Postcards from Estonia

“I need a new rifle,” I say to the cashier at a petrol station. Two young women look at me astonished, and I realise my mistake. The word I want is rehv, not relv, and after we’ve sorted that out, a young man says in English to follow him to a garage where they can replace a tyre.

I had arrived in Elva, a little town south of Tartu, a new place to explore, starting with how to fix a flattie. No spare wheel, no jack, but a bottle of sealant and a car battery-powered air compressor. The instructions fell to bits in my fingers, so had to guess how this works, and in the end it was okay. But it’s not a permanent repair, and while I am waiting for something to happen, an older mechanic called Raul beckons me into his private workshop, where he has a wall full of US number plates, and more significantly, a classic American car on a hoist, its gleaming engine recently refurnished.

This is a shed dedicated to the American dream, and outside a young chap backs out a huge, lime-green 1950 Plymouth. Raul says he imported a container full of parts from the States, along with a couple of tractors. He is interested to know that there is a classic car scene in New Zealand, and for rockabilly music.

Meelvin finds a broken staple in the tyre, 8mm long, and does a swift repair job. By the time my tour of Americana in Estonia is over, I can get back into the Yaris and drive a few kms out of town, to another RMK campsite in the forest, to await the arrival of a thunderstorm.     

The name Elva stems from what was a Swedish female name for the local river, Helwejegge. The date of first mention in the 1600s supports the idea, the appearance of a settlement during the “golden age” of royal Swedish rule. We passed through here quickly three years ago on the bikes; this is my first real visit.

On driving into town, there was a petrol station, a good-sized new supermarket, a pharmacy and a chemist, a traditional pub, a sports bar and cafe playing 1980s rock classics, lots of trees, nice houses placed amid widely spaced pines, a sports and playground complex, a cultural centre, in short, the sort of infrastructure a town needs, and what I found lacking in places like Jõgeva to the north, which from the size of the lettering on a map, seemed to promise something more.

Tartu revisited

They say the university town of Tartu has a vaim or a spirit. For me, this has taken repeat visits to begin to feel; the students have finished for the year, and are in party mode, so everyone is relaxed, even me, now that I have figured out how to park the car in busy traffic.

Some streets are narrow because, after all, the old town is centuries old, while further out, the streets are planned, in good condition, constrained only by the ever-present Emajõgi, its lazy brown current flowing from west to east through to the Peipsijärv.

Coffee in a department store café offers easy access to Wi Fi and do a little work, as well as look around a Rahvaraamat bookshop (and buy yet another book), and do ablutions. This infrastructure is generally much higher quality than in New Zealand, except perhaps in Queenstown. Coffee is the same price as in NZ; books are more expensive, and food is also roughly the same price, perhaps, a bit more expensive, also the case for petrol. Price levels are of course related to the strength of the euro compared with NZD.

Pärnu

Elephants everywhere. About knee high and made of concrete. Sometimes singly, other times in troops, marching across traffic islands. These little statues take different forms around Estonia. Viljandi has cats, Otepää, little bears, and in Narva, visitors are treated to prides of lions. Mostly, there is a logic to this, but elephants? To consult Chat GPT.

An “elephant barn” – elevanditall - stood in town back in the 1700s, giving its name to a nearby street. Then in 1936, a travelling exhibition from Hamburg brought five elephants to Pärnu, which made a big impression on residents and visitors to what was by this time a seaside resort. In the 1950s a water slide was made for children in the shape of an elephant’s trunk. Post-independence, the local authority revived the elephant tradition.

I sit in a café attached to a theatre where I have free parking for three hours, and can plug in the laptop, while drinking good coffee. Finding access to power has been a constant thing in Estonia, and I am finding good haunts, including in Tartu and Elva. Pärnu is one of Estonia’s nicer towns to visit, with brightly painted wooden buildings in the centre, on either side of the wide, brown Pärnu river, and a long beach of white sand opening into the Baltic sea that appears to stretch forever.

My main interest here is the statue made of thin strands of metal shaped into two hands holding each other, commemorating the flight abroad of around 80,000 Estonians in 1944. It’s one of few monuments around Estonia dedicated to the diaspora. One in Rakvere recalls the Soviet deportation of around 30,000 Estonians to Siberia, and another in Pirita, Tallinn, the 18,000 names of Estonians who fell as victims of communism.

Valga

In a café in this cross-border town, the serving staff speak Estonian and English, and some of the clientele have crossed from Latvia for coffee and crumbed chicken and French fries. In the cobblestone square, the street signs are in Estonian, and there’s no indication of any frontier between one country and another. Here, there’s little infrastructure to speak of, and the outside of town is built in Soviet-era apartment blocks, some wooden houses, others in the same two-storey design laid poorly in breeze blocks, sloppy mortar and no paint.

It’s raining and it’s a grim sight, a reminder that like many places, parts of Estonia like Valga are down at heel, as are occasional tumbledown semi-ruins of farmhouses alongside the motorways, and abandoned churches. In such places, there is another Estonia, one of poverty and neglect, and a struggle to catch up with the rest of Europe.

There’s nothing here to do, and so I fill the tank with petrol and head east to Rõuge, a village at the edge of Haanja national park full of prosperous restored farmsteads and new builds, dotted around numerous lakes. Camping is on a lawn by a lake, and I finish all arrangements just before a thunderstorm arrives, the lightning flashes, 1.8 kilometres distant.