day two: straight on to the sketchy bits

PART 1: SETTING OUT

So … this is where it could all go wrong.

I’ve just boarded a 9am coach from Tallinn (which has lost none of its charm) to Tartu, Estonia’s biggest student town. From there, after a little wander around, I’ll bus it again to a place called Valga,
on the Latvian border. The Latvian railway website confidently informs me that there’s a train service from Valga to Riga, leaving at 5:30pm this afternoon.

The problem here is with this word “train”. The Baltics have never fully got it together rail-wise, and trains in this part of the world are notoriously sketchy and unreliable. Routes are often changed or discontinued, and information about the changes takes a while to propagate across the internet. So you can easily find yourself standing on a deserted railway station in an obscure town, with no choice but to stay the night. 

If you’re really lucky, you may be able to ‘coach hop’ to somewhere that’s vaguely on the map, because what these countries lack in train services, they almost make up for with long-distance coaches. But you still need some good fortune and a lot of patience. Oh, and even when the trains do run at the advertised time, anything that goes more than about 100kms on rails comes along incredibly infrequently. The Riga-Vilnius service, for example, only runs once in two days.

For all of the above-stated reasons, I'm skeptical about anything I read on a timetable in this part of the world. I guess we'll find out whether or not, and to what extent, that skepticism is justified.

Meanwhile, the coach I’m on now is super-modern and groovy, with in-seat displays that show you where you are on a map that updates itself every few seconds ... like the ones you get on aeroplanes. Admittedly, it's slightly disturbing that the picture of the bus is not to scale and can't change direction, 'cause it means that quite often you seem to be in an enormous 'superbus' that's heading straight into the sea! But I'll forgive this little technical detail.

The main thing is that the bus actually arrived, so I can get 160km closer to my final destination ... and see some lovely Estonian countryside along the way =)

I'll write more soon.

Bye )))

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = 

PART 2: PEAR-SHAPING

So … as I mentioned, if something was going to go wrong on this trip, today is one of the days when it was most likely to happen.

All was going well until I hit Valga and saw the railway station there. That’s when I had to start drawing up a Plan B.

I’ve seen some pretty closed-looking railway stations in my time, but this definitely came across as one of the closedest. The whole building was covered in scaffolds, construction of the ticket counters hadn’t been finished, and the only humans around were a few workmen (unless you count the token town drunk and the two gossiping grannies in the park opposite).

I walked around behind the station and onto the platform, and couldn’t find a place to buy tickets. There was a train, though. Unfortunately it said “Tallinn” on the front, and looked more like a museum exhibit than a functioning means of transport. Inside one carriage, I could see a tangle of copper pipes, as if an alchemist had set up his laboratory in there.

Not looking good. 

Four hours earlier I'd arrived in Tartu during a heavy rain shower, but once that cleared up I found the town quite pleasant to explore. Nothing spectacular, but good to see, since while I was living in Tallinn several people had recommended it to me as a nice place to go for a weekend, and I'd never quite got there. 

Tartu was pretty quiet, but there were definite touches of that characteristic Baltic quirkiness. I enjoyed the 'Monument To The Meeting of Two Wildes', which depicts Oscar Wilde having tea and chit-chat with the Estonian poet Eduard Vilde. The odd thing about this is that it commemorates a meeting that never actually happened ... though it "easily could have" according to the Tourist Information brochure. In Tartu, that's apparently sufficient justification to warrant a monument.

I also liked the sign above the two Wildes that said area of wireless internet. Obviously wi-fi zones are hardly a rarity nowadays, but they're especially common in 'e-stonia'. They've gone all-out with the "e" stuff here; in fact Estonia is the second most online society in the world, after South Korea. 

(Short aside: some years back the Estonian govt. also invented a way of filling out your tax return online which takes less than ten minutes and involves zero stress, which ought to have every employee of the Australian Tax Office hanging themselves in their garage out of pure shame and embarrassment. Even Finland is still catching up with Estonian innovations in this area. Just thought someone out there might like to know :-)

Much better than Tartu, though, was the countryside of Central Southern Estonia. I'd never been to this part of the country before, and it was a treat for the eyes. Much hillier than the northern parts; forested ridges and steeply rolling farmlands were the dominant features. At one point, I saw a woman in a bridesmaid's dress leap out of a Land Rover and run into a field of wheat. (Now there's a moment when I wish I'd had my camera ready!) It was odd ... but then, its oddness is one of the things I like about Estonia. And the Baltics in general, come to that.

A little further on we entered a region of lakes which were dramatically studded with islands, some of them rising vertically out of the water. I was surprised, impressed ... and sadly, once again far too slow on the draw with my camera :-(

So yeah ... Estonia arguably had no need to confirm its rockingness, but it went ahead and did so anyway. 

Also, the Estonian language continues to bring on the cute words, my favourite for today being "Rokibaar" (Rock Bar). Maybe it's just me, but I love it )))

As I said, though, the fun turned not-so-fun in Valga ... which is not, incidentally, one of Estonia's prettier corners. A quick walk into town (dragging my 20kg wheelie bag behind me along crappy footpaths, since no railway station means no luggage lockers) was enough to establish why this town is not on the 'tourist route'. 

The only remotely interesting thing I found was this 'Locomotive Monument', commemorating the opening of the Pskov-Valga-Riga railway line in nineteen-something-or-other. And yes ... the mocking irony of it did annoy me.

I came back to the station at around 5pm, to find that the decrepit-looking train had gone. In its place was a much nicer one with Riga written on the front. Success!

I then made a little discovery: the station was not completely closed after all. At one side of the building there was a small sign above a door that said "Cargo Bus", and when I pushed the door, it opened.

Inside was a corridor, a toilet (yay!) and a small courier's office. My train was scheduled to leave at 5:29pm, and it was raining quite heavily outside, so I asked the courier lady if I could wait in the corridor until twenty past. (I set my alarm so that I wouldn’t miss it.) As soon as the alarm went off, I packed up my stuff and went outside. It was 5.22pm when I reached the gate leading directly to the platform – seven minutes till departure. You can imagine, then, how shocked I was when I saw the train pulling out and leaving!  

After standing pathetically at the gate for a minute or so, watching the train disappear, I went back inside to the courier's office.

“Excuse me. Something very strange just happened. Can train drivers leave early if they want to?”

“Yes, sometimes.”

“Ummm …”. I bashed around in my brain for words, in a 'wasp at a window pane' kind of way. For a period of time somewhere between five and ten seconds, the pane remained impenetrable.

I mean, delays I expect. Cancellations … well ok, they happen. But a train leaving almost ten minutes early, when it’s one of only three trains per day that can get people out of a dull-as-eggs little shithole like this one?

I just couldn’t believe it.

The woman behind the counter must have seen the disappointment written on my face (probably in arterial purple). I’d already paid a deposit for my accommodation in Riga, and the hostel had my credit card details, so if I was a ‘no-show’ they would just take the balance. And more importantly, I'd had pretty much all the Valga I could handle without becoming impolite.

Then she said “I can sell you a ticket on a coach from St Petersburg to Riga. It stops here at 7pm.”

Wow … amazing! I hadn 't even realised that this place was a booking office for coaches (there was no sign to indicate that), let alone that there would be one leaving in an hour and a half.  It was three times as expensive as the train, but obviously at that point, cost was more or less irrelevant. I paid up, and after a brief trip to a smelly little corner shop to buy ‘dinner’, I went to wait in the park right next to the bus stop. Rain or no rain, I was taking no chances with my ride-to-be.

But I still had one more trial to get through. I was passing the time semi-productively, writing up a blog entry, when the token drunk accosted me … and he was an elderly, filthy, and rather stinky one :-(

At first he asked me something in Estonian, and when I made 'don't understand' motions, used the word "tourist" (which seems nearly universal) and said "Ei osta eesti keelt" (I don't speak Estonian), he didn’t seem to get it.

A few attempts later, it finally sank in that this foreign traveller probably wasn't going to understand his Estonian, regardless of how loud he shouted. (I hate that ‘speak louder and the foreigner will understand’ thing.) So then he switched to Russian … which, thanks to the slurring, was only slightly more understandable.

“Where are you from?” he asked.

I should’ve said somewhere nearby like “Riga” or “Poland”. Instead, I stupidly said “Australia”.

I then heard the word “Australia” posed as an incredulous question about half a dozen times, getting a little louder and more ‘Oh my god, how unbelievable!’ with each repetition. Suddenly a thought (or half a thought, or the foggiest, most whisky-soaked outline of a thought) occurred to him:

“How do you know Russian?”

“I used to live in Kazakhstan.”

“In KAZAKHSTAN?!?”

And that was the next few minutes gone:

“AuSTRAlia … KAZakhstan?”

  [short pause]

“AuSTRAlia … KazakhSTAN?”

  [longer pause
  punctuated by some chuckling]

“AUSTRALIA? KAZAKHSTAN?”

... and so on.

A thought bubble appeared above my head, containing the following text:

"Yes, brains trust, that is what I said. And look, I’ll admit that I do quite like having a slightly unusual biography, but would you please get over it now? Oh, and it would also be great if you could just GO THE HELL AWAY. Do you think you could manage that?"

But despite my best attempts to communicate the contents of said bubble using facial expressions and body language, the drunk decided to persist in bothering this curious Australia/Kazakhstan man.

(Don't they always?)

After listening to some more of his slurring and dodging a little more spittle, I decide to venture a question:

“Do you live in Valga?”

"Frmblgrdlhrrrruuuu fuck-brrnnarrl ... huh?" 

“I said, do you live in Valga?”

"Wrdlyschvrrnvek Moscow-vrrr-grrr ... again?" 

On the third attempt he finally seemed to understand, and nodded “yes”.

“Is your house far from here?”

“No, not far. Not far. Not far.” 

For some reason, the second and third “not far”s were uttered with a slight air of melancholy. Ignoring that (because I couldn't care less whether or not he was melancholy, or indeed why), I then asked

“So why don’t you go home and rest for a while?”

Instead of answering verbally, the drunk reached into a shopping bag, pulled out a second bottle of whisky and brandished it at me, as if to say “Herein lie my evening plans” (except far less eloquently than that). Clearly he was settled in … and he was getting more shouty with every passing minute.

So again, back to the courier’s office I went, this time to get away from Spitface – except that when I tried to get in, I found it had closed. Arrgghh!!! The woman there had basically sold me a ticket and then buggered off, which is generally not a good sign :-(

There was a cleaner in the corridor, though, and she spoke great English. I asked if I could hide in the stairwell until my coach arrived, and she allowed it.

When 7pm finally rolled around, no coach arrived. The drunk was still ranting in the park, now with a fellow whisky-drinking bum for company. I was thinking “Oh my gods, I am stuck here after all … and this place sucks!” But about 15 minutes later the coach turned up, and I gratefully threw my bag into the luggage lockers underneath the cabin, then boarded. I was saved!

And that's really it. Everything else went off without incident. The ride through the Latvian countryside was picturesque, and the room at the hostel (or rather, the closet with a bed stuffed into it) was still available. I’d made it through Day Two.

Incidentally, that means 710kms down, 1,540 to go. 

Tomorrow I hit Lithuania. It’s the only Baltic country I haven’t visited before … pretty excited about that!

Good night )))