30.8: The Klamp's at Põltsamaa

Today I had a pretty laid back morning, with a few Skype calls, writing and a visit to Werner’s. The main activity for the day was to travel to Põltsamaa, a town ~50km northwest of Tartu to meet the Klamp family. I am distantly related to the Klamps and my grandmother is a good friend of Eha Klamp, with whom I have been in contact. At 1pm I was at the bussijaam and ready to board the bus to Põltsamaa. By about 8 minutes past 1 however, I was thinking that perhaps I had encountered my first Estonian bus that wasn’t running perfectly to schedule! I went inside to enquire and instead found that the Tartu bussijaam has one platform on the opposite side of the station from where I was sitting, where the Põltsamaa/Tallinn direction busses depart. Now I know. Fortunately the next bus was due to depart in about 5 minutes and was an express line, so I was only 10 minutes late in the end… lucky! I rang Eha to let her know.

Eha and husband Toivo along with one of their grandchildren were at the Põltsamaa bussijaam to greet me. We drove back to the local youth centre that Eha and Toivo’s daughter Heidi helped establish in 1999 and now manages. We visited here in 2012, this is the post. Eha and Toivo’s son Mati was there and it was his daughter’s seventh birthday party. As such, there were lots of children and other people there celebrating. We spent the afternoon catching up over a large spread of party food, talking about our respective lives. Eha and Toivo both seemed to be in good health. Mati works in a school for children with special needs and is also one half of a very popular Estonian band, Ansambel MaMa. A YouTube video is below. Both Mati and Heidi are considering travelling to Australia in the future, which was nice to hear. After exchanging some gifts and taking some photos, Eha and Toivo dropped me back at the Bussijaam to catch the 18.30 bus back to Tartu.

Inside the youth centre

View from front of youth centre 

Toivo, Eha and me

Mati, me and Heidi

My evening wasn’t over, however. Back at Terviseks, Christian had been slaving over the stove for three hours to cook us all dinner. A risotto for the vegetarians and an extremely good pasta sauce for the carnivores. We had a most pleasant evening together. Besides Christian and me, there were three sisters from Austria and another long-term Terviseks resident from Italy.

29.8: Piusa caves

Today I decided to make a day trip to the terminus of the other railway line which extends from Tartu, at the Piusa caves. I set out in a southeasterly direction from Tartu for ~80km. The journey took 1.5 hours and was a good opportunity to catch up with writing. An interesting part of the journey was when, upon nearing Piusa, we actually changed lines to the line which runs between Russia and Valga. This line is now largely disused, except for the small section used to reach Piusa. This is only used in the summer. To anyone travelling to Estonia, I can highly recommend the trains. The whole system has recently been overhauled with the lines re-laid and new trains rolled out. This means that the journeys are extremely smooth with fast WiFi and power points. I think the journeys are on average less expensive than bus travel. It is also extremely easy to carry a bicycle on board, as many people did today. The only draw back is that the frequency of trains is much lower than busses, meaning the travel times are not very flexible. I think this is because many of the lines have to be shared with freight.

After a pleasant journey I alighted at Piusa and wandered over to the information centre where I booked myself on a tour of the caves. The ‘caves’ are actually the remains of an extensive sandstone quarrying operation that took place in this area from 1922 to 1966. The sandstone here was particularly prized as, with its high quartz content, it was perfect for glass making. What remains is a 22km network of cathedral-lake tunnels. Legend has it that these tunnels actually extended much further, even crossing under the border into Russia. The caves have now become home to the largest bat population in the Baltics. The bats hibernate here during the winter, as the temperature is fairly constant and never falls below zero. As it is still summer, there were no bats today. Inside the caves was a bit chilly at ~5˚C. I was a tad disappointed to find that the visit to the caves was restricted to concrete reinforced viewing area. Apparently bits of rock occasionally fall from the ceiling, making the caves too dangerous to wander around. It was still nice to see though.

Writing aboard train

Train waiting patiently at the Piusa station

An open area of mine

The caves

For me, the more interesting part of the visit was the nature trail that extends from the visitor centre. The forests around here (as in other parts of southern Estonia) were really beautiful. The gentle undulations (sorry, Estonian Himalayas) around here made them particularly so. Fortunately the rain held off as I walked around and the sun even came out for a while. I found a nice place to sit and eat my lunch. I was again able to pick blueberries and cowberries (not to be confused with the flavourless bearberries!) for dessert. Near the end of the trail were the remains of German trenches, left over from WWII. These were pretty interesting to check out. There were also occasionally fenced off sinkholes, presumably where the tunnels beneath had collapsed.

Ilusmets (beautiful forest)

An open mined area

Sinkholes

WWII trenches

I had time for a coffee and a bit more writing before catching the train back to Tartu.

Once back in Tartu, I was able to sell my bicycle to Christian, the owner of Terviseks, where I am staying. Getting rid of the bike was a weight off my mind, although I will miss it.

28.8: Shopping

Overnight I received a load of information about a 10-day conservation holiday I am participating in next week with the Eestimaa Looduse Fond (Estonian Fund for Nature). We are first going to a little place in the west of Estonia called Pivarootsi where we will be clearing scrub from disused grazing land to enable migratory birds and certain rare plant species to return. We’re then going to Vormsi Island, which is one of the smaller islands off Estonia’s coast. Resultantly, I decided I needed to get some more appropriate work clothes. As I’ll most likely throw these things away once I’m done with them (or re-donate them if they’re not destroyed), I wanted to find some cheap, ideally second-hand stuff. Fortunately some Tartu locals and friends, Katre and Piia, were able to point me in the direction of some op-shops and other suitable places to go. Clothes shopping isn’t my favourite activity so I made sure to intersperse it with some coffee breaks. I found some good long sleeve shirts and waterproof pants at a second hand shop called Humana, then found a hat at another place on Kuperjanovi. None of these places had shoes of my size so I checked out some of the bigger supermarkets around town with no luck. In the end I decided to trek to the edge of town to a very large shopping centre which had a Rimi Hypermarket, basically a Big W kind of place, along with a plethora of other stores and an indoor ice skating rink. Here I was able to find a cheap pair of sneakers which fit the bill nicely. I was very pleased with myself when, at 5pm, I managed to catch a free bus back to the kesklinn, saving me a rather long walk.

The day started with a brief military parade on the plats

A typical Tartu suburb (very different from Narva!!) 

Indoor ice skating rink at shopping centre

In the evening I met up with Gustavo at a nearby restaurant called Meat Market. We had some cocktails, Gustavo watching very closely to try and pick up some tricks, and a delicious platter of different smoked meats, fish and dips. We spent the evening chatting about various things, with Gustavo showing me some pretty amazing ultrasound photos of the baby he and his wife are expecting, one of which he had set as the background image on his phone. Eventually we exchanged some gifts and went our separate ways. Just as we were doing this in the Raekoja plats, I got a tap on the shoulder from Martiene, one of the students from the second part of the language course. She is originally from The Netherlands and is doing her masters in human geography at the University of Tartu. She was taking part in a pub-crawl organised for international students so I joined in as a ring-in. There were two pubs left, both of which were extremely noisy and didn’t lend well to conversation. Nevertheless it was nice to catch up with Martiene and meet a handful of other international students and Tartu locals.

27.8: Back to Tartu

My bus wasn’t due to depart Narva until 12.50 so I had the morning to pack and play around with some boring technological things. The weather had mellowed somewhat and was a mixture of sunny clear skies and overcast drizzle throughout the day. After farewelling my host I loaded up my bicycle and wandered over to the bussijaam. The trip back to Tartu took 3.5 hours and was quite pleasant. I added the map to my blog. Along the way, it was interesting to hear the gradual transition in language from Russian to Estonian as we headed further south. The difference between Narva and Tartu is quite great and was particularly evident when travelling directly from one city to the other. The ethnic makeup of Tartu is about 85% Estonian and 15% Russian/other. It was nice to be back at my digs on the Raekoja plats. I cooked some sausages and veg for dinner.

26.8: A rainy day in Narva

It would seem, for the moment at least, the Estonian summer has come to an end. I awoke this morning to overcast skies and light rain. Armed with my rain jacket, I set out to explore Narva a little further. My first port of call was the art gallery, which was included in the ticket price of the Narva Castle. There, a kind old lady turned on the lights for me and explained the origins of all the different exhibitions. There were four exhibitions spread over two levels. One of contemporary works by artists from Narva, the next was the museums collection of pieces specifically of Narva throughout the decades. On the top floor was the museums private collection, much of which was lost during WWII, only to be later found, water damaged, in a nearby barn. Most of this was restored and is on display once again. The final exhibition was of the types of housing found across Estonia throughout history, from ancient one-room structures to German manor houses.

Kunstigalerii

After this I attempted three ‘mystery’ geocaches. This type of geocache varies from a multi cache in that clues are given in the description of the geocache and it is from these that one has to figure out where the geocache is hidden. These can be very difficult however those that I attempted were not so bad. The first led me back to the remains of the Swedish fortifications. In the photo I took two days ago, I didn’t realise that there was in fact an entire passageway behind the little openings in the wall, extending for some distance. This was really interesting to explore, in spite of the array of unsavoury litter lying around the place.

An entrance to the tunnels

View out 

The next two caches led me to some other interesting locations. The first in the ‘dark garden’ in another hole in the towns wall. The next was near the Raekoja plats, on which stands the new University of Tartu Narva campus, beside the original town hall. Some interesting architecture here, I thought it was quite a good mix of old and new.

UT Narva campus

UT left, town hall right

With the rain still holding off, I was able to ear my lunch beside the river, with a coffee, overlooking the border crossing.

Views to Ivangorod

In the afternoon I attempted another multi cache, this time with eight stages, designed to take one on a tour of the Kreenholm neighborhood of Narva. Kreenholm grew rapidly in the late 19^th when the industrious baron Von Knoop decided to build a cotton mill there. Knoop learnt much about the cotton trade in Manchester and used British machinery (and labour) to fit out his mills. Unfortunately, the collapse of the soviet union saw a decline in the mills business, leading to its ultimate closure in 2010. The cache started at the Lutheran cathedral – still closed – which was originally built for the Lutheran workers at Kreenholm and can hold up to 5000 people. It was then on to the railway station (the original having been destroyed in WWII) and the hydroelectric plant, both of which were critical to the operations at Kreenholm. Next was Gerassimovi Hall, constructed for workers in 1957 and named after a bloke the soviet’s hailed as a hero, having led a large strike at the factory in 1872. The building has been sitting disused for 10 years and is in a very sorry state of repair. It was then past a war memorial and a wing of the Narva hospital that was once used exclusively for the factory workers. The final location was the house of the factory director, a majestic wooden construction on a raised bank of the River Narva, next to two now disused border crossing bridges, again once used by factory workers. At each of these locations I had collected a number (e.g. the number of swords on a coat of arms or the number of pillars on a building) and used these to determine the coordinates of where the geocache was hidden. As it turned out, it was next to the directors house, with an excellent view over the river. Another great geocache that took me to places I wouldn’t have otherwise visited/known about.

Hospital

Directors house 

View downstream

… and upstream 

Up until this point the weather had been playing nice. However, now that I was about two kilometres from the city centre, it decided to start raining heavily, meaning I got a bit wet on the walk back. I ducked into the first café I happened upon on the way home to ride out the storm. After spending a while there writing and making a Skype call I had a pre-dinner drink and snack at a nearby pub before heading home to cook dinner.