It was a week-long vacation trip for me and my wife.
Before anything else I would like to thank community on Reddit who warned about need to fill a travel authorization form (even for transit!). it could be possible that without such hint I would not fill it at all and our vacation could become a sad thing instead.
One of strongest impressions was is the most developed public transit system we seen in Tallinn.
Trams are very good. We used them many times.
Going beyond some “standard” travel landmarks was an improvisation and while we was not able to visit the place we wanted to see, we seen something else, and it was a good experience as whole.
One of the most cute things seen was the signpost at Kaperi bus stop with directions to various places, from hairdresser to kindergarten. It gives some cute atmosphere that I can’t describe well. most close metaphor coming to mind is it like walking into a quest game about a small medieval village.
The Elron trains are really good. I can say I dreamed to travel on an European train since last year, and during this travel that dream come true out of the blue, when we decided to travel to Tartu. Train interior design looks quite futuristic to my taste and I like it.
Intercity buses are quite good, better than I expected. We took a bus from Tartu to Kaperi and than later continued to Võru.
We wanted to visit the very specific place, Urvaste to see Tamme-Lauri oak, the oldest and widest oak of Estonia.
The main lesson of this attempt was that visiting such places require a careful preparation beforehand. You can’t just sit in tram in Tallinn, travel with Elron train for hours, book a intercity bus to Võru direction, and catch a bus from Kaperi to Urvaste in the same day, as an internet search engine suggest. So, if we would be lucky enough to have another trip to Estonia, we would make the next attempt to see the Tamme-Lauri oak the main event to plan whole trip around, not just an impromptu.
I would say you can not rely on internet regarding routes to and connections between cities and villages smaller than Võru and related connections. I feel there is some threshold that if you want to visit some “small” place, you have to not just plan beforehand carefully, but also research in more offline way if want to plan something like that.
Speaking of trees… I have an impression after this vacation that there are so many trees and forests across Estonia, and this is great! It become one of main impressions from this travel.
Tallinn also have much more greenery than Tbilisi, and combined with very developed public transit, it gives me some positive solarpunk-friendly feel. Speaking of solarpunk, yes, we seen a large set of solar panels at some place.
The Viru hotel we stayed in has an own museum about soviet times and KGB. It is very interesting, but may be the narrator of this exhibition tells the story way too fast for my skills in aural English so I missed some moments of the story. Now I know some new details about these harsh and difficult times.
One moment I was not expected that somehow Kiluvõileib was not so easy to bump into and we did not got a chance to taste it eventually. May be I “bumped into” wrong 4 places, or may be Gemini is not the best tool to ask questions like that, it seems.
It was much easier with kama which was available at hotel breakfast and it is very tasty, really.
We surely will visit Estonia again!
