sites.
– Take your waste with you and throw it into the appropriate containers, in the nearest village.
– Do not camp inside protected areas and do not make any fires.