I’ve never been much into national identity and stuff but now I clearly realize one thing: I’m European, no matter the country. Home is where you can’t be kicked out of.
Estonia: a land of free Wi-Fi
The town of Narva doesn’t look very different than the Russian towns on the other side of the border. There even are some inscriptions in Cyrillic.
Also, it’s raining again just like back in Russia. The first major difference is that the local shopping mall has free Wi-Fi. We contact some Couchsurfers in Tallinn, the country’s capital. Just like in most new countries, we download a dictionary and google a couple of basic words in Estonian. Many people might speak Russian here but since the relations between the two nations are somewhat tense, we’d rather not start conversations in Russian straight away.
When we start hitchhiking at nightfall, I keep repeating the Estonian
word for hello. The dictionary says it’s “tere päevast”. I’m trying to
keep in mind I must not speak Russian. I must not speak…
“Здраaвствуйте, куда вы идете?” I say as soon as a car stops.
The driver doesn’t seem surprised and answers in fluent Russian. Later
we learn that this wasn’t that much of a coincidence: Narva is where a big
share of the Russian-speaking minority lives. The guy drives us a bit behind
the city just like we wanted, and we go camping into a soaking wood.
In the morning, it’s raining again. A small gas station next to our camping spot has Wi-Fi. So far, the legends about Estonia’s internet coverage seem to be true. We find out we are lucky: we got accepted by a Couchsurfer in Tallinn. With the idea of a dry haven and a conversation with a local person, the prospect of traveling in the steady rain is suddenly way more exciting. The gas station feels strangely futuristic with its minimalist design. Tea costs as much as a big meal in Russia, so we give it a miss and go thumbing.
The magic of hitchhiking seems to still work, though: the very next driver invites us for the very same tea at the next gas station. He is Russian just like the yesterday’s driver, so there still is no language shock for now. With caution, we ask him about the Estonian–Russian relations. We know that the issue dates back at least to the USSR times and the occupation of Estonia: during the Soviet rule, people of the Baltics were forcefully Russified and massively deported to Siberia. Once Estonia regained independence in the 90s, the Russian minority (that meant one third of the population) didn’t get citizenship and lost many of its citizen rights. One could only regain citizenship if they spoke Estonian. We don’t know what the situation is now, though, and we are curious to know what people think about it. Our host says the relations are good enough (“normalna”): he lives in the Russian part of Estonia but knows many Estonian people too and has always been on good terms with everybody. “There of course are some people who are idiots,” he says. “But there are some idiots in any country.”
Tallinn looks modern and airy. I’m wondering why I didn’t notice that a couple of years ago when I came here for the first time. Then, it seemed like an ordinary city. The downtown shopping mall has Wi-Fi–as usually. It also sells a plenty of fancy food we didn’t see in Russia. The prices are in Euros, though, and every time we try converting them into Rubles in our heads, we feel we should just buy pasta and ketchup instead.
Oliver, our host, lives in a clean, modern suburb. He is the same age as we are, majored in music and his spacious flat is full of musical instruments, CDs and books. Especially books. He spends most of his free time reading and is a very thoughtful person. Even though he seems pretty introverted, we spend hours in conversation. He hardly ever laughs. He never says anything without thinking. And he never says anything banal or uninteresting.
A part of the story of troubled relations between Estonians and Russians
When he’s at work, we go for long walks through the rainy city. Just like in Siberia, we go to a history museum. And we get a part of the very same story that we started following in Siberia. To crush any possible resistance in occupied Estonia, Stalin deported tens of thousands of people to Siberia: in total, several percent of the population were forcefully relocated. Many of those people whose stories we read in the Siberian museums came originally from here.
Oliver lets us stay in his place longer than first agreed, so we can continue with the conversations. Also, I spend a lot of time walking around the city and exploring abandoned places. Abandoned places have a special atmosphere and can trigger your imagination: you always wonder what happened there. In Estonia, there is a lot of places like this as the course of history changed abruptly 30 years ago after the country’s independence. To a certain extent, the same goes for Czechia, my country, but as Estonia was bound with the USSR way more, there are way more disused Soviet facilities. Like this, I discover an old prison (closed and fortified), an ancient concrete amphitheater for the Olympics, two decaying factories and an abandoned neighborhood with houses for workers. These places can tell you more about the country’s past almost like a museum.
 |
| Urban exploring in Tallinn |
 |
| Linnahall: abandoned stadium for the 1980 Olympics |
After several days, we leave Oliver’s cozy home and head south. It’s still raining. That doesn’t stop drivers from giving us rides. We are surprised how easy hitchhiking is in Estonia even though it’s Europe. Many people go our way, sometimes long distances: most of them go to Latvia to buy cheap booze. One of the drivers gives us beer. The next driver stops in a minute even though it’s getting dark and we are still holding the beer. Then we get a ride from an elderly lady.
I’ve already managed to remember how to say hi in Estonian and to ask
people if they prefer to speak English, or Russian.
“I prefer English,” the lady says slowly. “I speak Russian too but I
don’t want to.”
It turns out she is more fluent in Russian but she sticks to English as much as possible. For her, the conflict between the nations is much more present than for the driver from Narva. She says Estonian nation is very small and 25 % of people in Estonia are Russian. She is worried Estonia could be overwhelmed by Russia and Russian people once again.
On our way, we stop in the town of Haapsalu to see an abandoned manor house and a railway station from which no tracks go anywhere. Next to an old military airport, we find dozens of abandoned military buildings. In one of them, there is a hall with rectangular holes in the ground, marked with names. They look like empty graves.
 |
| A gloomy discovery in an ancient military building. Later we found out that this might have been graves of Russian soldiers. When the occupation ended, the bodies were brought to Russia. |
 |
| Ungru manor |
 |
| A train station with no train tracks |
Latvia: a land of cheap alcohol and a tough nut for hitchhikers
We cross the border to Latvia with a driver that made more than a hundred kilometers to buy alcohol in a big alcohol store on the border. It’s impressive if you consider that the distance from the northern to the southern border of Estonia is 200 km.
In Riga, it’s pouring rain. Also, we lose the hitchhiking luck again. We are trying to go east, to Daugavpils, because none of us has been to that part of the country before and we are curious. However, we get stuck for almost two hours on a perfect hitchhiking spot, even though the rain has eased up. By night, we’ve only made some 50 kilometers from the capital. A friendly young guy drives us to a nice camping spot near a castle ruin on a peninsula at a lake.
When we get up in the morning, two cops come to the deserted park to kick us out. Normally, I’m afraid of cops but now I don’t care: we are in Europe, they can’t deport us. I first ask them if they speak English and let them suffer for a few seconds. When I admit I also speak Russian, they seem so relieved they become way friendlier. They just check our passports and tell us to go away, which we were up to anyway.
Our bad luck comes back together with the rain. We are standing in the steady rain for an hour; the road in not very busy and nobody is stopping. Eventually, our sign gets drenched and falls apart. Water gets into our sleeves even though we wear raincoats and jackets. So, we give up and try going back to Riga. We catch a ride surprisingly fast. Hitching a ride to get to Lithuania the most direct way possible is surprisingly easy too. It’s as if Latvia just didn’t want us to hang around.
 |
| This is what we found near our camping spot in Latvia. There were more of these. We may be lucky the only thing that happened to us on this place was the encounter with cops. |
Lithuania: the last part of the Siberian story
Lithuania, in contrast, shows us a friendly face as soon as we enter: by night, the rain eases up and we make it to Kryžių kalnas, the famous hill of crosses. It is a place of pilgrimage in the middle of nowhere: a small hill covered by thousands of crosses of different sizes and shapes, brought and mounted by individual visitors. The illuminated forest of crosses in the middle of the dark marshland looks magical.
 |
| The Hill of Crosses |
In the morning, I find out my rain jacket and satchel are going moldy
and are starting to smell as they haven’t dried up for several days. Lithuania
seems to be friendly to hitchhikers, though. We get a lot of short rides. When
the rain gets heavier again, a guy with a loaded car stops.
“I will be happy to give you a ride, but I’m not sure you fit in,” he says.
His back seat is filled with furniture but our motivation to fit in is very
strong. Vojta takes the front seat and I end up traveling to Vilnius entangled
in a wooden kitchen chair, with the backpack on my lap (and on the top of the
chair). The driver, an elderly good-natured guy, is called Andrius and has a
punk band. Eventually, he gives us his CD. (Two months later, we will see
Andrius and his friends in Czechia. Two years later, I will still be listening
to his CD and I will still have no idea what the lyrics mean.)
Paulius, our Couchsurfing host in Vilnius, is a very skeptical person. He seems more pessimistic than Oliver and even more pessimistic than Vojta. I’m starting to wonder whether there is something to the stereotype about unhappy people from the Baltics. Whereas Oliver just didn’t smile, Paulius is downright grumpy. He seems to have reasons to be, though. Things seem never to go easy for him. He has hitchhiked a lot in the same countries as we did, and where we were miraculously lucky, he was remarkably unlucky. In Iran, he had troubles with visa, was arrested several times, had to pay a fine, and got his stuff stolen. Some troubles happened to him in other countries too. Now, he’s back home, trying to figure out what to do next.
 |
| Are the Baltic countries grumpy? |
 |
| Europa Park in Vilnius |
Paulius says there are not many interesting things in Vilnius but we do find some. We go to a large park full of bizarre sculptures and I go exploring abandoned buildings. Also, Vilnius has a museum of oppression just like other cities in this region. This museum is located in an ancient Gestapo then KGB headquarters and is particularly depressing. It tells stories of a desperate country where nothing could have been done right. The country was first occupied by the USSR, then people welcomed Nazis as liberators, then were oppressed by the Nazis, and then occupied by the USSR again. It tells stories about people waging a lost guerilla war against the Soviet occupation, people deported to Siberia, and people murdered by the KGB in the very rooms where the exhibition is.
For us, the museum is the last part of the story of Siberia.
Unexpected hospitality and a night at a climbing wall
Just like in other countries, we are staying in the Baltics longer than planned. It’s been a week since we said to our families that we would be home in a week, and we are still only in Lithuania. Just like other countries, the Baltics are too interesting for us to just rush through. Also, the people we meet are too interesting, so it would be a shame not to stay with them for a conversation.
Like Julius. He gives us a ride when we are trying to leave Vilnius in pouring rain. We’ve been standing at a gas station for almost two hours because the weather was so horrible that drivers couldn’t really see us. Just Julius spotted us and went back to pick us up. He seems reserved at first, so we just talk little. Then I notice he has rock climbing guides on the rear seat.
“Do you climb a lot?” I ask him.
“I’m a climbing instructor.”
“Do you spend more time on outdoor rocks, or at an artificial wall?”
“I go outdoors too. But there aren’t many rocks in Lithuania, actually.”
I realize Lithuania is completely flat, so it would be hard to find rocks here. Still, climbing is not a completely uncommon sport here: there are several artificial walls in Klaipeda, Vilnius and Kaunas. In Czechia, climbing is very common and I used to climb during my university years too. The popularity of climbing in Czechia is not very surprising, though. Czechia has a plenty of rocky areas. Even if you live in the capital, you need to go less than half an hour to some of them. It feels crazy that Lithuanian climbers often cross half of Europe to reach rocks. I imagine they must be really motivated. Julius seems glad to have bumped into someone who shares his hobby.
“Where do you stay tonight?” Julius asks later.
“We’re going to camp.”
“In this rain?”
“We are used to that,” we shrug our shoulders.
“Actually, maybe you can stay in the climbing gym I work for. Also,
there’s a movie night today…”
So, even though we were thinking of reaching Poland today, we end up at a Kaunas climbing center with a group of Julius’ friends. After the two hours in the rain, the climbing gym feels like the coziest place in the world. We get hot tea and spend the evening playing table tennis, watching a movie about Himalaya, and talking. We couldn’t wish for anything better. At night, we sleep under the climbing wall on huge comfy bouldering mats.
 |
| Hospitality at the Miegantys Drambliai climbing gym in Kaunas |
Meeting Polish friends from Iran
The next day, we reach Warsaw and see our Polish friends, the doctors Gosia and Gosia we met back in Iran. It feels as if we haven’t seen each other for a long time. The girls have made some more trips since then, one of them to South America. They are going to a cycling trip next month and Vojta is thinking about joining them. Now however, the topic no. 1 for them is the protest of junior Polish doctors against bad work conditions. Since the conditions are generally bad, more and more doctors go working abroad instead, so there are not enough doctors, and the conditions for the remaining ones get even worse. The government told them not to be spoiled, Gosia and Gosia are explaining us. They are joining the protest too.
We spend several days together, talking like old friends and bringing up memories. We meet the other guys from the Iran group too. It’s not very hard to become old friends with somebody during this journey.
 |
| Warsaw |
Poland: unexpected hospitality, part II
After two or three days, we say goodbye to Gosias and go hitchhiking south again. This time, we believe we would be in Czechia by night. It’s not even raining today. Things turn out different, though. We get lost twice and it takes us almost 2 hours to reach the hitchhiking spot. Once we’re finally there, we wait for 2 more hours. Then we catch a 5 km ride and walk some 10 km through fields and in a ditch along a motorway. Another 5 km ride gets us near a promising gas station and we only need to climb over a fence to reach it. When we’re finally there, it’s getting dark. We are still almost in Warsaw and it’s pretty sure we’re not going anywhere near Czechia today.
We buy messy sausages with a plenty of ketchup at the station and go thumbing with them, expecting some more hours of waiting. A car stops before we even finish the meal. Mikhail is not going in the direction we planned but to the city of Częstochowa which actually is on the way to the Czech border and better located for us than the place we were trying to get to.
Mikhail very conservative and very catholic. As we are talking, he is surprised both Vojta’s and my parents are divorced. He says he doesn’t know any divorced people at all and is wondering how to explain a thing like divorce to his kids. That’s surprising for us as half of our friends’ parents are divorced. Mikhail is very interested in our trip, though, and wants to know everything about our experience from other countries. As we approach Częstochowa, he invites us home. His family lives just under the monastery of Jasna Góra, a famous Christian pilgrim place. He doesn’t even call his wife to tell her and says she will be happy to have guests. We were used to this in places like the Middle East but wouldn’t expect that in Europe. He was right, though. Mikhail’s wife Karolina gives us a hearty welcome and doesn’t seem surprised at all.
Karolina and Mikhail offer us a delicious dinner and then browse through our photos the whole evening. They give us their spare bedroom. They also say they will be gone for work early in the morning but tell us to wake up when we want, grab anything we find for breakfast, and go when we want.
The next day, we get almost to the border. We camp on a field like so many times before. It’s strange because we realize it’s probably the last time.
Back in Czechia: a cold welcome at the border
Getting to the border is easy. We cross to Czechia in the town of Náchod. The last time I tried hitchhiking through here, everybody we met looked grumpy and we were stuck here for 4 hours. I’m wondering if we will be luckier this time. We aren’t. We are waiting on the same spot for 6 hours. Half an hour before the deadline we set for giving up, we finally get a ride. It’s dark already. I’m looking at the driver as if he was a ghost. But he is real, he speaks Czech and is offering us a ride up to Prague, our hometown.
He drives us to one of the subway stations in downtown Prague. It has been 11 months since we’ve left and I realize this has been the longest time I’ve been off the town. Nothing has changed here since the last year.
Vojta and I say bye to each other in a very ordinary, undramatic way and we part, each of us heading to join our families. It’s difficult to realize that this is not just another city we are crossing. The idea the journey is over and I should resume a civilized life feels inappropriate and a bit hard to believe.
 |
| The last camping spot |
 |
| Last kilometers to Czechia |
No comments:
Post a Comment