Traveling from one Estonian island to another had proved more difficult than expected. But once on the second ferry of the day, we were almost there.
Just to give you a sense of the minutia that makes up the experience of traveling in a foreign country: I must show you the signs on the bathrooms on the ferry. I couldn’t quite grasp their point. They were obviously covid-era signs, but were they trying for empowerment and mental health messages in order to get people to keep the bathrooms clean? Or is it just highlighting Estonian humor?
Whatever, it seemed to have worked. The place was spotless.
The ferry from Virtsu (on the Estonian mainland) to Saaremaa Island lands after a 30-minute crossing on Muhu Island. But I didn’t realize we had COMPLETELY MISSED AN ISLAND until later. Following our GPS toward our guest house, we drove straight over a 4km causeway that took us from Muhu onto Saaremaa. Having later discovered that Muhu (population 2000) is rich with folk art and its own cuisine, I will make it a point to stop next time. (There are so many “next times”!)
We got to Järve Cottages around 9pm, after spending most of the day trying to get from Hiiumaa to Saaremaa (see the last post). Our host felt sorry for us (“Of course you couldn’t get a ferry from Hiiumaa to Saaremaa. No one goes to Hiuumaa!”) and upgraded us to a cabin with a kitchen. We promptly cooked some smoked sausages that we had bought on Hiiumaa and feasted on our front porch.
After a comfy sleep (a double bed to myself!), I got up early and walked five minutes through a woods past this guy…
to this empty beach and sat on the Thinking Stump that someone had so kindly placed there for me. The clouds over the water were so low it felt like you could touch them with your fingertips if you reached high enough.
After some quality alone time, I went back, woke the kids, had breakfast and visited the guesthouse’s animals: rabbits, peacocks, hens, roosters, a goat and several ponds stocked with goldfish.
Then we spent the day doing what I had bribed the kids with when doing the boring ancestor stuff: fossil hunting. After someone told me that Saaremaa’s beaches were full of fossils, I looked it up and her story seemed to have merit. (But still…I didn’t find much documentation, so it wasn’t a sure deal.) Our host confirmed the story, and told us to start on nearby Ohessaare beach. We arrived to find the beach full of stacks of rocks, but only a few contained fossils.
So we drove across the island to Panga Cliff (the highest bedrock outcrop in the islands, and a notorious place for ritual sacrifices where the ancients would throw things…and maybe people or animals…into the waves). We followed a footpath for a distance along high cliffs until the cliffs became lower and we found a rope down a cliff that accessed the beach.
In prehistoric times, the entire area was under the ocean. So the cliff is made up of layers of fossils, and as the cliff face slowly erodes, pieces fall onto the beach.
Tibor had a great time smashing rocks, including a baguette-shaped one that hid a white crystal inside.
Tallie and I wandered off on our own, gathering fossils, then had to choose which to bring back. Some of our favorites were these:
The next day on our drive back to the ferry, we stopped for coffee and chocolates at a cute little town called Kuressaare. (Just to show you that the island was more than beaches and fossils. There are a few towns scattered throughout the breathtaking scenery.)
In legend, the giant Toell (or Töll) the Great lived on the island of Saaremaa, while his younger brother Leiger lived on Hiiumaa. Toell tossed giant rocks toward his enemies (thus the erratic boulders) and loved eating cabbage, drinking beer and taking saunas.
Toell was hotheaded, whereas Leiger was known to be gentle and level-headed, although he also tossed around giant rocks when frustrated. Toell sometimes walked across the 6km distance between islands to visit his younger brother, gather more cabbage, and sit in Leiger’s sauna. When this happened, Leiger threw a feast that lasted ten days. The Sääremägi spit (which the kids and I walked out onto) stretches out into the water from Hiiumaa toward Saaremaa, and was said to be a bridge Leiger had begun building between the islands. But the brothers got into a quarrel, and he abandoned it.
Nowadays the people of the two islands carry on the spirit of older brother/younger brother, with, for example, our host in Saaremaa discounting Hiiumaa as not worth visiting. The Hiiu see the Saar as not being serious because they always talk about things being “nice.” I could tell from the article that I was reading that this relationship was much more complex than I could decipher from the translated text (jokey while competitive?). But I was glad that I had gotten a taste of the two islands, however brief.
With our itinerary, that was all the time we had for the islands. We headed toward the ferry, and after a quick crossing, we were back on the Estonian mainland, where we drove 1 1/2 hours to Soomaa National Park.
We checked in to our treehouse at SPA glamping Kirikumõisa
and almost didn’t leave again because there were SO MANY TOYS.
and
which, although much appreciated by my teens would have been PERFECT about ten years ago! If only I had known.
Once I was able to lure them out of the ball pit, we continued on to Soomaa park, which was supposed to be just a few minutes’ drive away.
The park’s website touted boating and swimming and kickbikes. But we drove around for awhile and there was no signage and no one seemed to know what we were talking about. Finally, we returned to a park sign we had seen near our glampsite. There were a few cars parked next to the sign, and as we pulled up, a group of people emerged from the woods on a boardwalk. I asked one of them what it was, and they said it was a bogwalk. I asked them about kickbikes and they looked confused.
So instead of kickbiking through the park, we ended up walking on an elevated wooden walkway through some of the most gorgeous bogland I’ve ever seen. (Okay, It’s probably the only bogland I’ve ever seen, but it was stunning.)
We found a giant ant hill…
But besides the ants and a few birds saw no other wildlife. (We kept hoping for moose, but they remained elusive throughout our trip.)
It was a couple hours’ walk around the park, and we began wondering if we were actually going to come out at the same place as where we parked our car. But in the end, we discovered we had circled around in a huge loop and found our way back.
I hadn’t quite realized quite how in the middle of nowhere we were, because the only food we could find was at a convenience store. And the only food they had was frozen, It ended up being pretty nasty. But we comforted ourselves by sitting in the sauna and then spent a peaceful night in our treehouse.
The next morning we hit the road, heading toward the next country on our roadtrip. With a feeling that I could have spent several weeks more in Estonia, we set the GPS and drove onwards to Latvia.