Hitchhiking competition, Day 3

This is a guest post by T.

Day three. We woke up at my parents place in Pärnu. I was so grateful for getting to sleep in my own bed and getting a shower after two days in wild (and the morning coffee!), but arriving there late had been a little awkward, though. My parents hadn’t met M before, and my mom didn’t even know I was in a hitchhiking competition. She doesn’t agree with hitchhiking. Therefore, I was really glad at how calm she took it and how friendly she was. Everything went well, and we got to sleep for quite long.

Or at least until 8 o’clock or something.

We stood at Pärnu’s limits, with a sign “Edasi!” (“Forward!”, sounding like a slogan). One car took us to Audru, a nearby village. There, we painted on a bigger sign “Saaremaa”, which was our next destination. Since I was bored of us telling the same story about our hitchhiking competition to all the drivers, I told M that we should make up something instead. We decided to introduce ourselves to the next driver as a brother and sister driving to visit our grandma. We put together our characters: he would be a builder, I’d work at a supermarket and go to trade school studying to be a shop assistant (yeah, they actually teach it at schools). When the next car picked us up, we didn’t have a good chance on introducing ourselves that way, though. In this car, a woman was driving and a man sat in the front. They told us they were heading to Lihula. The man had work there. I asked what they did for living. The woman told: “He is a music teacher, don’t you recognize your own teacher?” I, indeed, hadn’t. I hadn’t seen the face of the man before, but it turned out it was my middle school teacher, who had left for work in Iceland, but apparently got back and didn’t find a satisfying job in Pärnu, so decided to take a job in Lihula. I was really glad that we hadn’t told them more than that we were going to visit our grandma, because the named teacher knows my parents, and probably knows that I have no brothers. The rest of the drive he told us stories about Iceland’s school system.

From Lihula we got to Virtsu, the ferry port, with a car of a woman who apologized for the dog hair and mess she had in her car. I didn’t mind, though. Compared to standing at the back of the roadworker’s paint-stenched van, it was nice and comfy. She took us to our next destination, which was off the road, a tavern named “Mutionu”. It looked as if it had been built in an old cellar. She then took us directly to the ferry station as well, which was nice of her.



The ferry drove from Virtsu to Muhu in half an hour. Muhu is a smaller island, connected to the bigger, Saaremaa, with a bridge. On Muhu we had two places we had to see, and on Saaremaa, there were three. We decided to take all the points on Muhu and then see if we had time for Saaremaa, as we planned to go with the last ferry to Hiiumaa. For our plan to work, we needed to get to Tupenurme village on Muhu. We met another competing couple in the ferry, who told they had already found someone that would drive them away from port. One of us had to talk to people as well, to ask where they’re going and if they’d take us with. I left that for M, as I was too much a coward to talk to strangers like that. He got us a ride to 5 km from our destination. They dropped us off right next to a supermarket. The place was such that every car that would drive out of the parking lot would fill us with false hopes. We stood there for long, it seemed, but I guess it wasn’t more than 15 minutes. What made it awful was the really hot weather, and our warm clothes. A car finally picked us up. We took a picture at the village sign and, after changing our clothes in the forest in the anthill, hitchhiked right back. I don’t remember the people that picked us up there too well any more.



Somehow we got to the next village, Koguva. It was a tourist trap: there was a map of hundred places where movies were made during last century, and some of the places were there as well. We only saw the map and the parking lot, but the village contained at least four housings for tourists, a museum, a nice beach and some workshops for making... something... We hitchhiked back on a car of the museum director, who told us more about the village. I was a little sorry we didn’t get to see more there.


We headed to Kuressaare, the only town on the island, after that. It surprised me how far away it was: 70 km. I had thought the island was smaller. It seemed that our good luck continued, as we hadn’t stood there five minutes when we were picked up again. It was a young guy wearing sweatpants in a fancy-looking car. You’d assume people who look like this would be narrow minded and act on a certain stereotype, but after an hour in his car, we realized our prejudice was not justified. He listened to reggae and seemed quite intelligent and open-minded. A reminder of how looks can be deceiving. Just like those two guys heading to pick mushrooms the day before...

We calculated that we’d still have time to take at least one out of three points in Saaremaa, even though they were far away from civilization.One was in a nature resort, another was on northern coast. When we stood at the crossroads, it seemed more cars were heading to the nature resort, so we tried our luck with that, writing “Viidumäe” on a sign. Not long after that, we were picked up. A car with a young couple on front and a drunk woman at back. She was scary, she pulled the map out of my hands as I tried to calculate our way. Thankfully, they didn’t take us long, though, just 15 km.

The next car stopped for us just minutes later. It was a family with two little children, so first they had to make room for us. The mother would take one of the children to sit on her lap. They told us they had seen us on the crossroads before, and drove past thinking “We can’t take them, we don’t have room with two children,” then reconsidered and thought they could make us room, drove back and didn’t find us, since we were picked up already. As they headed back to home, they drove past us once more. Lucky us! And the young family was quite interesting as well: the woman originated from South Africa, and the guy had dreadlocks just like M. Hippies, we thought.

They took us to the nature reserve, waited until we climbed the watching tower, and drove us back to the main road as well.


We didn’t run out of luck after this nice family either. With two cars, we got to the crossroads heading to the north coast. It seemed that we had time to take yet another point in the middle of nowhere, since there was lots of time before the ferry and we had met only nice and friendly people with every other car picking us up. We hadn’t waited for fifteen minutes when a car took us from Tõlli to Tagaranna (both really small villages). In Tagaranna, there was a memorial for the victims of the sinking of the ship “Estonia”. We also found a statue of an old man smoking a pipe there, which was one of our “moving points”.


We walked on the beach, looking for statue, with a young Finnish couple. As it was nowhere in sight, we decided to run in opposite directions along the coast. I found it first, and then had to wait for M to run back to me with the camera to take the picture.



The couple then took us to ferry port. They had a kid with them who listened to Moomin tales in finnish on the back seat. They told us they were tired of driving around the Estonia already, and the kid even didn’t come out of the car when parents went to look the coast. The woman picked some weird flowers from the forest, saying it’s for medicine. I wish I had known the name of the plant (I study biology, you know). The family seemed almost as interesting as the hippies from South Africa for me. The woman worked with handicapped people and told us she’s a vegetarian because of the way the animals are treated. It irritated me a little that she tried to push it on her children as well, but I didn’t say anything. I tried to leave as good an impression on them as I could, since I was really grateful for being picked up at such an abandoned place and taken right to the port, while I had thought we’d have to drive back to Kuressaare before heading to the port, since the traffic is low there. We had been so lucky that day!

We even had time to eat burgers before the ferry (yeah I’m guilty for M eating meat...) and climb an adventure trail we found next to the shop. We walked about 2 km to the port, and wondered about the things at the road the whole time: a fence built in the forest, ending at a strange place, with no obvious purpose, a field of strange plants, between them growing poppy’s, a nut tree and a cherry tree. There were also some strawberries beside the road, of which I couldn’t get enough of.

The ferry trip from Saaremaa to Hiiumaa took one and a half hour. We had time to drink coffee, check where other couples were heading (one had just missed the last ferry we were on), and again, ask strangers where they were heading and if they took us with them. Again, I left that for M. He talked to almost everyone before finally found us two people who were heading to Kärdla, but, since the girl had been on the hitchhiking competition on a previous year, agreed on taking us to two other places we needed to head to on Hiiumaa. One was Külaküla küla, a village which’s name is, in translation, Villagevillage. The other was yet another monument.


 After the monument, the couple told us we should see the Eiffel tower of Hiiumaa as well: a huge tower built by a crazy, but brilliant local. Not only was there a tower in his yard, he had made a whole theme park with nitty comments everywhere. Some pictures:



After the Eiffel tower, we decided to once more try our crazy luck, and hitchhike to the south part of the island to take two more points and head to the first ferry in the morning. We were, indeed, lucky again. A car picked us up and took us to Suuremõisa, even though the driver originally wanted to go only half the way there. The map told us there was two places of accommodation there, but what we found out was that one was being renovated and the other only accepted cash, which we had run out of. We still got to find our checkpoint, “an outhouse with interesting design”:


We started walking towards the port in dark after that, as there was supposed to be another place of accommodation. Margus would’ve been ok with us staying in tent again, but I didn’t like the idea at all, since we hadn’t still figured out how to put up the tent, there were lots of mosquitoes and there wasn’t a good place to put up our tent. We had this crazy idea of walking 10 km to the last checkpoint in Hiiumaa, but since we were too tired, gave it up. A car drove past us when we were heading to port. They picked us up: two locals heading home. When they heard of our hitchhiking competition and how we looked for a place to stay in night, they offered us to stay in their home (right as we were about to go into the hotel). So, we got to sleep in a bed again. Crazy luck, and those locals in Hiiumaa are really friendly!