Estonia: A Minibus Odyssey
August, 2006
To understand exactly how we experienced our time in Estonia, both in August and, to a lesser degree, our previous two excursions there earlier in the year, you must first understand how it was that we came to be there in the first place. We have good friends there, for sure, but ultimately this is all because of the game World of Warcraft.
For 20 months, The Game had been my sole form of social interaction; indeed I honestly believe that it had saved my life from the dark, evil, lonely days of 2004. Unlike many of my peers, I had never actually gotten bored of it – I had eventually stopped playing only because the quality of my internet connection had nose-dived since I’d moved house.
World of Warcraft wasn’t just the reason I had friends in Estonia, it was pretty much the reason I had any friends at all at the time. It had introduced me to The Grey Company – TGC, a pan-European sparky band of brothers and sisters with whom I immediately felt a strong kinship.
Thus, when we visited Estonia, the thing that brought us together was The Game. It was the thing we all knew for certain we had in common and it was therefore The Game that served as the prism we saw the world through and acted accordingly.
Most of the time, when we were all talking, it was about dungeons we had conquered together; monsters we had killed, treasure we had collected. Slugs were no longer slugs, they were ‘Borelgore’ after slain villains. Dogs were ‘Sons of Arugal’ after werewolves we had ran away from. We encountered castles that we would dub ‘Shadowfang Keep’ or ‘Scholomance’ after locations in the game we’d visited together.
Many of us had never met in the flesh until now and it was second nature for us to refer to and address each other by our in-game pseudonyms; handily this freed some of us from the responsibility of having to remember our peers’ deliciously European names (to this day I don’t know some of them).
That such a trip is possible, that we all got along so well and had such a good time, that we are to this day still great friends is a testament, I think, to just how much modern technology and, more specifically, online games, can change people’s lives for the better. Just remember that the next time tabloids struggle to demonise electronic entertainment.
Copyright ©2010-2011 Lee Gent
lee@leegent.net
When I arrive at eleven o’clock at night, I’m hyperactive for some reason. I command everyone to follow me outside because I want fresh air. And a coffee. My friends oblige me, and it’s then that I see Alex is wearing a very special t-shirt: It’s a picture of me with one of my catch phrases underneath: “Ban This Filth”. I am both flattered and a little perturbed to be meeting someone for the first time only to find them with my face on their chest.
This is to be a relatively long trip and we’re loaded with entertainments: Some have brought their Nintendo DSes; Robin has brought a deck of swanky-looking transparent cards; I have brought my pocket magnetic chess set. There are many hours to kill before our 5.30 am flight and so I waste no time in having Ryan dominate me at chess – a game I love but am desperately poor at.
Instead, I resolve to teach everyone else Texas Hold’Em Poker, a game I’ve very recently learned myself and have become obsessed by. We have cards thanks to Robin; I go over the rules and even make a handy cheat-sheet of hand values for newbies to refer to. All we are missing are some chips - that is until we break out some of the TGC can-do spirit and, in what would soon become a tradition of sorts, fashion our own out of whatever is to hand. In this case, coffee stirring-sticks from the coffee shack.
Naturally, jealous passers-by watch in wonderment as we enjoy a stirring game of poker on the floor of the airport. A strangely fragrant traveller/hobo even stops, sits down with us and joins in before bumming a cigarette and promptly running away. Thankfully, I am very slightly better at poker against first-time players than I am at chess and rapidly become the stirring-stick king.
There are still some hours to go before we can check in to the flight, hours we pass by reading a book of Sick Jokes that Ryan has handily brought along; and by ‘we’ I mean ‘me’. Loudly. For everyone’s amusement. Even the old couple sitting a few seats away from us who, after the third or fourth time we all burst into laughter over awful, childish jokes, try to kill me with their minds and eventually move off.
There’s just no pleasing some people.
Finally our alarms go off and it’s time to stuff our faces with breakfast beyond the security barrier. Of the flight itself there is nothing to tell and before too long we are thrown out into the beautiful sunshine over the fair capital of Estonia: Tallinn.
Our good friends Kris, Ann and Tõnis are there to greet us and from that moment on we’re completely in their hands – very literally; we have no knowledge at all about where we’re going and how we are to get there. We were directed to an online map before we left but, embarrassingly, none of us bothered examining it in detail. The Man With the Plan is Tõnis - he has arranged our route, transport and accommodation (no easy task) and we are eternally grateful.
Knowing that we would be spending almost two weeks crammed into a minibus, I have packed very light indeed. Our brief was to bring a sleeping bag and tent and, besides my tiny carry-on suitcase, a camping mat and the clothes on my back, that is all I have brought.
Thankfully, however, we will be staying in luxury tonight - the beautiful Hotel Barons in the centre of the city. We’d utilised the posh sauna beneath the building on a few occasions in the past but had never actually stayed there; luckily our man Tõnis is a trusted member of their staff and has wangled us some rooms. After a spot of lunch, a quick stop-off at the ferry terminal to pick up our Finnish friend Argosh and a quick change of clothes, we encamp in the hotel and break out the booze.
The day spills into evening slides into night as we talk, catch up, reminisce and knock back beer after spirit after liqueur. Hugs are shared, there are pile-ons and laughs a’plenty. Robin breaks out his portable media player and screen but we are much more interested in its built-in Nintendo NES emulator; much Super Mario Brothers is played. We remark that the theme music is a work of art and spend a few moments trying to replicate it on our mobile phone ring-tone composers.
Team Glasgow have, as usual, brought Aftershock. Argosh has imported some genuinely Finnish Finlandia Vodka and insists we all share it, adamant that it is the strongest vodka in the world. Alas he is in the awesome presence of the Ultimate Authority on Vodka: the superhuman duo that is Emma and Kris. They drink it and politely agree that it is fine stuff. Privately they find it quite ordinary.
In order to maintain our powers for the coming days, we have an early night.
Tõnis and his brother have arrived with our conveyance - two wonderful, shiny and clean minibuses; one blue, the other silver. We throw our luggage in the back and head to the airport to pick up some more crew members: Abergavenny’s own James and Will. With a spirited goodbye we switch Tõnis’ brother for another native – Ubilskap (who radiates beautiful oddness and would, in the film of our lives, be played by Steve Buscemi) – and our team is complete. We each choose a minibus and, unknowingly, immediately become two proud, rival gangs. Tõnis, having set his laptop up with a GPS receiver, will lead with Robin as his co-pilot in the Silver minibus. Ann and I will share driving duties in the Blue minibus. We stop for a colossal food/cheesy-bread and booze shopping trip before finally hitting the tarmac for real.
We head west out of the city and follow the coast for a few hours before our first stop, a scenic viewpoint overlooking the Gulf of Finland around the borough of Keila-Joa. Beers are immediately shared around the non-driving crew while we pose for group photos and compete in that Olympian test of manliness, ‘how far out into the sea can you throw a stone’. The game goes on for a while; the winner is indeterminate. Eventually the contestants upgrade to ‘how far can you throw a fellow human off the cliff’ and everybody wrestles homo-erotically for a few moments.
Just across the road is a river, a little dried up right now but with a rather fascinating feature: a bridge, from whose chains and stanchions dangle innumerable padlocks; many with Cyrillic engravings. We’re told of a Russian tradition where newly-wed couples would (after perhaps engraving their names and the date) fasten the lock in a public place and throw away the key, thus symbolising the unbreakable bond of marriage. Recall that Russians make up about a quarter of the population of Estonia and we’re talking a lot of padlocks. They drip from the bridge.
Still further, and there is a significant stream of water flowing past what looks like a tiny hydroelectric power plant. Indeed, mounted on a plinth outside we see an old turbine complete with a dedication plaque. Once again, tomfoolery ensues as we try to throw each other into the water.
Back in the buses we continue west towards Paldiski, passing the occasional Armed Forces Armoured Personnel Carrier and stopping occasionally to drink beer and lark about on beaches. There are a fair number of crazy underground bunkers to investigate – we guess that the Red Army once infested this land like termites. Lighthouses, giant radio masts and the occasional wind turbine flash past our windows before, eventually, rain begins to fall from the sky.
We take cover in what appears to be a massive, run-down, abandoned mansion cradled by some trees in the middle of nowhere – precisely the kind of place that, had this been a Hollywood film, would contain people who are eager to eat our flesh. Apparently it is some sort of monastery. Thankfully it is empty and, as the heavens open up to disgorge liquid on us, we investigate some sort of rickety outdoor amphitheatre. An exposed electrical fuse-box mounted on a stone wall near us begins to spark and splutter as rain seeps into it; I have an odd phobia of sparking electrical devices and immediately run away. In case I die.
There are a bonkers array of tunnels, ladders and scaffolding up to some sort of observation tower, which we duly climb. Finding nothing but more rain, we depart - but not before some of us give in to the deluge and perform a funny little dance for all of our amusement.
Finally, after a few moments driving again, we reach our campsite for the night. It is quite impressive: there’s a beach one hundred meters away and, while the buses are unloaded, someone produces a football. We unwind and enjoy a small spot of beach footy. It’s only eight PM but the rain has darkened the sky; thankfully there is a large covered wooden rotunda under which we unpack our dinner and entertainment: a camping barbecue, hundreds of kilos of marinated meat, and many, many cans of beer.
There is a small sheltered sleeping hut of some sort which is allocated to the ladies; the rest of us will have to find sleeping areas wherever we can, out in the open. It sounds like a great idea – until the rain begins again. It seems the only way any of us will be able to have a comfortable night’s sleep is by getting horrifically drunk, which we all try our best to do while tearing into our barbecued meat and cheesy bread.
Despite the rain, we manage to get a reasonable campfire hissing away and pass the time between gulps of Aftershock by alternating between singing our favourite Tenacious D songs and our new favourite thing: an Estonian Girl Guides Singing Game. The idea is to split into two teams and then essentially attempt to out-sing each other with lyrics that Ann teaches us, all while keeping time and in tune with one another. It’s a little bit like when several people give a syncopated rendition of ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’. The game and lyrics are designed for, well, girls, but we throw ourselves into it with gusto and enjoy ourselves immensely.
There is (naturally) a midnight game of drunken beach football before we all turn in for the night. I elect to sleep in my minibus, which goes well until I am joined by an anonymous drunkard seeking shelter. Now, listen, I’m well aware that I snore: I’ve accepted it and if I ever have to share a sleeping space with someone, I always tell them to hit me if I start to get on their nerves. I honestly don’t mind. If I were in the their position I’d want to do the same. I’d rather they made me stop, then we can all get along.
Tonight I’m in that position – someone is snoring right beside my ear. Without their leave to punch them (indeed, with zero knowledge of who it actually could be), I am forced to grit my teeth and bear it. It is devilishly cold and cramped in the ’bus; I have no pillow and for some reason, my freezing, drunk fingers are unable to zip my sleeping bag closed. I have a very miserable night of no sleep.
Our camp is soggy and it takes us a while to tidy up and assemble; it is late when we finally hit the road. Ann is driving our bus while I co-pilot. John and Will sleep in the car, on each other’s shoulders. We all look and say ‘ahhh’.
It doesn’t take us long to reach Haapsalu, where we park up and prepare for a tour around an ancient castle. We’ve only been driving the minibuses for twenty-four hours but already they’re caked with mud and filth and so we take the opportunity to daub graffiti on the back and sides of each other’s buses. There is the usual assortment of childish profanity but for the most part they’re World of Warcraft references (or, at least, nerdy geeky references) and a healthy collection of team-building “TGC FTW” phrases. An anonymous artist draws my favourite: simply the words King Mourn and an arrow pointing to where I usually sit. Genius.
There is a tour bus filled with civilians nearby. What they must think of the spectacle of fourteen crude, filthy geeks in two disgusting, graffiti-coated buses we can only imagine.
The castle itself is wonderful. There are an assortment of spires and cannon dotted around and even free wireless – very much a staple even in the darkest corners of Estonia. Best of all, though, is a giant chess board complete with knee-high wooden chess pieces. I’m eager to make up for my humiliation at the airport and so I challenge Alex (who, lest we forget, is a maths savant) and win. Just.
After Kris challenges and defeats John, we depart. We have a date with a ferry, it seems, but there’s an hour or so to kill first, which we spend driving around until we locate and subsequently invade a pizza parlour. Each of us demolish a delicious (although strangely salty) pizza and we roll onto the ferry. Our destination is the island of Hiiumaa, off the west coast of the mainland in the Baltic Sea.
Our in-flight, sorry, in-sail entertainment is provided by Ann’s laptop and consists mainly of an assortment of screen-captured videos of us all playing World of Warcraft together. The highlight is a long film of our jaunt to (and domination of) a variety of End Bosses in the Molten Core dungeon. Someone has been kind enough to edit the videos together and provide a speed-metal soundtrack; the video even includes footage of me (as my invincible digital alter-ego) mid-asskick. I will never tire of the sight of myself and thirty-nine other close friends all operating in perfect synchronicity, like a well-oiled machine, working together to destroy a ridiculously large Elemental Fire Lord.
We cheer and high-five as we watch the final enemy crumble at our feet. High-fives have rapidly become ‘the currency of Awesome’ and over the past couple of days we have exchanged them with alarming (and ever-increasing) frequency. We high-five at the slightest excuse, sometimes even just to celebrate a particularly impressive-sounding high-five. Call it a juvenile male-bonding ritual if you must – I call it awesome.
Eventually we come to dock and disembark onto Hiiumaa. Once again I have no real idea what our agenda or final destination is and am happy to simply follow the silver minibus and trust in our Dear Leaders. As it happens we’re not going far; a short drive north-west brings us to the town of Kärdla. We stop on the outskirts and discuss our options: we can drive on and camp out for the night, or we can stop where we are and stay at a hotel.
It has been many, many hours since my last shower and change of clothes so I very vocally select the ‘hotel’ option. Eventually this becomes the winning option and we park and unpack at the Padu Hotel on the outskirts of town.
Rooms are quickly allocated but I draw a short straw – I’ll be sleeping on a sofa in a room with two other dudes. I say I don’t mind so long as there is a shower. As it happens, the hotel can do a lot better – it can do sauna and hot-tub. I respectfully decline, insisting that I would rather just shower and make myself sparkly clean rather than sweaty. I am, of course, lying – I am simply not yet comfortable enough with my peers to hang out for extended amounts of time, 90% naked.
As punishment, karma decrees that my shower runs out of hot water after three minutes – nowhere near long enough for someone as filthy as I am – and I do my very best with tepid water. In shiny new clothes, I wander down to the hot-tub where my friends are laughing and joking and insisting that I join them – shyly I decline and I promise myself that I must do better.
We enjoy hotel cuisine for dinner – giant meatballs – and settle in for a relaxing, sociable evening of booze and games. It turns out that today is a big day for World of Warcraft players – a major patch, v1.12, has been delivered and all of us, current and ex-gamers alike, eagerly read the patch notes to see what has changed (again, courtesy of the ever-present free wireless Internet access). Those of us with powerful laptops boot the game up and have a go.
Those of us without laptops make do with poker. We have upgraded from wooden sticks in place of chips with something new: neon-coloured hair bobbles, a bag of which we bought for this express purpose earlier in the day. We play a large game while simultaneously drinking a lot of beer.
Someone makes a startling discovery: some of the television channels tune directly into CCTV cameras installed in the hotel. Nothing voyeuristic, of course – unless you enjoy watching an empty lobby – but it sows the seeds of a terrific prank. The lobby camera is set behind the reception desk; one of us will wait until the receptionist leaves her post before dashing in front of the camera holding up a comedy sign and, finally, flashing the devil-horn salute (second only to the high-five). Someone in the hotel room will take a picture of the television. In our tiny minds it is comedy gold.
That someone turns out to be me. I lurk around the lobby looking very shifty indeed, occasionally smiling nonchalantly at the receptionist as if to say ‘don’t worry, I’m just on my midnight stroll’. She wanders off and I zoom in front of the camera to present my sign: an A4 piece of paper with ‘TGC Rules!’ scrawled on it. An elderly resident stares at me, agog. The receptionist comes back and I run away, giggling.
My partners-in-crime have collected the relevant photo of the television with my stupid gurning face on it, and we high-five.
Comedy gold.
It is now very late and we are quite drunk. I retire to my sofa and sleep although, without a pillow, the scratchy fabric tears at my face all night and it is stiflingly hot. Once again I have a fitful night but eventually drift off into sweet oblivion.
We load up into our two minibuses and head west to explore the verdant wonderland of Kõrgessaare Parish. The drive is wonderful; it is a beautiful sunny day and we are cruising on what is essentially a dirt-motorway through a lush forest of tall green trees.
Before too long we pull over and stop at the side of the road in the middle of nowhere – there is some sort of gift stall here, which seems incredibly random until we’re told a local legend: many years ago, two wedding carriages collided at this spot killing the groom from one and the bride from t’other. The surviving pair later married and, in memory of their departed spouses, placed a cross at the fateful site. It’s a good/sad story and, true or not, it has become a tradition of sorts for pilgrims such as ourselves to leave crosses here.
As we look around we can see an astounding array of crosses in a bewildering number of configurations – some elaborately carved, many others constructed simply out of a couple of twigs. They drip from the tree branches around us and litter the woody path we’re on. Of course it would be churlish of us not to leave our own tribute and so each of us dives into the trees to search for raw materials.
I build mine out of some sturdy fallen branches bound with a long reedy leaf that I gingerly splice into a crude length of string, and delicately suspend it from a nearby tree. One of our number leaves two beer bottles on the ground in a crude cruciform. I am a Goddamn artisan.
At the gift stall I buy myself a wooden cruciform pendant simply because I like the look of it. I will spend the next four years insisting to people that this does not make me religious.
Westwards, then, to the western peninsula of Hiiumaa; the pointy finger prodding the Baltic. Our next stop is the five-hundred year old and very distinctive Kõpu Lighthouse. It’s distinctive because it looks less like a lighthouse and more like a colossal fortress or, depending on your mood, a space-faring Steampunk rocket-ship: a rectangular cuboid extruding up from the Earth, its four sides each seemingly supported by what look like massive triangular stone stabilising fins topped by a red metal and glass dome.
Naturally, the plan is to enter within and climb to the top. A number of us, myself included, settle on staying at ground level to enjoy the perfect summer weather with the minimum of fuss. After a while, though, I can no longer bear the taunts of my peers from several hundred meters above me. I ascend the many millions of stairs until I scrape the stars themselves.
When inside there are the occasional welcome breaks from the slog upwards in the form of museum sections but finally, out of breath and dripping with sweat, I claim the reward: a stunning panorama all the way to the horizon, a fluffy layer of green foliage (the tops of mighty trees) stretching away in all directions. Beyond the trees to the west the sea shimmers enticingly. My breath, had it been there after the climb, would have been taken.
We skylark for a time and then, as any group of high-spirited young people will eventually end up doing, decide to throw things off the side – and by ‘things’ I mean my prized straw hat. The one I’d got the summer before from Las Vegas and was dearly attached to. After many shouted communiqués (much to the annoyance of other tourists milling around) we manage to arrange a catcher on terra firma and, with all due ceremony (and me genuinely fearing that I would never feel its soft, reedy embrace again) I hurl the hat like a frisbee out into the ether.
It floats majestically down to earth and is handily caught. Mission accomplished.
Between the edge of the forest and the sea is, of course, a beach, which we reach after a few more minutes of westward driving. The area is littered with the ruins of what seems to be an old military base.
There are rusty, decrepit turrets and towers galore, poking out of the foliage, built long ago to spy on watercraft. More impressive, though, is the huge network of underground tunnels, bunkers and barracks accessible by spiral staircases which are now more rust than metal – structures I have severe misgivings about trusting with my weight but thankfully prove hardy. Some of the tunnels lead to room which, rather eerily, still contain tables and chairs. I inevitably think of Pripyat, the town decimated by the Chernobyl incident.
We explore and navigate through the maze of trees and wreckage until we hit the beach; much like the forest it is a graveyard for unrecognisable metallic hulks of all shapes and sizes. We’re in good hands, though – our native brethren have a tradition of camping here on New Year. We gingerly follow them.
There is a skeleton of a stubby tower right there in the sand and we declare it ‘TGC Tower’, climbing the death-trap steps and draping ourselves liberally over it like clothes hanging out to dry.
The Baltic Sea stretches out to infinity before us and the weather is still glorious and so we relax and drink beers, marvelling at a colossal creeping insect that someone finds on themselves. We adopt it and name it Borelgore, after an evil giant World of Warcraft baddie. Some of us perform minor surgery on James when he finds ancient glass shards embedded in his feet after walking on the sand; others simply wince and commiserate.
After a while, though, it’s time for us to leave. We have a ferry to catch and so we drive south, eventually arriving the ferry terminal. It’s a desolate place lifted right out of the coast level of Half-Life 2; over there is a dilapidated fishing boat dangling from a cradle, evidently in the middle of a paint job but whose caretaker is nowhere to be seen. I expect a horde of Antlions to burst out of the sand and chase us at any moment.
There is, at least, a café, where we whet our whistle and fill our stomachs with hot food. We have some time to kill before our crossing and we poke around outside. As is now tradition, we start with throwing stones at the sea until we hit pay dirt – behind the café is a giant swing contraption not unlike those massive swinging pirate boats you find at theme parks.
There are already three local children playing on the swing but we don’t let that stop us – there are more of us and we’re bigger. After a swift conference, we decide that the best thing to do would be to scare the beejeezus out of them and hope that they clear off. We immediately all pile on the swing at the opposite end to the kids and begin doing our damnedest find out just how high and fast we can make it go.
You know, real adult stuff.
We can’t make them leave, however, and so we take it to the limit, migrating from simple high-velocity swinging to advanced tomfoolery like trying to stand up mid-swing and switch seats. It’s a great deal harder than it sounds – as soon as you stand, your centre of gravity changes and your momentum threatens to pitch you head-over-heels over the metal railing and, at best, into the sand. At worst you’ll be flung against the steel frame at relativistic speeds.
Which is exactly what happens to John ten seconds later.
To be fair, he isn’t trying any tomfoolery himself but is more the victim of tomfoolery. Someone (who shall remain nameless) thinks it would be terribly fun to lean over and tickle him at the apex of our swing. He loses his grip, is slammed back into his seat by sheer momentum and then, as the swing begins its decent in the other direction, he is flung out of the device. We watch in slow motion as he hurtles groundwards and wraps his body comically around a stout metal pole with a sickening crunch.
There are shouts of ‘medic!’ and ‘man down!’ and we all, fearful for John’s life, leap out to attend to his moaning, crumpled body. Thankfully he has sustained only minor brain damage and is up and about in no time. The local kids stare at us, aghast. We decide that this children’s play toy is just too dangerous, and return to the café.
It’s now time to board the ferry and we embark in our filthy minibuses. On the ferry I play the jester and amuse everyone with rousing readings from Will’s book, Loamhedge – a book featuring a cast of heroic countryside animals – doing my best to liven it up with a variety of silly voices for each character. Eventually my throat aches and I stop.
The trip across to Saaremaa is short, however, and before long we’re back on the road to Kuressaare, the major town on the island. We reach there shortly after dusk and find our hotel without incident.
It smells a little but is otherwise comfortable; I’m sharing a room with Ryan and we make ourselves at home before deciding to hit the town. First stop is the supermarket: our plan is to buy booze for this evening’s entertainment. Unfortunately there is a little friction; our usual system is to throw cash into a big pot to buy a load of communal beer and then place orders for ‘specialist’ stuff on the side (with your own money). Unfortunately tonight we can’t decided on which booze to get for communal consumption. Our system only really works for small groups (and especially small groups who can all agree on drinking beer) and, before long, law and order breaks down. I begin to lose my temper and then loudly insist that we abandon the communal booze system and, instead, everyone should simply please themselves.
I am told to calm down and when I do, the object of the lesson has sunk in: it is impossible to please everyone all the time.
We all go our separate ways in the supermarket and rendezvous twenty minutes later, each clutching a different bottle of personal poison. Everyone seems a lot happier with the new system and so, in high spirits, we drive back to the hotel to stash the goods and freshen up: it’s time to hit the streets and find dinner.
The town centre itself is very pretty. There is a central plaza of sorts and I’m reminded a little of holidays I used to take with my family as a child. The nostalgia fills me with pleasure and indeed our whole team is buoyant. I am filled with a desire to spend a night ‘on the town’ in some sort of bar and crawl some nightclubs, a desire which ebbs away as we eat a delicious dinner sitting outside at a restaurant on the edge of the plaza.
I elect to have some sort of ham in cheese sauce and am very pleased with myself when I manage to relay my order to the waitress in perfect Estonian. Alex later shames me by flexing his mind-grapes and learning to count to 20. I fail to convince myself that being able to ask for ‘ham in cheese sauce’ is the more useful skill. Yet others of our team have traditional Russian soup and someone even considers wild boar.
Full of food and happy, we wander back to the hotel where half of us cram into someone’s room to watch a film and the other half decide to exercise our poker talents. We still do not have chips and so standing in for them tonight are pieces of dried macaroni that someone had cleverly picked up at the supermarket earlier.
Ryan wins.
After locking one another in the stocks and subjecting them to various taunts and pokes, we head to the battlements where we are granted a perfect view over the wonderful countryside surroundings. The sea is just visible on the horizon; once again it is a beautiful sunny day and the climb is more than worth it. Looking down, though, I can see there are small boats on the moat and my interest is piqued: I simply must go sailing!
I manage to convince a few others and, before long, we have a flotilla of rowing boats in the water. There are three boats each with three or four occupants and, as any chemist will tell you, the combination is unstable: it doesn’t take long before we’re threatening each other with boarding action and challenging each other to a race around the moat.
Being a nautical man I, of course, take command of my crew and lead them to a delicious victory. The pleasure is unfortunately cut short when I accidentally smash James in his face with an oar. To be fair, we were fighting a valiant defensive action at the time, his crew attempting to sink us, but with the grinding crunch of wood-on-bone we’re brought back to reality. It’s time to leave.
The water has taken its toll on my worn-out old trainers, however, and I decide to take advantage of the fact that we’re in a quite major town by doing a spot of shopping before we head out for good. Unfortunately my trainers finally dissolve to nothing and I am required to wander the streets and shops barefoot. Thankfully it doesn’t take me long to find an awesome-looking pair of sandals. Despite their heavy price tag I fall in love and immediately part with my hard-earned currency, finally covering my feet and feeling a million times less like a hobo.
We’re not on the road for long before it’s time for our next stop: a perfect sandy beach edging a calm, shallow stretch of inlet. All of the males – myself included, for a change – strip to the underwear and plunge into the clear warm water. Water which, alas, hides a secret: what lies beneath seems to be less sand and more slimy mud and weeds.
We make the best of it, though, splashing around in high spirits. There are some local kids close by with an inflatable football and we do our damnedest to get involved in their game (or at the very least steal their ball), gesturing and shouting at them; shouting words we believe are the Estonian for ‘pass the ball here!’ but after a while suspect are simply gibberish. Eventually they understand us (or at least they fear for their lives) and acquiesce, tossing the ball to us. There’s a rousing and very grown-up game of ‘pass the football’ which, of course, degenerates to ‘throw the football at each other’ before it’s time for us to dry off and move out.
Meanwhile, the remaining half our cabal have been entertaining themselves by fighting off a concerted aerial attack by a squadron of the meanest and largest wasps we have ever seen. They have set themselves up on a picnic table on the beach and begin to drink but have to abandon the idea as the sweet smell of sugary liquid attracts every flying, stinging insect in a large radius. Eventually someone has the bright idea of using an empty orangeade bottle as a trap and, by the time we have caught up with them, they had proudly amassed tens of angry yellow buzzing objects inside the bottle. The din from their combined wingbeats and furious attacking of the plastic is colossal and I personally cower in primal fear at the sight.
Thankfully it is time to leave the evil bottle of insects behind. We board our respective minibuses and drive east, all the way east across the rest of the island until we reach the edge. It’s not the end, though: the road carries on over a thin causeway that snakes out through the water. We are crossing a narrow strip of the sea that divides Saaremaa and another, much smaller (but still significant) hunk of land – Muhu Island. The sensation is wonderful, no less so than the view ahead and on either side of us: beautiful green flatlands and shimmering water.
We’re across before long and waste no time in transiting the entire island, west to east, before reaching our final ferry terminal. It’s a short hop (and interestingly, had it been winter, we could have driven over the ice); there is barely enough time for me to read more from Loamhedge and we’re back on the European mainland. Our final destination tonight is Pärnu, a city we had driven through very briefly on our visit earlier in the year but alas didn’t get to see because of a the biggest bloody blizzard I have ever seen.
There’s no such occurrences today, though, and we plough through the gathering dusk in a cheerful mood, eventually parking our now disgustingly filthy minibuses in the town centre. The idea is to grab some dinner before hitting the shops for boozeahol and so we begin our trek on the enchantingly-lit streets of the city. We don’t really know where to go and so our intention is to simply wander randomly until we find somewhere that looks reasonable.
For some reason, though, most places appear to be shut and we meander for a long time, stomachs growling and tempers fraying until we finally find a decent-looking pub that serves food. We order various burgers with, having just learned and become childishly fascinated with the Estonian word for gherkin, extra helpings of happukurk. We joke that gherkins are so powerful that they would make a fantastic addition to the various magic potions in World of Warcraft, imagining them bestowing the eater with hugh bonuses à la Popeye’s spinach. More people join in and we discuss other outlandish everyday items that could, in the right hands, make one a powerful warrior: in the end we’re all in agreement that there is absolutely nothing more powerful than my straw hat and, much like The One Ring, whoever wore the HAT OF POWER would immediately rule the world.
Elsewhere in the pub, we bump into some fellow tourists from the Emerald Isle – two young Irish ladies intertwined with a smug-looking Scottish sugar daddy. We make conversation and some of us idly try to make some moves on one or both of the women while the man bleats on and on about how much he has travelled around Europe. We eventually determine that his modus operandi appears to be wandering the globe having sex with strange women; something he claims to be adept at and, after a while, he ‘demonstrates’ to us by going to the men’s room, immediately followed by one of his Irish harem. For some reason she also elects to use the men’s room.
They return a while later with sly grins and we all, to a person, hate all three of these people.
We make our excuses and leave.
Once again law and order breaks down when we hit the supermarket for the evening’s drinks and snacks but I, having learned my lesson, keep out of it and treat myself to some fruity ciders. I ‘plan’ on taking it easy since I’ll be driving tomorrow, taking over the helm of the Blue (and clearly the best) Minibus from Ann, who decides to let her hair down this evening after a few days of restrained responsibility. Thankfully, though, we’re a lot better at shopping than we were and, once again, we’re soon on our way.
Tonight we’ll be staying at Tackendorf, a little way outside of the city. Tackendorf is not so much a settlement as a sort of resort – earlier in the year we’d stayed in a guest house there and driven ATVs (well, everyone except me – I had a broken wrist at the time). This time around we’ll be staying in a collection of small wooden cabins arranged together in a campsite and, as we drive the minibuses across the grass towards them, the full implications of this become clear: we’re not in a hotel or household and so we’re able to, in effect, let loose.
Which we do. Huge amounts of alcohol are consumed. I teach my friends a new drinking game I’d learned back home earlier in the summer called ‘21’: everybody sits in a circle and, one by one, we count up from one to twenty-one. If we make it to the end, one number is randomly substituted for any phrase. Valid (indeed, encouraged) phrases include other numbers, tongue-twisters and our favourite – carrying on the tradition of the master who taught me the game and complete with dramatic arm movements, pitch and cadence – “shoes of the future – trousers of the past!”. Naturally, anyone fouling up the sequence is required to drink and the cycle begins again.
The difficulty of playing drinking games with professional alcoholics, though, is that no matter how the game turns out, you will lose. My plan goes out the window when I decide to glug down that most delicious of liqueurs, Vana Tallinn, mixed with milk. Unfortunately I’m forced to mix them in my mouth since we have no drinking vessels to speak of. I don’t mind losing my dignity.
That evening I also lose my new Palm Pilot, covered in beer and broken beyond repair; Alex loses his phone and Carl loses his teeth after being violently punched in the face by Ann, who could stand his drunken ribbing of Will and his Welsh heritage no longer. I’m just happy that he stops demonstrating his belly dancing; undoubtedly talented though he is, it was beginning making me retch.
There is a good deal more retching to come, though, with various members of our team eventually succumbing to sleep, sickness or both. We find Emma and Ubilskap literally tangled up together asleep in a bed and all go ‘awwwwww!’ before the blackness descends on the rest of us.
We are, to a person, horrifically hungover.
With the minibuses less ‘packed’ with our gear and more ‘stuffed’, we leave the area as fast as we can for the drive to our next port-of-call, Viljandi. Our reward for this is an absolutely stunning view across an impossibly green and wooded river plain; the land around us generously dotted with picturesque, ancient ruins and walls. We take many, many pictures and almost – almost – feel good inside despite our continued self-inflicted illness.
We’re here to meet a couple of hitch-hikers, our friends Ele and Eva-Liisa. They join us as we play on a huge A-frame see-saw/swing contraption designed for around eight people, hurling each other skywards not unlike John’s trajectory the last time we used a swing. Besides our somersaulting stomachs there are no such shenanigans today, thankfully, and we enjoy ourselves in this wonderful oasis of peace.
Having picked up our new team members we put tyre to tarmac and continue our odyssey east. It’s a long journey and we pause midway at a tourist stop featuring caves and, more importantly, coffee at a roadside stall. The caves are fun but not as much fun as my coffee.
Another drive and another stop, this time at a serene lake shore complete with sand and a wooden jetty. The more manly and muscular males of our crew immediately get naked and leap in; I loudly decide not to join them since I have no desire to reveal myself in front of the new additions. Those of us ashore bask in the sun, read and chat – indeed it is hard to imagine a more perfect day and a more perfect setting. Alas, time is running away and we have many kilometres to chew up ’neath our wheels.
Our final destination this evening is Võru and a lovely hotel/apartment complex whose apartments back onto a long sandy beach bordering a huge, beautiful lake. The town is oddly devoid of human activity as we trawl it for somewhere to eat dinner in our minibuses; there are a few options but for some reason this evening a couple of our team members of being extra picky and veto many of them.
Eventually we find a pub that passes muster; the food is good and we enjoy a little beer but for the most part we are exhausted and soon decide that we need to get some rest. I’m driving, though, and very quickly make a critical fumble and lose our GPS-powered convoy leader. Unwilling to admit that I have fouled up, I brazenly assert that I can navigate my way through a strange town at night using only The Force.
My passengers soon suspect I am lying (I am) as we take a long tour through the town, a tour that might have been quite pleasant had we not had the eerie feeling that this was, in fact, a ghost town of Silent Hill proportions.
Eventually (and mostly thanks to sheer luck) I triumph and nudge our conveyance into the hotel car park. Unwilling to join most of our peers in bed, Robin, Kris, Ele, Eva-Liisa and I decide to hang out but our mojo has gone and we sit in uncomfortable silence; even a rousing game of ‘guess the tune from the first few seconds’ courtesy of Robin’s laptop and considerable music library cannot perk me up.
After getting through most of the Greatest Hits of the 90s, we hit the sack.
We’re heading first south-east to the ‘bottom’ corner of the map: it’s there that we’ll find the highest point in the country, Suur Munamägi. On the way, Team Blue Minibus alternate iPods and I become vaguely jealous of how superior Ryan’s capacious iPod Video is to my rather pathetic looking monochrome iPod Mini. His music tastes don’t mesh perfectly with my own and so we reach common ground with Electric Six’s Gay Bar, which we all find absolutely hilarious and insist on singing to one another for the next forty-eight hours.
It’s early afternoon when we arrive at the mighty protrusion, whose name translates roughly as ‘Big Egg Mountain’. Cosmically speaking it’s not enormous, just over 300 metres high, but you must recall that Estonia is generally a rather flat land. It certainly looks large enough when you’re required to walk up it, though.
We park up and start to climb – it’s not hard and there’s a well-paved road that takes you to the top, upon which is perched a restaurant and spire. While we stop for refreshments, Ubliskap receives a phone call: it’s his boss demanding to know why he isn’t at work. It has apparently slipped his mind to inform his boss that he was on a two-week holiday. Ubilskap is awesome.
After cracking the Big Egg, we turn our attention north-west: Our next destination is Estonia’s second city and famed seat of learning, Tartu, wherein a few of our companions attend the lauded university. The road is long, however, and we collectively decide, through the magic of cellular communication, that the best possible use of our time would be to write messages on pieces of paper. The plan is to attach the papers to string, dangle them out of the lead minibus and have the trailing minibus collect them in some sick perversion of air-to-air refuelling.
For some reason the task is too important to leave to the minibus copilots and it falls to the drivers – myself behind with Robin up front – to perform the manoeuvres. At one hundred and twenty kilometres per hour. In traffic. Risking eight lives apiece, we try it but the first attempt ends badly: the string, which appears to be made of shoelaces and is oscillating wildly, gets tangled around Robin’s tow-bar hook until the paper is torn asunder and rapidly dissociates into its component atoms in the violent slipstream, much like Tom Cruise’s F-14 in Top Gun. Or the Space Shuttle Challenger.
For the next attempt, someone decides that in order to make the packages more aerodynamic, they should have a small coin in their centre and be wrapped in as much sticky tape as possible. I’ve no idea how this is actually supposed to work but we try it anyway.
Swerving wildly and air whipping at my face I lean out of the window once more and watch carefully as the projectile whips and buffets around one metre behind the lead bus, then two metres. I try to close the gap but we really are stretching the ‘safety’ margin a little thin.
Three metres, four, and the paper wad is level with my bonnet, a ridiculous piece of string snaking back to Robin’s hand. Five metres and I can just about capture it; flies and debris are entering my facial cavities but I simply must catch this absurd tampon of a construction.
Six metres and I close my grubby fingers around it. Success! We are exhilarated and I honk the horn in glee while the message (and the pivotal keystone of the operation, the small coin) is unpacked.
It says simply, ‘you are gay’.
With the time successfully killed we enter Tartu and park up. Ele and Eva-Liisa meet up with some random guy with a beard (who may or may not be one of their boyfriends) and promptly disappear with nary a goodbye, let alone full-contact hugs that I was so eager to deliver. We decide to bury our feelings by having lunch in a pizza joint and eating carbohydrates topped with saturated fat with some sugary alcohol on the side.
And when I say ‘lunch’, I actually mean ‘luuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuunch’: Our pizzas arrive and they are colossal. I am talking tractor hub-cap enormous. I’m eager to tuck in because I had foolishly ordered a Bloody Mary (‘Tomato juice?! I love tomato juice!’) before becoming immediately sick thanks to the liberal concentration of vodka (‘there’s vodka in it?! I hate vodka!’) and desperately need to take the taste away.
For reasons known only to our Intelligent Designer, any activity where a certain amount of men are involved will always devolve into a competition, and eating lunch is no exception. I’m not entirely sure how it happened but before long, we are racing each other to finish our celestial body-sized dough disc. It’s slow going, even with my years of training, but I’m a strong contender until Carl starts to cheat by folding his pizza into squares before ramming them into his mouth, doubling his demolition rate. We are incensed but can’t argue with the results: he finishes and looks smug before retiring to the bathroom, looking queasy. I hope it was worth the round of high-fives he receives as his prize.
Onwards, then, in the gathering dusk to Põltsamaa, some distance to the north-west. In addition to the monumental carbohydrate crash I have begun to feel slightly queasy, although I am manly and hardcore and don’t show it in any way. We park up for a pit-stop at Põltsamaa Castle, a half-renovated ruin which is surprisingly full of people. Many of them are in period costume and we assume that they either work here or we have stumbled into a massive LARP session and they are nerds dressed as wizards.
By the time we set up shop in our hotel for the evening, I cannot pretend that I am not feeling ill any longer and so, with a heavy heart, I play Ministry’s Psalm 69 through my earphones and get some zeds. It’s a real shame, too, because a short way down the road is a nightclub out of which comes some ‘banging choons’ and I had half a mind to go there despite the gathering hordes of classy clientele – scores of dolled-up youngsters – and the name of the place, which I’m told translates to ‘The Frolicking Woman Tavern’.
While I am somewhere between delicious, crushing industrial music and sleep, the rest of our crew are enjoying themselves in the basement of the hotel, wherein live a couple of pool tables under lax supervision. Pool is played until it is decided that playing drinking games is far more fruitful and, indeed, this is what happens until 2am. John, being the fresh-faced youngster that he is, drinks too much delicious Zebra juice (it’s actually just called Zebra and is consumed by the canful) and decides to daub the word ‘LOL’ onto Kris’s back using pool cue chalk.
I like to imagine that Kris is already semi-naked because, well, that’s how he rolls.
The retaliation is swift and brutal: John’s clothes are ritualistically torn from his body and the words ‘WILL TAKE IT HERE’ followed by a downwards arrow are tattooed onto his back, again, with chalk.
Aaaah, adults.
The refreshment is clearly needed because my brain has failed to boot up this morning: I completely forget that I am wearing my favourite headgear – the beautiful straw hat I had spent a great deal of money on in Last Vegas the previous summer. Things turn to slow motion as the hat fills with air and, like a perfect aerofoil, sails away in the opposite direction to us at seventy miles per hour.
I scream and beg Ann, who is driving, to stop. She stamps the brakes down and skids to a halt on the side of the road, fully believing that we have just crushed a convent school full of dying orphans.
I let her believe this because it is slightly less embarrassing for me and retrieve my hat.
Our inexorable journey continues; the roads get thinner and dirtier as we leave the highways behind and the woods get ever more dense. Eventually we stop and park up in a sparse village made of a motley collection of old, colourful wooden houses and, quite incongruously, an exquisite, pearlescent Orthodox church: Vasknarva.
We disgorge onto the grassy shore of a thin strait of water next to an ancient stone ruin. Hauled up on the grass is a rowing boat and standing on what would generously be described as a jetty (but is, in reality, a plank on a couple of bricks) is a man with a fishing rod. Across the strait is a tiny wooden shack which betrays our position in the world: A flag flying from its roof is emblazoned with the white, blue and red of the Russian Federation.
This is the Russian border.
Immediately everything takes on a different hue. The man on the jetty is not a fisherman any more: he is a secret Russian border agent. The cute, furry, feral cat circling the fisherman’s feet waiting for a piscine treat is no longer a cute, furry, feral cat: it is a RUSSIAN ROBOT SPY CAT. On the pebbles close to the water is a knot of the teeniest, tiniest frogs we have ever seen, each about the size of a fingertip: these frogs are, quite obviously, Russian-trained surveillance frogs.
Russia: the impossibly vast, impenetrable, powerful, mysterious land lies within a stone’s throw of us.
We throw stones at it, then leave.
The strait is actually the River Narva and joins the giant Lake Peipus (or Peipsi... frankly I’m not sure which noun to use) just south of us to the Gulf of Finland (and thence to the Baltic) forty-eight miles north of here. It’s to the shore of the lake that we head off to now, two minutes away. There’s a strip of sand and the shimmering lake stretches away to the horizon but we spend most of the time kicking a football around in a woody grove nearby.
There is an abundance of long, spear-like trees branches littering the floor and naturally we all revert to Neanderthals fashioning the first weapons, first with simple pretend-lightsaber fights (of course) and later evolving to jousting and, finally, ludicrous baseball. With an inflatable football. And a three-metre long spar for a bat.
Time is running away and so we mount up and head north to the city of Narva, the principal border crossing (and major route to St. Petersburg). We are told that Narva has the largest population of ethnic Russians as well as significant problems with unemployment and drugs although of course correlation does not imply causality and you are a massive racist for thinking as much.
There are forty-eight miles between that and us, though, and on those miles we pass a Red Army tank. It sits on a plinth complete with a dedication plaque praising the heroic Soviet liberators of Estonia and their awesome victory over the evil Nazis in 1944. It neatly skips over the far less-welcome Soviet invasion of the fledgling republic four years prior, a direct consequence of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.
We climb onto the tank like an angry mob, straddle the cannon and pose as conquerors and/or freedom fighters for photographs. We bang the sides just to see if there’s anything inside: it turns out that yes, the tank is home to a colony of wasps. Angry wasps, who rapidly leave the tank in an evil stinging cloud like some sort of bizarre bio-weapon.
We flee.
On the radio we hear news of chaos around Narva: freight drivers, fed up with typical waits of seventy hours to cross the Russian border, have all simply left their vehicles at the roadside and blocked the crossing with a human barricade. The roads in and around it are choked with trucks and their angry drivers. On our way north we pass a truck whose driver was clearly so angry he had overturned on a roundabout, spilling his cargo of sand across the road. We edge around it and carry on.
At the city itself we pull up at a supermarket and try to find some food. Narva is unlike any city we have visited thus far: it feels dark and downbeat and many of the people are scowling and sullen. We are told that most of the people here cannot speak the Estonian language, let alone the English language; indeed it seems that most of the signs we can see sport Cyrillic text alone.
In the supermarket we amuse ourself with the toy section; there is a large selection of Lego and I elect to buy a couple of sets: two trucks which stand alone but are designed to be combined into an infinitely powerful robot which we dub (with a heavy Geordie accent) Optimus Mint. After a week of playing with sticks, hair bobbles and pieces of pasta, I also pick up a tin poker kit complete with baize, chips and cards. I am feeling pretty smug with my haul and hand over my credit card to the angry-looking woman at the checkout. She looks down at the arrangement of toys on the conveyor belt, rolls her eyes and scans the card.
“Niet”, she says, pointing to the card. “Declined.”
Oh shit.
The queue behind me is growing and each and every person in it is looking at my pile of Lego and rolling their eyes.
I look sheepish and hand her my debit card, which has been working so far. She scans it.
There is a pregnant pause and I hold my breath.
The woman shakes her head. “No”, she says simply, and rolls her eyes. I sweat and I hear angry words in a language I don’t understand from further down the queue.
I deeply hope Optimus Mint is worth it and desperately hail down one of my cohorts in order to borrow money before fleeing for my life, angry mob at my heels.
We exit the city to the north, catching a glimpse of the colossal queue of vehicles we’d heard about at the border crossing, and breathe a secret sigh of relief.
Our final terminus today is Narva-Jõesuu, a town squeezed into the extreme northeastern corner of the country between the Gulf of Finland and Russia, again on the banks of the River Narva which separates us from the Russian Bear. Here the border feels a little more obvious than it did down south by the lake: across the water are official-looking (well, alright, evil-looking) guard towers undoubtedly filled to the brim with snipers who as we speak have us painted with laser sights. Powered dinghies roam up and down and we fancy we can see secret Russian submarines lurking below the surface of the water.
We throw stones at Russia and leave. Quickly.
Ultimately we arrive at Hotel Liivarand. It is late and dark and most of us are weary but the dilapidation of the building cannot escape us: electrical fuse boxes lie open to anyone who would like to fiddle (that’s us); wall-mounted lights are powered by cables which snake down the walls into domestic power outlets, the cables helpfully have metal nails driven through them to pin them to the wall. I take a shower and am convinced that the water sousing me is either mildly radioactive or at least part carcinogenic mercury. The rooms on either side of us seem to be filled with surly, shaven-headed, tracksuit-wearing Russians and we fancy the place is probably filled by and/or run by the Russian Mob and hookers.
Naturally, rather than life-threatening and frightening, we find this all hilarious and settle down to an evening of partying and poker in the sofa-filled communal hallway next to our rooms. There is some rebellion at our constant playing of the infernal game (and perhaps rightfully so – we’d played it almost every evening so far) but I need to justify the cost (and humiliation involved in the buying) of my new poker kit and so we play while the rebels drink and socialise properly.
Of course, I win.
By now most of us are itching madly: our outdoor adventures today have resulted in a mild case of being eaten alive by insects and Robin busts out his ‘bug zapper’. It is a small cylindrical device which one places over a bite before pressing a plunger at the other end, supposedly neutralising the bite. It seems like black magic to me and I poke it suspiciously in order to find out its secrets: a piezoelectric crystal which, when deformed (by pressing the plunger), generates thousands of Volts of potential. I conclude that rather than neutralising the insect bite, the device simply destroys your nerve cells so that you don’t feel itchy. Whether my conclusion is correct or not is irrelevant: I fear electricity and shocks, throw it back to Robin and scratch myself.
Finally (and specifically to annoy our Russian neighbours) we all sing a rousing chorus of the Super Mario Brothers theme music and turn in for the night.
The ‘food area’ seems to be the hotel’s function room and seems to have hosted a function either last night or very recently; it’s possible there was a wedding party here. We have a choice between (what we think is) lukewarm greasy mince and macaroni or nothing at all; some of us choose the latter but I shovel it down. It tastes reasonable enough but we suspect that it is left over from whatever function happened the previous evening.
Obviously I am not an expert on such matters but we joke that, in the daylight, the place looks and feels like a deliberately tongue-in-cheek Communist-themed hotel. The stark brick building, its furnishings, food, mercury-laden water and even the decorations remaining in the hall from whatever event we missed here last night all give off an air of 70s functionalism. We jest that our Communist breakfast was good enough to power the Red Army for fifty years and that we should stop complaining.
I brush my teeth; my gums tingle slightly as I pack up and leave.
Back in our indestructible and ridiculously filthy minibuses and we head west; Kris supplants Ann as my pilot despite his lack of a driving license and gleefully hurtles the fully-laden vehicle down the road for a while.
Our first port of call is some sort of fast-food shack on the coast road where we stop and wolf down some delicious hot-dogs, made in that delectable continental style of a hollowed-out baguette filled with sauce with a wiener slotted in. Sauce that, of course, comically jets out all over John’s clothes as soon as he takes a bite.
A little way away there is a long, thin patch of woodland pinched between the waters of the Gulf to the north and a high cliff to the south; a cliff on which we now stand. There is a bight a couple of hundred metres wide in the cliff which would ordinarily have a colossal waterfall emptying down into a roiling pool in the woodlands below. Today, however, the waterfall and the pool are dry; there is nothing below us but naked rock (and a large helping of empty beer cans).
It is a terrible shame because someone has thoughtfully built a small bridge over what should be the top of the waterfall as well as a magnificent spiral staircase down the cliff face to a walkway which protrudes out into the void over what should have been the pool. We descend the staircase and stand on the pier but alas there is nothing to see but a massive padlock engraved with Cyrillic text like the ones we saw between Tallinn: this is clearly a good place for Russians to plight their troths.
We drive a little further west and stop at Kohtla. This is the site of an old oil shale mine; the entire region here is rich in the petrochemical-laden rock and there are remnants of the extraction industry visible everywhere. Our mine is now a tourist centre and, being tourists, we are going to check it out.
First, though, a history lesson and safety briefing from our grizzled but genial tour guide. Alas he can speak no English and so our very own Kris stands up and provides a running translation. We wander past offices and meeting rooms and all the trappings of a 21st-century industrial complex.
And then, it turns into Half-Life.
We are required to don protective overalls and a flashlight-equipped helmet attached to a heavy battery and, as I zip up the garment, I am convinced I can hear an ethereal voice say “Welcome to the HEV Mk. IV protective system. For use in hazardous environment conditions.” I am inside my favourite game of all time.
The feeling only strengthens as we descend into the depths of the Earth in a stark metal lift. We exit but then immediately board a series of tiny, cramped carriages that form a long but diminutive underground rail system. Our tour guide fires up the battered locomotive at the front and drives us a kilometre or two further into the planet’s crust. This is no tourist convenience: this is the actual train mine workers used to get to work every day.
In my mind’s eye the introductory sequence to Half-Life plays out: I imagine I can see various employees going about their day around me with clipboards and lab coats. We pass derelict machinery and I dream of meeting my doom in the Sector C Test Chamber.
Aliens do not invade, however, and soon enough we disembark from the train. We are at the business end of the mine. Our guide – with Kris still translating – explains the extraction process and even allows us to play around with the giant, spiky drilling machines that look not unlike a Tiberium Harvester from Command and Conquer or a Meat Wagon from Warcraft. Some of us have a bash at extracting our own minerals with a ridiculous-looking two-metre long handheld electric drill. My geek sense tingles. It is splendid.
We’re all mined out eventually, though, and ascend into the daylight like Tim Robbins at the end of The Shawshank Redemption. Oh, spoiler alert.
After a brief spell of riding west once more, we hit our next port-of-call: the ancient town of Rakvere. Rakvere is guarded by a colossal bronze statue of an aurochs and, atop a hill, a weatherworn but well-maintained castle, now a tourist attraction. We are attracted inside and are there met with a delicious array of mediaeval pursuits: archery, swordplay, armour and a guided tour around the ever-popular torture chambers and dungeon.
First, though, we decide to unwind in the ‘armoury’, a large open area whose walls play host to a wealth of weaponry and armour. We’re instructed not to touch but of course this is a futile request: we are all warriors and we won’t be kept from our equipment. Indeed, we go berserk and help ourselves to chain hauberks and plate helmets, rusted gladiuses, longswords, bastard swords, ridiculously long claymores, cutlasses and even a three-metre long pike. James even finds a Roman-style plumed helmet which stands him in good stead as fifteen people let fly with cold steel, re-enacting every lightsaber duel, historical mêlée and fantasy role-playing game battle ever devised. John is cruelly put to death while empty suits of armour stand silent and ever-vigilant against the walls.
With our violent urges sated for the moment, we queue up and follow a tour guide into the festering, stinking pits littered with disembowelled human cadavers and shelves stocked with monstrous tools dedicated to the art of torture. There are skulls, chains, ropes and all manner of vile deeds past are related to us. A girl in our tour group is so disgusted she leaves in a terrible hurry. We giggle and point at the spiky instruments.
This is no time for frivolousness, though, for we have serious business in the castle courtyard: bows and their crossbow cousins. We’re issued with weapons and line up facing a set of targets before letting fly. The targets are large canvases painted with knights in various mean poses; I take a shortbow and handily slay my foe with the first arrow before causing grievous damage with my remaining ones. I am a stone-cold killer. Robin tried his hand with cruel-looking crossbow and thunks a quarrel into his quarry.
We have a taste for blood now and move on to large fake swords – heavy foam-covered staves. We have no armour to speak of besides our own skill, speed and agility, three things I find I am sorely lacking: despite years of training (using, of course, a keyboard and mouse) I am soundly beaten by Will. I flail and try to parry his flurry of blows before activating berserker mode and screaming curses and obscenities (or, as I like to call it, my battle cry) but in the end I am flung to the gravel-covered ground and cold-bloodedly slain.
I fight to regain my shattered manliness by chasing Scott around with a ridiculous wooden toy horse’s head attached to a stick between my legs.
As any warrior knows, the only way to follow up a battle is with a feast. We depart the castle and settle in at an absurdly wonderful restaurant nestled in the shadow of the giant aurochs. We drink ciders and beers and even some martinis in the open air as we watch the sun slide below the edge of the world. We bathe in the half-light of evening, luxuriating in nerdy banter and talking about everything and nothing before chewing on some of the finest food I have ever tasted. It is hard to imagine a more perfect end to a day.
It’s not over, though; there remains some distance to travel to our hotel and it falls to me to pilot our minibus through the now inky darkness of night, following our lead vehicle’s tail lights across many a bendy, narrow road. I insist we play the Faith No More’s King For a Day and sing my lungs out – much to my passengers’ distress. Sod them, though. I’m driving and I need to be kept awake.
We finally pull in to a frankly scary-looking lakeside hotel sixty kilometres later. It is very, very dark and many of our party have misgivings: misgivings that do not go away after we finally check in and haul our baggage upstairs to our rooms. The facilities are rudimentary indeed (and we see not a small number of silverfish roaming the floors) but I am quite at home and comfortable; my colleagues have overlooked the fact that we are effectively paying naff all for these rooms.
There is, naturally, a nightcap of poker. I am, naturally, the fucking champion.
I suppose it is time to rise.
I shame myself further when I try to pay for our room: my credit card is once again declined and I am forced to borrow money, a much better solution than the plan I’d initially tried which was to call the only person I could rely on to be exactly where I needed him at any moment: my old chum Daryl, at his computer back home in Newcastle. As the pounds tick away on my mobile phone bill, we struggle to have him log in to my online banking site before finally realising that, in fact, there is nothing worthwhile he could achieve other than assure me that my bank had not been robbed.
He assures me that this is, indeed, the case and I leave him to go and beg for money.
This will be our last day on the road and it’s our intention to go nuts: the hotel offer boat rentals and we fully plan on taking them up on their offer.
While the remainder of our team sun themselves, relax and read their books along the shore of the lake, we don our life vests and then immediately abandon them as uncool. Real men swim out of danger. James and I rent a rowboat alongside Scott and Carl while Will and Argosh join forces with John and Ryan in a couple of pedalos. It is obvious who the more nautical of us are.
We launch and immediately the destruction begins. Cannon shot sprays around us (well, splashes from the oars of the oarsmen and hands from Team Pedalo), boarding actions are performed and hulls clash as we ram one another. The pedalos, although slower, are a good deal sturdier than the rowboats and our many collisions with John and Ryan do nothing more than make us easier targets as our keel rides up over their low gunwale. Ryan takes the opportunity to deftly leap across the water into our boat and steal our oar, rendering us completely helpless.
This storm of blood and carnage can only end one way: while reaching out to seize a passing pedalo I lose my balance and pitch over the side into the murky water, but not before the side of the boat sinks a centimetre under the surface with me. James struggles to right the vessel but it’s too late and, in sickening slow motion, he tumbles out and the boat capsizes over my head.
My immediate fear isn’t of drowning or pain or anything like that. My sole, overriding worry is simply that we will be told off by the hotelier. I have brief visions of lifeguard types rushing to save us in powered boats and of our sheepish, apologetic faces glowing red as our boat is towed to the lakeside. The shame would be unbearable.
Thankfully, a minute or two passes and we hear neither sirens nor rescue helicopters. There is a temporary truce and the remaining rowboat and two (annoyingly unscathed) pedalos bob around the disaster zone, offering hands. The humiliation galvanises me, though, and rather than beg for help from the (still mercifully absent) boat rental people, I emit a manly roar and heave the boat rightside-up with a loud schlep before hauling my portly body over the gunwale to begin baling the filthy water out.
We are flushed with success but elect to take it slightly easier now, choosing to sedately probe the lake and enjoy the ludicrously sunny day. We find a wooden pallet floating in the water and each take turns at trying to stand upright on it without slipping off. It’s only when our shore-bound brethren begin to get restless that we put in to port, sodden and exhausted and two hours late on returning the oars. We are subjected to verbal abuse and extra charges by the hotelier who had in fact seen our misdeeds but just didn’t care. The bastard.
Once more packed up into our respective minibuses, we complete the last arc of our 150 kilometre radius circle around this most wonderful land with a short trip west to our terminus, Tallinn.
As we pull our battered, filthy, graffiti-covered vehicles into Kris’ driveway, we’re met with a beautiful sight: his capacious back garden is filled with fruit trees laden with all manner of apples and pears and other things besides. We are in our own personal Garden of Eden and we immediately set upon the bountiful harvest with gusto. Of course, humans cannot live on fruit alone and so we send a foraging party out on foot to hunter-gather a huge amount of meat, bread and alcohol from the local supermarket.
We’ll be staying here in Eden tonight and so we’re finally able to justify the large amount of camping gear we’d flown to the country and carried around with us for ten days. Two tents are pitched and stocked with sleeping bags, the remainder of which are stashed liberally around the inside of the two-floor wooden sauna/summer/outhouse that lives in the back garden.
Our local friends Fred and Herzog arrive to take part in the action. We sit in the grass and I spend a long, long hour trying to explain the rules of poker (badly) before I am overruled with someone’s insistence that they can learn it quicker if we just shut up and play.
They do not, and I become frustrated before eventually abandoning the game: that’s what I get for listening to other people.
Our intrepid harvesters return laden with goods, a significant proportion of which are buckets of tasty marinated meat-chunks which we immediately begin to burn on our barbecue and eat. There is also a large amount of booze and we decide that the best way to get rid of it would be to have drinking competitions. There are rousing choruses of the Estonian girl-guides song, a bracing game of 21 and, finally, Carl makes a critical mistake.
He insists that he can out-drink Emma.
What follows is, depending on who you are rooting for, a pathetic or triumphant display of irresponsible binge-drinking followed by vomiting and unconsciousness. It is, of course, not even worth noting that Emma emerges victorious – as long as your definition of ‘victory’ includes permanent liver damage. Carl is summarily emasculated but then tries his best to recover his masculinity by fondling Alex in his tent.
Tender though the fondling is, Alex is mentally scarred forever and decides he would rather suffer the most uncomfortable night’s sleep in his life in the sauna.
Our epic journey is complete but we have the minibuses for another day. We chew on the remainder of the food from last night and decide that the best thing to do would be to sit around being phenomenally lazy and playing Super Mario Brothers on Robin’s portable DVD player. Someone has also found a ridiculously difficult Flash-based version of the game on a Web site and we all take turns trying to beat it. It is impossible because the clone is designed to be arbitrarily hard: oftentimes you are killed for absolutely no reason whatsoever.
We quit with disgust.
Of course, after a long time on the road, we find it difficult to stay in one place for too long. We take a vote and the bowling alley wins out; the minibuses are filled and we hit the road. The bowling alley is swelteringly hot and I blame my abysmal performance on the litres of sweat running down my body; I gutter ball after ball and eventually give up altogether.
On the way back we fill the buses with petrol ahead of having to hand them back in to the rental depot, but disaster strikes: The silver minibus fails to start up again. We spend a horrifying moment making sure that we had used the correct pump and that we hadn’t just put forty litres of unleaded petrol into a diesel engine before it becomes clear that the only way we’re moving again is with a ten-person bump-start.
Luckily, we have persons to spare.
We disgorge into the night. The beautiful weather has begun to break and rain has begun to fall; we have an incredibly early rise ahead of us and so we think the best thing to do is pack our bags. There follows an hour of ‘playing Tetris’: assembling our various items into an optimal configuration in our suitcases. True to the stereotype, the girls are the best at this.
By the time we are finished, Kris’ back garden is a muddy swamp and we are soaked through: it is clearly time for bed.
Wordlessly we pack our bags and paraphernalia into our filthy, battered buses for the last time before taking the short journey to the airport’s car rental area. Each of us sheds a tear as we hand the keys for our metal steeds over; we wish them farewell and drag our bags into the terminal.
Our local friends have travelled to see us off. There are more tears as we have our final hugs; I pretend to be not as affected as usual because I am a veteran of this part of the trip. I am lying to myself.
Our flight back is tooth-pullingly painful: we share the aisle with a disgustingly obnoxious Russian family whose manifold litter are permitted to run screaming from the nose to the tail of the aircraft, snot dangling from their filthy noses, hitting and annoying every single sleepy British traveller on the way. Their ignoramus parents ignore them and conduct their discussions very very loudly. Not only do they deliberately destroy any hope of sleep we had but they also commit the cardinal sin of standing up to get their luggage down as soon as the ’plane’s landing gear touches the tarmac, causing a (just as annoyed as we are) cabin crew to angrily chastise them over the PA.
Our fellowship finally dissolves for good after we collect our bags: Ryan boards a second plane to the Channel Islands; Team Scotland board a second plane to Glasgow and still others catch lifts from friends and family back to their homes. I myself am still at the mercy of the National Express coach company and so it’s a long, long time before I am finally able to climb into my own bed.
I sleep, and dream of being behind the wheel of a packed minibus.