Day 10 - Riga, Latvia to Tallinn. Estonia

The tenth day of the tour and our eighth country visited, Estonia.

With a comparatively short day of just over 300kms, we had plenty of time to visit the Art Nouveau district of Riga. When we did the open bus tour we didn't stop to look at the buildings, so we decided to return and give ourselves some time to admire these wonderful examples of Art Nouveau architecture. We went to Albert Street where there are some very fine buildings in Art Nouveau style.

Here are three buildings which show the incredible detail that went into the design.

 

 

The plaque on one of the buildings commemorating Mikhail Eisenstein, the architect.

Some close-ups showing the extraordinary sculptures that adorn the buildings. I was particularly interested in the open-mouthed sculptures. What were they meant to signify?

 

 

 

As we were about to leave, we saw this silver Toyota parked in the street with stickers for a Budapest to Mali rally. Competition for us!! As luck would have it, the driver returned to his car and we talked with him about the event which took place earlier this year. Apparently, over 100 cars went to Africa, which makes our five car event pretty puny by comparison!

 

We spent about an hour in Albert Street before leaving Riga for a 30km drive north to visit a small town called Carnikava. I had read about this town in a harrowing book called"The Mascot". It is the true story of a Jewish boy who became a mascot for a Nazi death squad in Latvia during the the Second World War. He was then 'adopted' by a Latvian businessman and spent part of the war in Carnikava and that is why I wanted to see the town.

The road sign to Carnikava.

We drove around the town and into the surrounding countryside. We saw a strange-looking yellow brick 'castle' house on the outskirts of the town.

We drove through the woods near Carnikava in an attempt to find the beach where, according to the book, the boy was dressed up in his SS uniform and filmed for a Nazi propaganda film.  We never found  it!

We left Carnikava and headed north to the border with Estonia, about 100 kms north of Riga. There was no actual sign saying we were entering Estonia, just this strange looking Big Mac sign, with the words 'No Borders'!

Once across the border, we were almost immediately stopped by the police for an ID check.They were very pleasant and after a few questions about our visit to Estonia, they let us go on our way.

The weather had become quite overcast and as we reached Parnu, a town on the Baltic coast, it started to rain more persistently. We had intended meeting Eric and Kenny for lunch in Parnu but, because of the weather, we decided to continue our drive north. The traffic was now getting much heavier, so we turned off the main highway to Tallinn and went across country. Once again we drove on gravel roads but, with the rain which had almost stopped by now, the amount of dust was minimal. At around 1pm we pulled off the road, and had a snack lunch.

Here's Wendy standing on the edge of the gravel road waiting for Eric and Lynn to catch us up.

Next to where we parked was a grove of silver birch trees, which I thought were rather beautiful.

Eric and Lynn did not catch us up as they had taken a different road, so we continued our drive to Tallinn, which we reached at about 4.30pm.

Bob and Kenny had already arrived and Eric turned up a few minutes later. We checked into the Merchant House Hotel, which is right in the centre of the Old Town. Wendy then discovered that the Estonian National Ballet was performing Swan Lake that evening. The artistic director, Thomas Edur, was a principal dancer at the English National Ballet and she had met him and his wife, Agnes Oaks, at their farewell party in London before they returned to live in Estonia. We hurried round to the Opera House, just eight minutes away, and managed to buy two tickets in the back row of the upper tier. We returned to the hotel to change and went back to watch the performance in the evening. It was a huge success.

Tomorrow we have another of our 'rest' days, which gives us time to explore Tallinn, Estonia's capital, before we take the ferry to Helsinki on Sunday. We have now driven over 2,000 miles, more than a third of the total tour.