There is a hitchhiking competition held every year in Tartu by the university nature preservation club. I participated last year, and since it went unexpectedly well (we got the second place), I was anxious to try it again this year.
The competition is for mixed (boy-girl) pairs, who have 3.5 days to visit as many of the ~40 checkpoints as they can, using only walking and hitchiking as the means of transportation. The competition generally starts on Monday in Tartu and the finish is on Thursday in the Viljandi Folk Music Festival. To collect a point the pair has to take a photo with at least one member visible along with the object described in the checkpoint description (such as a certain memorial stone or a building). The checkpoints are scattered around all across Estonia, both on the mainland and on the islands, and although they were numbered, the pairs are free to choose the order in which they collected them as well as which points to collect and which to abandon.
This year, I had my girlfriend as my hitchiking partner, which is common, although a pair of two friends seems to be more frequent in a ratio of about 1:2, judging by the 13 pairs on the starting line this year.
The competition started at 10.00 behind the Town Hall in Tartu. We arrived just in time to hear the introductory speech, after which they handed us the roadmap collection, the checkpoint descriptions and a SIM-card for mobile tracking.
Our first order of business was to make some copies of the checkpoint descriptions, as my last year's experience showed that they tend to be very easy to misplace or have damaged accidentally and so it pays to have a few spares. As we also had some errands to run, we decided to split the work. I therefore grabbed the bags and headed to my workplace to do the copying, while T.K. (my gf) headed first to the library and then to grab us both breakfast.
After she joined me with the sandwiches, we decided to head to the southern border of Tartu to try and take 5 of the 7 points in SE-Estonia.
When we got there, we found two pairs on the side of the road already. One of them got picked up ahead of us, but the car that took the other pair also drove a bit further and picked us up as well. We were now two competing pairs in the same car.
The driver was a young man who had graduated high school the year before and had just recently finished military service. He seemed eager to help us and so we wasted no time in explaining that we were competing and needed to visit certain (weird) places. As 3 of the 5 checkpoints (all memorial stones) were on his route, he gladly drove us to all these. He said he would also drop us off to the fourth, but needed to go by her grandmothers to drop something off. Her grandmother, however, lived about 10 km from the 5-th point and once he realized this, he made the following offer: "I'll take you to the 5-th and then back to the 4-th, if you'll share a burger with me in Põlva". This we gladly agreed to.
He had a mutual friend with the girl from the other pair and they talked a while about that. After that it turned out that he was to come to study Computer Science in Tartu, at which point I explained what I do for a living and what he can expect when coming to study in Tartu. By the time he dropped us off at one of the main roads heading back to Tartu, we had managed to collect 5 checkpoints in less than 3 hours, probably putting us ahead of most of the competition.
Getting back to Tartu was also easy, as we were essentially picked up by the first car passing by, which took us directly to the shopping mall on the outskirts of Tartu. We went through the mall to the bus stop and took an inner-city bus (the use of which was also within rules) to the other side of the town.
We now attempted to hitchike north, towards Narva. However, it seemed that our luck had changed and had now abandoned us - there was quite a bit of traffic, but no-one was interested in picking us up. After nearly half an hour of not being picked up, I finally realized what the problem was, however - we were on the side of the wrong road - which led to the right place, but which was marked as a side-road, not the main road by the road maps. Thankfully, the right road was still within walking distance, so after 3 km of walking we were finally in the right place.
There we got picked up pretty quickly. The driver asked where we wanted to go and what we were doing, of course. While trying to answer, we discovered to our horror that we had lost our Estonian Road Atlas that we relied on for navigation - so we quickly asked the driver to stop and to just drop us to the nearest bus stop.
That was a pretty unsettling experience for us. However, I quickly remembered a similar incident from last year, when my partner had lost her phone near one checkpoint and then had to hitchhike back and was successful in retrieving it. In a similar vain, I recommended that T. go back alone as a lone girl without bags tends to be picked up more quickly. She agreed and did indeed get a ride quite quickly. Soon after I got a phone call from her saying that she had indeed found the roadmaps and was now on her way back.
In another 5 minutes she already said she was in a car and told me to prepare our bags. It turned out she had been picked up by a family van driving back home. We asked them about the next checkpoint (which was a fence made out of old skis), one of the children said he had seen it once, but could not remember the location. They told us that they could not drive us all the way, but dropped us off at a crossing about 3/4 of the way there.
What followed was probably the longest wait during our whole trip, as we did not get picked up for nearly 3 hours and managed to walk nearly 6 km before finally getting a car. Not a total loss, though, as we passed by a herd of cows while walking, netting us an extra point for "a lone cow on the side of the road".
We were eventually picked up by an executive of VKG, one of the biggest private energy providers in Estonia. Despite his stern looks, he was very helpful and agreed to drive us through Kasepää and help search for the ski fence. The fence, however, was nowhere to be found. On contacting the organizers, it turned out we weren't the only ones with the problem and that the fence was probably in another Kasepää, 30 km south. This was a bit too far off the road, however, so we decided to just continue northwards in the same car.
He dropped us off at the Tallinn-St.Petersburg highway, just north of Kohtla-Järve, where we arrived just as the sun was setting. We thanked him and then put our thumbs up again, this time moving towards Narva. Despite the bad reputation of Tallinn-St.Petersburg highway among hitchikers, we were picked up in a matter of minutes.
The man who had taken us aboard was quite friendly, but there was a small problem of a language barrier. Most people in NE-Estonia are native russian-speakers, originally from other parts of the Soviet union. As for us, both me and T. have both learned some russian in school, but since neither of us has had to use it much, we were both fairly rusty, being able to communicate only the most basic things. Most of the car ride was therefore spent in silence.
Before entering Sillamäe (about 7 km short of our destination), we started thinking on what to do next. The sun had set completely and it was quite dark. We were in NE estonia, which has a reputation for a high crime rate. It seemed that the sensible course would be to find some lodging. We therefore said we wanted to go to hotel. The driver smiled and said he would gladly drop us off at hotel "Krunk".
Entering the hotel, we realized why he had smiled - hotel Krunk was a fancy, 3, maybe even 4-star hotel, with rooms going for 60 eur - a bit out of our budget range (which he could easily tell considering how we dressed and travelled). We therefore started discussing alternatives.
According to the map, there was one other place in Sillamäe called hostel "Oravake". However, I remmembered I had heared about that from Taiji friends of mine - who had always described it fondly as a "complete hellhole". For me, that would have been a good reason to visit - just to see how bad it could be - but T. persuaded me to keep on hitchiking and try to reach our checkpoint in Sinimäe.
Walking out of Sillamäe, we were both struck by its beauty. It was a soviet city, but built in the beginning of the era, with remarkably beautiful buildings and wide roads with plenty of greenery. Quite surprising for us, since we had been stuck in the stereotypes of NE being the backwater of Estonia.
We got to the side of the road and raised our thumbs. And then burst in laughter, as it dawned on us what we were doing. It was 11 PM, completely dark (save for the streetlights) and we were hitchhiking in what is reputably the highest crime rate area in Estonia. I commented that "I would not pick us up if I was a driver passing by here!".
Thankfully, not everyone thought the way I did and within half an hour, we were picked up by a mild mannered older russian man, driving home to Narva. He gladly dropped us off by the Sinimäe sign, from where it was maybe half a km walk to the village.
The place itself seemed nearly deserted, and the checkpoint (a memorial cross for the battle in Sinimäe - one of the bloodiest battles in WW2 in Estonia) was nowhere to be found. Neither was the hostel reputed to be in the village by the roadmap.
However, we were again very lucky - as we stumbled to a museum, and the light was on in the ground floor. We knocked on the door and a middle-aged man answered us - IN ESTONIAN. We quickly explained our situation and asked about both the cross and the hostel. He explained that the hostel we were looking for was to the north near the coast, maybe 5-6 km away, but that the cross was indeed nearby, maybe 2 km to the west, and he gladly gave us directions there. The battery of my phone (that doubled as our GPS) had run out, so I asked if I could leave it to charge while we went to take the checkpoint, and he agreed, asking us to be back in an hour or so.
We therefore continued walking, in darkness without streetlights and with dogs barking on both sides of the road - until we came to a bus stop that did not have a name printed on it. And then past that, to a cemetery. And sure enough - it was midnight. We knew that the cross was nearby, but in darkness it was impossible to find. We headed back to the museum.
The guardian was still there, and explained that we should have turned back from the bus stop and had literally stopped maybe just 100 m from the cross - which we would have definitely seen if it's lighting had been on. At that point, however, we were too tired to go there again so we decided to call it a night and try in the early morning.
The man showed us a spot on the museum lawn where he thought it should be good to camp, and also showed us to the bathroom where we refilled our water supply. We thanked him dearly and then set off to erect the tent.
We failed, however. The tent, which I had borrowed from a friend, seemed to be a standard two-arc tent, but for some reason, we could not get the arcs to bend properly. As we were dead-tired, we decided to just let it be, put one part of the tent under us, another over us, pinned both down so they would not move and then climbed between them in our sleeping bags, hoping to get a few hours of sleep before continuing.
The competition is for mixed (boy-girl) pairs, who have 3.5 days to visit as many of the ~40 checkpoints as they can, using only walking and hitchiking as the means of transportation. The competition generally starts on Monday in Tartu and the finish is on Thursday in the Viljandi Folk Music Festival. To collect a point the pair has to take a photo with at least one member visible along with the object described in the checkpoint description (such as a certain memorial stone or a building). The checkpoints are scattered around all across Estonia, both on the mainland and on the islands, and although they were numbered, the pairs are free to choose the order in which they collected them as well as which points to collect and which to abandon.
This year, I had my girlfriend as my hitchiking partner, which is common, although a pair of two friends seems to be more frequent in a ratio of about 1:2, judging by the 13 pairs on the starting line this year.
The competition started at 10.00 behind the Town Hall in Tartu. We arrived just in time to hear the introductory speech, after which they handed us the roadmap collection, the checkpoint descriptions and a SIM-card for mobile tracking.
Our first order of business was to make some copies of the checkpoint descriptions, as my last year's experience showed that they tend to be very easy to misplace or have damaged accidentally and so it pays to have a few spares. As we also had some errands to run, we decided to split the work. I therefore grabbed the bags and headed to my workplace to do the copying, while T.K. (my gf) headed first to the library and then to grab us both breakfast.
After she joined me with the sandwiches, we decided to head to the southern border of Tartu to try and take 5 of the 7 points in SE-Estonia.
When we got there, we found two pairs on the side of the road already. One of them got picked up ahead of us, but the car that took the other pair also drove a bit further and picked us up as well. We were now two competing pairs in the same car.
The driver was a young man who had graduated high school the year before and had just recently finished military service. He seemed eager to help us and so we wasted no time in explaining that we were competing and needed to visit certain (weird) places. As 3 of the 5 checkpoints (all memorial stones) were on his route, he gladly drove us to all these. He said he would also drop us off to the fourth, but needed to go by her grandmothers to drop something off. Her grandmother, however, lived about 10 km from the 5-th point and once he realized this, he made the following offer: "I'll take you to the 5-th and then back to the 4-th, if you'll share a burger with me in Põlva". This we gladly agreed to.
He had a mutual friend with the girl from the other pair and they talked a while about that. After that it turned out that he was to come to study Computer Science in Tartu, at which point I explained what I do for a living and what he can expect when coming to study in Tartu. By the time he dropped us off at one of the main roads heading back to Tartu, we had managed to collect 5 checkpoints in less than 3 hours, probably putting us ahead of most of the competition.
Getting back to Tartu was also easy, as we were essentially picked up by the first car passing by, which took us directly to the shopping mall on the outskirts of Tartu. We went through the mall to the bus stop and took an inner-city bus (the use of which was also within rules) to the other side of the town.
We now attempted to hitchike north, towards Narva. However, it seemed that our luck had changed and had now abandoned us - there was quite a bit of traffic, but no-one was interested in picking us up. After nearly half an hour of not being picked up, I finally realized what the problem was, however - we were on the side of the wrong road - which led to the right place, but which was marked as a side-road, not the main road by the road maps. Thankfully, the right road was still within walking distance, so after 3 km of walking we were finally in the right place.
There we got picked up pretty quickly. The driver asked where we wanted to go and what we were doing, of course. While trying to answer, we discovered to our horror that we had lost our Estonian Road Atlas that we relied on for navigation - so we quickly asked the driver to stop and to just drop us to the nearest bus stop.
That was a pretty unsettling experience for us. However, I quickly remembered a similar incident from last year, when my partner had lost her phone near one checkpoint and then had to hitchhike back and was successful in retrieving it. In a similar vain, I recommended that T. go back alone as a lone girl without bags tends to be picked up more quickly. She agreed and did indeed get a ride quite quickly. Soon after I got a phone call from her saying that she had indeed found the roadmaps and was now on her way back.
In another 5 minutes she already said she was in a car and told me to prepare our bags. It turned out she had been picked up by a family van driving back home. We asked them about the next checkpoint (which was a fence made out of old skis), one of the children said he had seen it once, but could not remember the location. They told us that they could not drive us all the way, but dropped us off at a crossing about 3/4 of the way there.
What followed was probably the longest wait during our whole trip, as we did not get picked up for nearly 3 hours and managed to walk nearly 6 km before finally getting a car. Not a total loss, though, as we passed by a herd of cows while walking, netting us an extra point for "a lone cow on the side of the road".
We were eventually picked up by an executive of VKG, one of the biggest private energy providers in Estonia. Despite his stern looks, he was very helpful and agreed to drive us through Kasepää and help search for the ski fence. The fence, however, was nowhere to be found. On contacting the organizers, it turned out we weren't the only ones with the problem and that the fence was probably in another Kasepää, 30 km south. This was a bit too far off the road, however, so we decided to just continue northwards in the same car.
He dropped us off at the Tallinn-St.Petersburg highway, just north of Kohtla-Järve, where we arrived just as the sun was setting. We thanked him and then put our thumbs up again, this time moving towards Narva. Despite the bad reputation of Tallinn-St.Petersburg highway among hitchikers, we were picked up in a matter of minutes.
The man who had taken us aboard was quite friendly, but there was a small problem of a language barrier. Most people in NE-Estonia are native russian-speakers, originally from other parts of the Soviet union. As for us, both me and T. have both learned some russian in school, but since neither of us has had to use it much, we were both fairly rusty, being able to communicate only the most basic things. Most of the car ride was therefore spent in silence.
Before entering Sillamäe (about 7 km short of our destination), we started thinking on what to do next. The sun had set completely and it was quite dark. We were in NE estonia, which has a reputation for a high crime rate. It seemed that the sensible course would be to find some lodging. We therefore said we wanted to go to hotel. The driver smiled and said he would gladly drop us off at hotel "Krunk".
Entering the hotel, we realized why he had smiled - hotel Krunk was a fancy, 3, maybe even 4-star hotel, with rooms going for 60 eur - a bit out of our budget range (which he could easily tell considering how we dressed and travelled). We therefore started discussing alternatives.
According to the map, there was one other place in Sillamäe called hostel "Oravake". However, I remmembered I had heared about that from Taiji friends of mine - who had always described it fondly as a "complete hellhole". For me, that would have been a good reason to visit - just to see how bad it could be - but T. persuaded me to keep on hitchiking and try to reach our checkpoint in Sinimäe.
Walking out of Sillamäe, we were both struck by its beauty. It was a soviet city, but built in the beginning of the era, with remarkably beautiful buildings and wide roads with plenty of greenery. Quite surprising for us, since we had been stuck in the stereotypes of NE being the backwater of Estonia.
We got to the side of the road and raised our thumbs. And then burst in laughter, as it dawned on us what we were doing. It was 11 PM, completely dark (save for the streetlights) and we were hitchhiking in what is reputably the highest crime rate area in Estonia. I commented that "I would not pick us up if I was a driver passing by here!".
Thankfully, not everyone thought the way I did and within half an hour, we were picked up by a mild mannered older russian man, driving home to Narva. He gladly dropped us off by the Sinimäe sign, from where it was maybe half a km walk to the village.
The place itself seemed nearly deserted, and the checkpoint (a memorial cross for the battle in Sinimäe - one of the bloodiest battles in WW2 in Estonia) was nowhere to be found. Neither was the hostel reputed to be in the village by the roadmap.
However, we were again very lucky - as we stumbled to a museum, and the light was on in the ground floor. We knocked on the door and a middle-aged man answered us - IN ESTONIAN. We quickly explained our situation and asked about both the cross and the hostel. He explained that the hostel we were looking for was to the north near the coast, maybe 5-6 km away, but that the cross was indeed nearby, maybe 2 km to the west, and he gladly gave us directions there. The battery of my phone (that doubled as our GPS) had run out, so I asked if I could leave it to charge while we went to take the checkpoint, and he agreed, asking us to be back in an hour or so.
We therefore continued walking, in darkness without streetlights and with dogs barking on both sides of the road - until we came to a bus stop that did not have a name printed on it. And then past that, to a cemetery. And sure enough - it was midnight. We knew that the cross was nearby, but in darkness it was impossible to find. We headed back to the museum.
The guardian was still there, and explained that we should have turned back from the bus stop and had literally stopped maybe just 100 m from the cross - which we would have definitely seen if it's lighting had been on. At that point, however, we were too tired to go there again so we decided to call it a night and try in the early morning.
The man showed us a spot on the museum lawn where he thought it should be good to camp, and also showed us to the bathroom where we refilled our water supply. We thanked him dearly and then set off to erect the tent.
We failed, however. The tent, which I had borrowed from a friend, seemed to be a standard two-arc tent, but for some reason, we could not get the arcs to bend properly. As we were dead-tired, we decided to just let it be, put one part of the tent under us, another over us, pinned both down so they would not move and then climbed between them in our sleeping bags, hoping to get a few hours of sleep before continuing.
No comments:
Post a Comment