Journey Through the Baltic
This photo is actually from before the Rogaine in Tallinn when Viv had the brilliant idea of hiring the terrifying 'Octibike', it proofed a highly entertaining and attention seeking way of zooming round Tallinn.
We camped in a deserted campground and it was truly freezing, so the following morning all feeling chilled to the bone we decided to find a nice cabin for that night. We drove to the town of Tartu and wandered through its pretty cobbled streets. We took a visit to the KGB museum and saw grim pictures of Ghettos in Siberia – after which we definitely needed some warming coffees. In the afternoon we drove out to the coast and had some difficulty finding any suitable accommodation – so (much to Chris’s glee) we ended up free camping in some bushes. However the bushes were beside an interesting piece of coast line littered with barracks and old shells from the war.
In the morning we planned to visit the famous (according to the guide book anyway) “Viru Bog”. There was a boardwalk spanning the bog so we figured the walk ought to be pretty straightforward, especially considering only a few days earlier we had spent some 24 hours getting ‘familiar’ with the Estonian Bogs. Unfortunately (and just as the sign kindly informed us) the excessive amount of rain had caused some flooding, and we were soon teetering along a rather submerged boardwalk getting a bit wet.
This was all fun, until we got to the end of the walk and started off back to the car, or so we thought. After 20 minutes on a gravel road Chris decided on a shortcut back through the forest. Soon we were in a bog. Then we realised we actually had no idea where we were. We could hear a road so we kept going and going….
Finally after 1 hour through the bog we reached a massive high way and we still didn’t know where we were! Some careful deduction had us traipse back a further 30 minutes to the car along the high way all feeling rather bogged out and hungry. The 20 minute bog track return took a bit longer than we had bargained on and Chris’s name was mud, literally (-:
That night we stayed at the City Bike Hostel in Tallinn, the same we had stayed at before the Rogaine. Tallin has a wonderful old town, it really feels like you have been whisked back several hundred years. We satisfied ourselves at the local bakery then headed across the border to Latvia. We picked the Town of Sigulda to visit in Latvia, because it is in the heart of the Gauja National Park. That night we happened upon a great spot to stay in a really nice new cabin on the shores of a nice reedy lake – we even got our own paddle boat to row around the lake in!
On the Baltic Coast
The place was so cosy we decided to spent 2 nights there. Chris and I went for a fun mountain bike adventure on the first day, exploring some sandstone cliff, a real beaver dam and taking a ‘ferry bridge’ to get back across the river.
The following day Julian and Jana went for a ride while Sylvia and I had a great row all around the lake
.
Afterwards we decided we had to have a go at the ‘Summer Bob’ we had read about in the guidebook.
This involved rocketing down the winter bobsled track in this little car thing. Sounds pretty terrifying, but luckily (much to Julian and Chris’s disappointment) they had a driver in the front who was actually an expert Bobsledder. It was pretty exciting as the rickety car thing hurtled around the bends at 80km per hour! However the guy told us afterwards that the actually Bobsledders average 110km, hmmm so I don’t think I will become a professional Bobsledder.
Later that day we headed to Riga to drop Sylvia at the airport as she had to head back home to Scotland. There we departed with the big silver van, and we spent the rest of the day exploring Riga.
Chris and I had decided we really needed to hire a car in order to make our way down to the European MTBO Champs on the Neringa Spit in Lithuania. We managed to find a very cheap car hire place in an industrial suburb of Riga with the help of Julian and Jana. The car started off dirty (which is always a good sign) so the four of us piled in and headed for the Neringa Spit.
The Hill of Crosses on the way dwon to the spit was an amazing sight... billions of crosses have been placed upon a hill and apparently during communist rule in Latvia the Russians bulldozed the hill of crosses three times, but they were always replaced.
Comments