ChristleZine: April Fools, Part I

Night of March 30. We'd spent a tremendously pleasant day walking along the beach to the Pirita suburb and through the forest to the Tallinn TV Tower, a route we noticed also doubled as a bike-path. We decided we should be taking advantage of the unusually fantastic weather, get some bikes ourselves and get back on that path. From the map in our Lonely Planet guide, it would appear that Lahemaa National Park was only 35 kms from where we'd just been at the TV Tower, itself only a 6 or 7 km hop-skip-jump from Tallinn. Impetuously, we made a late-night reservation at a guesthouse in "Vosu" (selected basically at random, though this was one of the bigger towns) in the national park for the following night, and set the alarm clock for Saturday morning. (We'd already hit the hay; this lazy in-bed Internetting a happy by-product of Estonia's heavy Wi-Fi dependence.)

Saturday morning, we scarfed some biking-worthy grub at an Old Town bakery-cafe (John: breakfast pizza with pickles, bacon and pineapple; Christine: weiner, smashed spuds and cabbage salad), then headed to City Bike, a bike rental co. and tour agency operating out of a hostel in the Old Town, and picked ourseves up 2 velos to go and a map of the national park. We also borrowed a map that supposedly pointed the bike-route way out of Tallinn, to something called "Koogi Crossing", which we assumed was somewhere near, if not itself, the gateway to the park. We were wrong.

We were through Pirita and past the TV Tower in no time at all. Here's one of the sights not too far outside of Tallinn; go-karting, anyone?

We continued to follow the bike-path signs, though they seemed to conflict with the map to Koogi Crossing. Every turn we took seemed to be leading us a few degrees away from the direction in which we felt instinctively we should be heading. From what the signs said, we were always equidistant from a handful of towns, never actually reaching any of them, just skirting every pinpoint in the region, every recognizable map-marker.

We were, however, making our way -- slowly and counter-intuitively -- to the Koogi Crossing, no part of the route following a point-A-to-point-B kind of logic. The weather was indeed beautiful, though we battled a constant and strong headwind, and our faces were stinging with the grit turned up from the fields. The bike-path also had you darting dangerously across the Tallinn-Narva highway at several points.

Koogi Crossing. This turned out to be some kind of rest-stop gas station, but there was a giant map of the region. Instead of seeing evidence of the national park on the giant map, we learned that there was a chunk of territory that none of our maps accounted for -- the zone between the park itself and the Tallinn outskirts map. This part seemed do-able, though we'd yet to actually see where the boundary of the national park lay. When would our park map become relevant? We were eager to get to the green space.

Kuui. Apparently 4 kms from the Koogi Crossing (by one map), apparently on the edge of the national park (by another map). Definitely in the "InterZone". There was nothing there, at least on the bike-path, highway part. Ok, a rusty post office box and another gas station. We bought some nachos and water, scarfed those down while local yahoos in loud cars squealed up violently to buy vodka reinforcements and plastic jugs of strong beer, then screech off off to get back to the fishing hole, or whatever parking lot party they'd just been at.

Kahala. Kahala kauplus. This "town", this "centre" marked on the map turned out to amount to about one house, one pig-barn, this one tiny shop (closing momentarily, it was a Saturday afternoon), in the midst of fields, swamps, forests, a couple of huts here and there, big expanses of nothingness. No signs for national park that we could see, though Kahala did, finally, appear on our park map. I started question my dependence on typographic convention with respect to map-reading. What I mean is this: I'd see a "town" on the map -- and judge it so based on the point-size of the font it was written in. So the word "Kahala", for instance, was rather big, Helvetica, bold, italic, somewhere around 28-point. When we saw that it was really nothing -- town-wise -- we started to get nervous, about font-sizes to come and the likelihood that we might find somewhere other than a stand of trees to sleep in that night. Recall that we'd made arrangements to stay at a place which now looked ridiculously far on the map -- we'd discovered the unmarked Inter-Zone in our travel route, and it was getting later in the day...

A fork in the road. Signs. 2 kms to Kolga. 15 to Loksa, more to Vosu. A closer look at the map. There was indeed a diamond symbol in Kolga with an "M" in it. "M" marks .... (a look to the legend) ... accomodation?! Surprise. Well, if there's one "M" in a town of about the same font-size as "Kahala", in which there was absolutely nothing save a couple of water-tanks, someone's boarded-up dacha and a manure-pile, should we really turn off this road and see what this "M" has to offer? [NB: this is the 2007 inaugural ride for these cyclists, already been quite a lengthy one, and our veloistes are sans their cushiony bicycle shorts.]

Cranky moods decide a closer "M" is better than a further one. We traverse the 2 kms to Kolga. The town is a tiny one -- consisting of about a road or two, basically a small grouping of rather squat apartment blocks. Then there's a strange stone arched passageway at the end of the street. We ride through it. There's an unbelievably beautiful ruin of a manor house to the right of us, gardens to the left, out-buildings and stables lining the periphery.

We ride our bikes up to the stables. We can't believe what we've stumbled upon. Sore-arsed, wind-whipped, dusty, dirty and hungry, we're astounded to learn that the renovated stables are a Gasthof. The woman at the front desk is more than happy to pour us a cold Saku from the fridge (guesthouse lobby doubles as guesthouse "baar") as we fill out our registration card, adding that the first floor of the manor houses a restaurant. Kolga: truly an oasis. We got a room and a shower, then walked over to have a look at the grounds behind the manor house. A bunch of local teenage girls and guys were hanging out, smoking and doing bike-tricks; same teen activities worldwide, only the backdrop changes -- these wheelies and smoke-rings practiced amongst historic, crumble-down ruins. For centuries, the manor house belonged to the Stenbock Family of Sweden; ownership since independence has been returned to Finnish relatives of the Stenbocks). We headed inside for a first-class meal in the restaurant, where we are the only customers. Salad with chicken and corn, elk-meat blinys with mushroom sauce, dumplings with candied fruit, clear soup with salmon and baked ice cream.