Tallinn, Estonia -> Riga, Latvia
350 km dep: 12:30 arr: 18:45
Date: 04/08/2012
Weather: Cloudy
The original plan was to only spend one night in Tallinn but like I was suggesting in the previous post, I did end up spending an extra day there. The city is lively, bustling with activity, beautiful and also interesting (it was under soviet control for a long time) but more importantly it is cheap, a pint of bear is only 2 Euros and a meal is 3. I did not hang around much with the Estonians but those I met were extremely friendly and cultured. The tourists were mostly russians around the streets, but I did not meet any in the two hostels that I stayed in, they mostly keep to themselves, sleep in hotels and eat out at the pricey restaurants.
As is usual after a night out, I woke up with my head up my ass but since the route was short today it was not too much of an issue. Estonia is impressively flat and full of forests. There are only about a million estonians so despite their country being quite small, it is still full of wilderness so I spent the better part of my ride on long, strait roads bordered by trees. On one occasion I decided to take a smaller road both as a shortcut and because the one I was on was not that palpitating. The road was under construction an part of it was paved over but one long section was actually loose dirt and gravel. It felt like cycling on sand, very unstable, dangerous and scary so I had to cut my speed down to 20km/h, which made that part of today’s ride very long. The rest of the road was gravel and dirt but since it had rained in the morning, it was very muddy too; my motorcycle is now very dirty, with mud and dead insects. Many roads including this one bore a sign that said it had been financed by the european union. Estonia has entered the Euro-zone very recently actually, in 2011, and is the first baltic country in so far; not too long ago, until 1991, these countries were behind the iron curtain and under soviet rule.
The road in Latvia looked very much like in Estonia except that it was coastal so it offered glimpses of the sea and had very peculiad vegetation in the form of forests where there were only pines and moss on the ground. It would have made exceptional camping. The traffic on the other end was somewhat scary because people kept passing me between lanes.
I will be spending an extra night Riga because everybody in Tallinn gave me good comments about it and suggested that I only spend a night in Vilnius. Having to be in Berlin on the 9th and spending two nights in Warsaw, my schedule is now fully compressed so I hope nothing will go wrong in between.
While walking along the pier tough, I made an interesting encounter. There was camper that really stood out the rest and on closer inspection, it had dozens of stickers from countries all around the world on its back and sported a North Dakota license plate. I decided to go knock on the door to inquire and was met by a very friendly american of around 65 years of age. On telling one another’s story, I learned that they (his wife was away visiting a museum) had been on the road for close to eight years and had seen the whole americas (north and south) and were on their way to completing a full tour of Europe. One question that even before our discussion was bugging me was how they got their camper across the Atlantic and apparently, its much more simple and affordable that it seems. All you have to is make arrangements with shipping companies that ship cars around the world (some boats are made specially for this purpose) and as soon as they get a free slot on one of their cargo they will be more than happy to fill it with your vehicle. It only costed him 2500$ and took about two weeks from Florida to continental Europe (can’t remember where exactly).
