Fully padded in the nether region I waited with Jon for Nick and Garry to return from Europcar for our journey to Tartu.
We waited outside for a bit then returned to the hotel. Outside the sun shone brightly, but this didn’t provide any warmth in the narrow streets of the old town. All we could feel was the bitterly cold wind.
Eventually Garry our driver for the adventure and Nick managed to navigated the maze of streets and return to the hotel.
We left and drove. The whole journey took 4 ½ hours. The countryside between Riga and Tartu reminded me of a flat Switzerland. The houses built for the inevitable cold and snowy winters while the land never rises above 60m. We saw no livestock all the way despite the wide vistas. The landscape dominated by forests and xxx agriculture. The woodland consisted mostly of firs with lots of silver birch. We saw many trucks laden with logs.
On the way we found it difficult to find a coffee stop. On the second occasion when we turned into a drive in the country in response to a massive sign on the highway we found a shack, a very dirty toilet and the place deserted.
By an hour out of Riga we saw few villages just farm houses, trees and large open fields for arable farming.
We eventually halted at the Latvian border town of Varga where we had a coffee and I had a a weird piece of bread filled with some type of meat substance.
Across in Estonia no villages interrupted our path to Tartu. We saw farms off the roadside but no settlements larger than hamlets until we reached the outskirts of Tartu 50 miles into Estonia.
We easily found the Hotel Hansa and checked in. All rooms had German town names. I spent the night in Berlin. Odd the German connection given the devastation the Germans caused in WWII.
We walked back into the centre of Tartu and around this University town bathed in bright sunlight but with a cold wind. Wood dominated the construction material of the older properties, while we also saw many blocks that had that familiar Soviet cheap look.
We visited the main church, but after that the options seemed limited so we decided to try out the beer cellar with the highest roof mentioned the Gary’s guide to the region. The large cellar played Gary Moore guitar riffs on a continuous loop and contained a couple of guests other than us.
The beer tasted fine and we had another drink while we supped away one of the staff came round to lay out chess boards on the tables and said we would need to move as the area would be hosting a chess tournament that evening. I’ve never been kicked out by a chess match before.
Now we faced the dilemma of where to eat dinner. We called the hotel to find the kitchen closed at 7:30 so now we returned to the main town square and randomly picked a place in the main town hall square. We all ate reasonable meal and walked back to our hotel and so to bed.