Hitchhiking competition, Day 2

We woke up next morning at 7.30 after 6 and a half hours of sleep. T. had slept well, which I hope was because I was curled around her, keeping her both warm and protected from the wind. I had not been so lucky, however, being half-awake most of the night and having rain drip on my nose for most of that time. Despite that, I actually felt pretty fresh waking up and had no problem packing our stuff and getting going.

Our first objective was to go to the cross that we had missed the night before by just a few hundred meters. As it was now light outside, we decided to go for a more direct path going along a grassy path along a field of wheat. The cross was about 2 km away, and was truly beautiful, being by far the nicest looking monument we came across during the whole trip.



We then walked back to the highway and set back westwards. The first car dropped us to the Kohtla-Järve crossroads that we had been dropped to the night before. From there, we were picked up by an emergency rescue worker heading for work, who dropped us off right next to our next checkpoint.

We now had a 100m climb ahead of us, as the next checkpoint was the peak of the Kiviõli ash mountain. The road up the mountain was pretty steep and slippery, which was not easy for T. who had  fairly slippery footwear. Nevertheless, we managed to haul ourselves and our bags up the mountain and then got to enjoy our breakfast (bread with canned tuna) along with a truly magnificent view.




We then climbed down but then had a dilemma in front of us. Our next point was quite a way away, and there were two ways of getting there - a more direct route, which seemed less used but started right at the base of the mountain, and the more used route that required we somehow get back to the highway.

After trying to get a ride at the base, it quickly became clear that this was not a feasible choice (due to the low volume of traffic passing by). We therefore headed to the nearby gas station, got our morning coffe and then started asking people if they would drop us to the highway. Eventually, one lady took us on board and dropped us off on the highway, about a third of the way to where we needed to get. She explained she was actually heading to where we needed to get, but was working and had to make a few stops on the way, promising to give us a ride if we failed to get one before.

We were now near a gas station by the highway. We asked all the cars stopping for gas if they could take us further, and in half an hour, we were on our way again. When in the car, we again realized we had about three equally valid possibilities, as our next stop was Kunda on the north coast.

We probably chose the worst of them - opting for the direct route from Rakvere (as opposed to the route from Tallinn or the route from Narva), which was probably the least used of the three, seeing only one car every 10 minutes. The third car did stop, but only took us 3 km further, landing us literally in the middle of nowhere.  From there, we had to walk 2 km before we came to another car willing to take us on board. That driver was very nice to us, however, going a few km out of his way to drop us exactly at the crossing near Kunda we needed to get to.

Our next checkpoint was actually in a small village called Rutja 15 km west of Kunda. However, we got lucky, being picked up by two guys (väga stereotüüpsed rullnokad) heading there to go pick mushrooms. They dropped us off in the settlement, where we now started hunting for locals to ask them where the checkpoint was - because this was one of the strangest (and cutest) checkpoints listed, namely a tombstone for a border guard dog Djoma, who had given 22 years of faithful service. Thankfully, the locals knew where it was and gladly told us which fence we had to hop over in order to get there. And behold, there it was, right in the corner of the yard.



We now got a ride back to the Kunda crossroads and from there quickly got another car heading for Tallinn. The driver was russian, but his first question was if we were in the competition. We answered in affirmative and then tried to figure out where we were actually trying to head next. After some deliberation we realized we had actually forgot to consider one fairly obvious choice that was supposed to be just along the highway, and decided to try for that. We asked to be dropped off near Kuusalu.

Again, we had to ask the locals to find what we were looking for - a burger stand made famous in the Estonian short movie "Tulnukas" (link, Part VI, 8:48). This time, their answers were quite surprising, however - namely, all 3 people we asked said that the place had been destroyed and now contained a grocery store. Not to be deterred, we just took a picture of the said store.



We then had to walk all the way back to the highway, and since it was about time for lunch we decided to have burgers in honor of the burger stand that had not been there. Yes - I am no longer a vegetarian, having given it up about a month ago. However, this was my first burger in 8 years - something definitely worthy of celebration.



We then went to the gas station and soon got a ride with two young russian guys heading towards Narva. We were now heading for Palmse, so we asked to be dropped off where the road turned towards Viitna. The road there was being repaired, so one lane was closed and there were two roadworkres with a car painting a turn sign on the closed lane. We walked past them and continued walking, as Viitna was just 2 km away.

Half the way there, we notice the roadworkers van approaching behind us. To our surprise, they actually stop and offer us a ride - first only to Viitna, but after they had their lunch, they turn towards us again and offer to drive us all the way to Palmse, to the piles of rock called Famine stones gathered by peasants during a famine a few hundred years ago.



Roadworkers then give us a ride back to the highway and drop us at the crossroads towards Tapa. Our next checkpoint was Tapa-Loobu roadsign (both place names, but translating to "Kill - Cancel"). We knew where both settlements were, but we had no idea where the sign was located. Neither did the driver who first picked us up. Despite our vigilance, we did not see the sign, which left us at a dilemma when we were dropped us off at a crossing. We consulted our maps and realized we should be near, but since we had no idea where to look exactly, we were considering abandoning the point and continuing to the next one.

At one point, T. decided to walk a bit further to check the roadsign further on for how far we are from the nearest settlement. She got 10 paces before she began laughing and called me over. We then had our picture taken with what we saw:



We then set towards Kadrina, and again had a stroke of luck. As the traffic seemed slow, T. headed to the woods to pick berries, and emerged from there along with a woman who had been picking mushrooms, and whose car was on the side of the road. We quickly asked where she was heading, and she replied "Home, to Kadrina". She gladly took us on board and even drove us a bit outside the settlement to the actual checkpoint - the statue of a wooden fist.



She then drove us back and left us at the crossroads towards Paide. We quickly got a ride again. The next 70 km stretch was spent talking to the driver, who was a cattle inseminator for the two counties we were passing through. There were two checkpoints near the road we were driving, and the driver briefly considered driving through one, but then remembered he was in a hurry and was already running late for an appointment. As we were making good progress, we decided to skip the two and just continue onward.

We were again dropped next to the checkpoint, which was a statue of a Hitchhiker, allegedly made by a young artist who later committed suicide by setting himself on fire at just age 26.



The irony of having just visited the statue of a Hitchhiker was that we had now run out of luck. Our original idea of heading for the last Saaremaa ferry was soon replaced by just a desire to get T. home to Pärnu as car after car after car passed by without picking us up, and the two that did both took us just 15 km. Sun was setting and we were on the side of the road from Paide to Pärnu with one car driving by every 15 minutes, always at around 100 km/h. We got so desperate we wrote "Please" on one of the papers we had and started showing that. At one point, I knelt down on the pavement with the said sign as one car was nearing. Didn't help.

As the sun was setting, a fire truck drove by us at 100 km/h. It too, did not pick us up. Initially at least, as after about a minute, we saw the same car approach from the other direction and stop just where we were standing. We heartily thanked the driver for coming back for us and climbed aboard.



The car was manned only by the driver, who said it was a spare car and he was driving it to Are cross where he was to switch cars. T. lit up when she heared that, and then explained that Are cross was on Tallinn-Pärnu highway and only 20 km from Pärnu, so there was a real chance we would actually be able to get to Pärnu for the night. Until then, however, we still had about 60 km in the fire truck.

When at the crossing, it was dark already, and there were no streetlights around, so we had to hitchhike in darkness. Using our flashlights and reflectors, we managed to make ourselves visible and were quite soon picked up by two young men for Poland who asked us in Russian if we could direct them to a hotel for the night. In my limited Russian, I answered in affirmative and we climbed into the backseat with all our stuff.

They asked us if we were brother and sister, and I said no. They then asked if we were... well something I did not understand, so I asked for clarification. They then resorted to body language, in what is universally accepted as the sign for sexual intercourse. T. blushed while I answered in affirmative yet again. We showed them a hotel in central Pärnu, grabbed our stuff and then walked back to the edge of the city where T. lived.

Finally - a warm bed to rest in for the night. Something both of us badly wanted. Also - a shower, which was something I wanted even slightly more, considering how hot the weather had been. Thankfully, we got both :)

Hitchhiking competition, Day 1

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.