Circumnavigation of the Baltic 6

Pärnu

The trip was uneventful; the countryside lush and green, with storks in abundance, the Lilac is a good month behind ours and is just now in full bloom. It was a fine day when we arrived in the smashing little seaside/river town on the Vandra. It has been through many hands until very recently , first Latvian, Polish, Sweden, German, Russia before finally ending up in 1918 as Estonian, alas in 1944 it was taken into the USSR where remained until the fall of the socialist state.  It was a favourite place for rehabilitation (kur) in the 19^th century and the large villas  stand as witness to this time (many empty and forlorn along the 7km beach front. The youth still gather here to spend their summer holidays and party well into the night.

We found our campsite without a great deal of trouble, got booked in and our camper set up. We decided to walk into town, it was only 1.5km and was along a pleasant riverside path. Here in Pärnu there is a lot of building/rebuilding works going on, thank goodness using original materials (wood) and in the original Baltic style.

The old part of the city is well maintained and has been restored to a very high standard and true to its history. The “Altstadt” is not large but it is very nice with lots of cafés, restaurants and souvenir shops, we made use of the first two, but gave the last one  a miss.

We stopped for lunch at a Russian restaurant (over 30% of Estonians are of Russian extraction) called Nikolai (Nicholas) after the Russian Tzar, how things have moved on in 20 or so years. We ordered a mixed sharing platter consisting of grilled sausages, chicken legs , pickled gherkins, small springrolls, calamari rings, strips of calamari and fried black garlic bread all with a sour cream dip. 

Sorry to say it was not as we hoped typical Estonian fare and was on the whole quite oily. Never mind better luck next time.

We finished touristing the old city and headed off through some of the old wooden villas  and along the river bank back to the campsite and a relaxing evening watching TV, drinking gin and lemon, 

followed by a nice bottle of pink. 

I watched a pair and a single skulls out on the river, very impressive. Then it was time for a bit of shut eye ready for the road the next day.

We had a full English Breakfast the next morning, We chatted to our nice neighbours from Vaasa a town that we would be going to as it would be from there that we would get the ferry to Sweden. They informed us that they belong to the Swedish majority that live in that part of Finland and have been coming to Estonia for many years in summer for a month. Very nice people in deed.

Lahemaa National Park

We had decided to visit the national park by cutting across country on route 5, but our lass who guides us, thought otherwise and she took us North almost to Tallinn before detouring around it via a set of extended road works. Eventually we got on to route 1 ( very well paved motorway) heading to the Russian border. We filled up with diesel, this was an automatic system, but a very helpful lass was able to explain (to Linda) the intricacies of automatic pumps. After another 10 km or so we turned off the motorway and into the forest, the well paved road took us a good 30km through wooded areas, there are bear, elk, wild boar and all manner of wild life, we saw none of it not even a one flattened on the road. We reached our selected camping site, it is a very nice one, set in the middle of the woods just before Vösu, it is well signposted and even if you drive past it there is a sign telling you to turn around. 

It is a grassed site but with a bit of manoeuvring you can get a relatively even pitch. The facilities are what some would call primitive; I call them rustically sound and completely adequate. Linda even got a load of washing done (about time she was getting withdrawal symptoms). There was a short path through the woods that ended at a small beach, bound on either side by reed beds, the beds were full of warbler chatter, wonderful.

We returned to the van and decided to Käsmu peninsular, this was well written about in Linda’s guide book and the material that the campsite had put together was full of praises of it. Käsmu had in earlier times been a very wealthy harbour and sea captains had built their homes here. Later when the railway line had been built connecting St Petersburg to Tallinn, the Merchants would stop off here to take a break, the houses would be let out to the merchants and the owners would move into the huts in the garden.

At the headland is a natural phenomenon called the Erratic Boulders, these boulders, relics of the last ice age are visible in the sea   and also in the gardens of Käsmu and strewn throughout the forest.

The area is a full of bird life and a lot of the paths, trails and shoreline is off limits during the breeding season. We walked to the spit and took a few photographs of the boulders, the Devils Islands and sedge warblers in the reed beds.

Linda decided not to take the path back through the forest (she doesn’t really like bears, elk or wild boar) but I took a trail it was a very nice trail indeed, winding its way through thickets and over fallen tree trunks in various states of decomposition. 

The track eventually met a slightly better track, this had been used in the past by the salt smugglers to bring the cargoes of the precious minerals from the beaches surreptitiously to Käsmu. Salt was a very precious mineral it being used to preserve the Baltic fish that would have been landed at the small fishing ports dotted all along the coast.

I returned to the car park to find Linda just about to go to a very posh restaurant to have Kaffee und Kuchen, I decide to join her and we sat in the sun and enjoyed it. The houses in the villages are very well kept, all built from wood lapboard, painted in decent pastel colours, none of your garish Mediterranean colours here.

We returned to the campsite and got ourselves settled once again, the sky and woods full of bird song and a cuckoo  was cucking its coo in the forest that fringed the site. Time to stoke up the BBQ, marinate the steak, get the potatoes and asparagus on the hob ready for our evening meal, we did have a Gin and Lemon while waiting for the food and the pink to chill.  We watched a bit of tele and I done a bit on my Blog and then shut eye, tomorrow off to Tallinn, book the ferry and do a bit of sight seeing.