Tallinn to Tartu to Viljandi
Trip Start
Aug 31, 2008
1
14
37
Trip End
Oct 05, 2008
Viljandi,
Estonia
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
We hadn't met any other English speakers in the previous 2 breakfasts in Tallinn, but this morning someone at the next table said what a surprise it was to hear English spoken & he just had to introduce himself. He was a Kiwi, from Auckland, who'd been playing (rugby?) in Edinburgh in a World Cup for Veterans. He was a bit of a pain really, but yes it was nice to talk to him in English. He described in detail where he'd been & where he was going.
When we answered that we'd spent some days in Finland, and had come over by ferry from Helsinki, a man at the next table (to the Kiwi) introduced himself
St John's church, Tartu
. He & his wife were from London - not far from Richmond actually - and they were spending a week in Tallinn but today were going over on the ferry to Helsinki just for a day trip & wanted some hints about what to see & do there.I'd been feeling a bit flat this morning, and it was a nice change to speak to other travellers, even briefly.
After breakfast we checked out. It wasn't raining so we decided we would walk the kilometre or so to where we were picking up the hire car, and wheel our luggage with us. This was easier than navigating the 1-way streets back to our hotel.
We hired our car from Easy Car Rentals (as it says in large letters on our back window - www.EasyCarRental.ee - so much for travelling discretely as a tourist!). I reckon it might be a father & son operation. Anyway we're hiring our car from Tallinn and returning it in Vilnius. The young guy we were dealing with, Margus, will fly down to Vilnius and meet us there on Monday & then drive the car back to Tallinn.
We have a little Opel Astra. 1.4 engine & automatic, so not big on power. It is a hatchback, and little, but fortunately our case & hand luggage fits in the boot.
It was a bit stressful getting out of Tallinn in a different car, but Tallinn is a much smaller city than Helsinki - around 400,000 in Tallinn, there is around 1.1 million in Estonia - so we managed.
Again I was driving so David could navigate
Terracotta figures outside St John's, Tartu
. Once we nearly turned into a shopping centre car-park, but perhaps it was our big car rental ad that encouraged passing cars to tolerate my mistakes & let me back into the traffic.After we drove out of Tallinn, we had originally intended to go to an ex-Soviet submarine base, but TomTom (our GPS navigator) could not find a route for us from there except coming back to Tallinn, so we decided to skip that. Instead we headed for Tartu, about 80 or 90 km east of Viljandi.
It was raining quite a lot when we reached Tartu. TomTom helped us find the National Estonian museum, but as David had directed it to take us to Viljandri via the museum, it was fortunate that David was following our progress on a map, because TomTom directed us straight past the museum - but didn't tell us we'd reached it. We had to sort of go around the block (on narrow 1-way streets, some cobbled) in order to find our way back to the museum.
Across the road from the museum, cars were parked at 90 degrees to the road, but with their front wheels up on the pavement. One car pulled out as we approached, so we pulled into that spot, bumping up onto the footpath like everyone else
Inside St John's, Tartu
. We went in to the museum.David reminded me of the time we'd parked somewhere in Spain, in a long row of other cars, only to come back later & find that everyone else had gone & we had been booked for parking in an illegal location. I worried about that until we came out again, and found we were still one of many cars half on the footpath.
The weather was too miserable to do much outside sightseeing, which is why David chose this museum for us to visit. Previous museums we've seen in Tallinn have either been about the history of the city of Tallinn, or 20th century Estonian history.
This museum focussed on the much earlier & also regional history of the country. Other than Tallinn, most of Estonia was still feudal, with (German descendants) lords of the manor, with the Estonians as their serfs, still under the feudal system. Officially that feudal system ended in 1819, but apparently it took another 50 years to dissolve. So only 140 years ago here, there were still special laws for serfs & peasants, and they had to work for the lords so many days a year in order to use the common land.
As we'd driven along, there didn't seem to be lots of villages with narrow streets & wall to wall people. Instead every now & again there would be a few farm buildings together & that would be it. This museum explained that.
The largest building, or barn, was divided into a central threshing room - with grain storage, stove, and bed for master & mistress of the house, with an attached threshing floor room, and later some chambers attached
Terracotta figures at Tartu
. April to October was the time for working outside, and the animals outside too. Late October all the animals were brought inside and the men turned to woodworking & the women to spinning and weaving.
The girls slept in the clothes storage hut, the boys slept in the loft of the hay storage hut.
There were lots of omens & superstitions about what you did & when. There were almost proverbs for each day of the year. Tomorrow's said, "if the wind blows from the north and ... (?) you should keep your cattle inside".
Understandably it seemed an old & traditional culture. "Christianity was tolerant of the old ways" - gods & spirits & "old ways" seem to merge.
Apparently it was only in the later 19th century, when people had more chambers & slept less in communal rooms that they started decorating.
Ironically at the end of the feudal times, for the first time Estonians were able to buy land or at least freehold to land
Raekoja Plats, Tartu
. Communal farms dissolved and people worked for themselves, in individual family groups. When the Russians occupied, they enforced collective farms, and everybody back working in communes. This national museum also had a collection of national costumes from all over Estonia, as well as a collection of beer steins from all over Estonia!
The final room ended with the 20th century. When I told you about the 300,000 at the public meeting, I'd forgotten that nominally that was a singing festival (the Estonians love their choirs). Thus theirs was called the "singing revolution".
Unfortunately we weren't allowed to take photos inside that museum, and I didn't get the opportunity to take many more photos elsewhere, because of the rain today.
After the national museum, we visited St John's Church in Tartu, dating from at least 1323. This old church was decorated, inside and out, by lots of medieval terracotta figures, in niches. The church survived the centuries, but was bombed by the Russians in 1944. Only after Estonian independence were they able to restore it
Town Hall, Tartu
.In 1632 Tartu became a university town - closed roughly 1700 to 1802 it became one of the Russian Empire's great cities of learning. We became tangled up in the narrow cobbled streets that are part of the university, but did not try to park to explore the Student's Lock Up. We didn't see this, but I feel I must tell you what the guide book says about it.
"The Student's Lock Up is where 19th century students were held in solitary confinement for various infractions. Back then, if you failed to return library books on time, you'd net two days in the attic; insulting a lady, four days; insulting a (more sensitive?) cloakroom attendant, five days; duelling, up to three weeks." I think fondly of a couple of young people I know with somewhat of a history of late library books ... Perhaps if ...
The next place we stopped in Tartu was Raekoja Plats - the old town square. Now I should say we got a little lost & I was getting stressed with narrow 1-way streets & dead ends. When we found ourself in a narrow, dead end, cobbled street & it was raining, I said to David - you go & take some photos of the town square, while I work out how to turn around, and then we can leave this place
Tartu
!He was gone a little while - in addition to a pretty town square, there was also the river & a bridge replacing the one built by Catherine the Great, as a gift to the Estonian people, in the 1700s. The Russians then destroyed it, while retreating from the Germans, in 1941. Then the Germans destroyed it, while retreating from the Russians, in 1944. Then it was rebuilt in 1994 as a sign of joining the people together. At the bottom of the plaque explaining all this was a website where you could send donations to help pay for it.
I must have seemed rather stressed (I WAS rather stressed) - anyway David returned & said that he thought I ought to at least walk to the end of the street for a view of the town square. I did, and of course it was lovely, so despite the rain & having left my umbrella in the car, I walked up to take a couple of photos of the town hall anyway. It was very pretty.
By then I had turned the car around & parked, so it was an easier get-away.
On a sign with directions to Viljandi, it said something about alternate detours & road-works
Tartu, bridge
. We decided to press on anyway. Little did we know that that would result in many miles of badly potted dirt roads, in addition to the pot-holed roads & new roads under construction. I seemed to be the only vehicle trying to keep to the speed limit on these dirt roads. A bus roared past me at one stage, sending stones flying.
And as if that wasn't enough to worry us, TomTom (GPS) started flashing a warning sign about low battery. But we thought we had it plugged in! Checked & we did have it plugged in. David tested connections & the cigarette lighter wasn't working.
So we turned off TomTom, to save whatever power there might be, and David phoned back to Margus to ask if there was some way it was supposed to be a non-smoking car & the cigarette lighter had been disconnected. No, Margus had no idea or suggestions.
So we had to drive the rest of the way to Viljandi without the GPS navigation. We'd been lent a road atlas for Estonia. We had a fold-out map of Latvia. But cities, and Lithuania were going to be difficult without TomTom
Turtles (concrete road blocks)
!Cutting a long story short, David did a good job of finding his way to our accommodation. Tonight we are in a guest house, and now that we are here, our hosts have left, so we seem to have the place to ourselves.
Anyway, "our host" who speaks a very little English & a bit more German, well we managed to explain our problem to him. He made some phone calls & found somewhere to take an Opel car to be fixed. Fortunately we'd arrived around 5 & these places close at 6, so we still had some time to find the place - called "Car Fix". (!!) Also fortunately our host had spoken to the auto-electrician who would look at the car, because "Rene" did not speak any English or German. Listening to one side of the phone conversation, I heard the words "cigarette" ... "kaput" ... "GPS" - so at least it seemed that our problem was understood.
Our host drew in the road atlas (belonging to the car company, but then they should have supplied us with a car with a working cigarette lighter). We drove there & "Rene" came to look. He checked battery & various things, and then sat down with the car's manual. I said to David "I wonder if it's just a fuse?"
Next thing he opened the boot (fortunately we'd left our luggage at the guest house) & opened up a side of that & there were the fuses
Car repairs at Tartu
. He fiddled with a few things & then brought us a little blue fuse & pointed to it, and then started putting things back together in the car. He directed one of the other staff to take David to the office - the whole process cost us 50 kroon to fix (about $A5.50). Actually later we found a screwdriver in the car, so we'll probably try to take that back to Rene tomorrow.For some reason, and most embarrassingly, with all these service men standing around, I couldn't start the car. I wondered if something had been disconnected in the fixing of the other problem. Rene got into the car & of course he started it straight away, so I don't know what my problem was. As I started to back out, they hurried to move another car that if I had tried really hard I might have managed to hit - I guess I/we looked anything but competent. But now that TomTom was likely to be able to guide us again, all this seemed funny rather than a worry. We'd had a problem & had managed to get past it.
Next thing we drove back into Viljandi looking for a place described as "an unassuming looking café". Well we parked, I had my doubts about whether we were parked legally, so we drove around the block (more narrow cobbled streets) to find somewhere legal to park. The café was so unassuming looking that it was no longer a café
Statue of (?) figure in park in Tartu
. So we chose somewhere else from our guidebook. Requiring another trip around a couple more blocks to get 200 metres to the next café, but complicated by the 1-way streets. I actually startled 2 young males by pulling up at a pedestrian crossing to let them cross - obviously they did not expect me to stop.
We had a nice dinner - although in these circumstances you never know quite what you're going to get. I decided to have a sparkling wine that was described as both "Sovjet" (Soviet?) but also "hispania". It was like the Russian champagne we'd enjoyed in Moscow in 1983. David had ordered a strawberry milkshake - that appeared to be made in yoghurt. After he tasted my Soviet Spanish champagne he decided to have some too.
After all the driving we'd done to get there, it was almost no distance at all back to our guesthouse.
We have Room 5. 2 King Single beds (we've had all twin beds since we've been away). There is a tiny ensuite that I barely need to get out of bed to reach. And we have in our room a porcelain tiled heater - a plainer version of the type we've seen in museums & palaces here. At the moment it's overly warm in the room (as always) but there seems to be a timer on the wall that we don't know what it refers to, but whatever it is will turn itself off around midnight, so the room might get cooler then. Alternatively that timer might refer to something else?
Tomorrow we leave Estonia and drive south into Latvia. I'm told that there will be less English the further away we get from Tallinn.
This morning I was feeling a bit "why are we doing this?" Tonight I feel we've negotiated some difficulties, seen a lot, and I'm feeling more optimistic.
We're going to open the window now & not wait till midnight. Hope that's not a mistake.
Love to you from Kerry & David
