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The Ryanair flight from Luton to
Tallinn was one of the rowdiest flights I had ever encountered. Being a Friday morning flight, it was full of groups of stag parties who had started drinking at the airport at 9. Luckily the flight was only a couple of hours.
On arrival we headed to our old town hotel and went straight to the city bike office for our bike tour. The tour took us out of the old town and out past the massive harbour to
Kadriorg, a nice park area containing 2 palaces, an old and a new one. We continued east to the
Tallinn Song Festival Grounds, an eerie music bowl built in Soviet times and where choir festivals still draw 100,000 people to the huge sloping lawn area. From there we head back along the windy coast to the west side of town which includes a 1km stretch of old railway line where old weapons factories and warship hangers are being converted into museums and art galleries.
We then cycled back into the old town around the wonderfully fortified town. The walls include 46 towers, almost half of which are preserved from the 13th century when it
was first built by the Danes. The main gate has the striking
Fat Margaret tower where the tour ended.
After the 15kms of cycling we had worked up an appetite, and there is nowhere better to eat than
Olde Hansa, the very touristy but well done medieval themed restaurant. We had the feast, a crazy amount of food brought out in small pots which just keeps coming out from our brilliant servant until you can't move. The highlights of the feast include wild boar and elk sausages, rabbit, salmon, quail eggs and even some bear stew! All washed down with a dark honey beer drank out of 1 litre clay pots, it was a glorious taste sensation and a great way to spend our first night in Tallinn.
The next morning we headed off on our
Laemaa National Park tour, an excellent day trip done by EstAdventures. Our guide was an Aussie, Andrew who knew a lot about Estonia after several years running the tour. We started off just out of tallinn at the 3,000 year old bronze age grave site of
Rebala Reserve, which interestingly was moved 20 metres in the 1970s so that a highway could
be built. From there we went to the
Kiiu Tower, the smallest castle in Estonia which was a small round fortress that the King used to hide in when there was an uprising in the 16th century. It is now a café bar and we had a shot of their local liquor to get us moving. From there we walked on the boardwalk out into the
Viru bog, a very eerie swampland in the park. There was a tower in the middle where we climbed and enjoyed the view of the ponds and swamplands. Next stop was the
Palmse manor house, a beautiful summer house complete with its own vodka distillery and lake. It was all very luxurious and well done. We continued up to the Baltic Sea where there are several bays with little fishing villages. We visited two of these villages,
Altja and
Kasmu, with their little wooden huts. The tour finished up at the Jagala waterfall, a small but pretty waterfall on the way back to Tallinn.
We got back from the tour and had a hot chocolate at the very bohemian Café Chocolaterie in a cute little courtyard off the Katarina Krik, a narrow lane
that is part ruin of a church and includes some 14th century tombstones. We then had another great dinner at a little underground cave of a restaurant called Vanaema Juures, which translates to grandma's place. Once again we got a hearty Estonian meal. We then took advantage of the long daylight hours and walked up to to high end of the old town and to the fabulous lookout point at Toompea hill where we got a great dusk view of the old town from the two lookouts. On the way up the hill we passed the imposing Alexander Nevsky cathedral, a huge Russian orthodox cathedral and Toompea castle, a huge pink building where parliament meets.
The next morning we climbed the largest church in the old town, Olafs church to get some stunning views of the old town. The climb up was a very small steep, dizzying staircase and the viewing platform goes around the whole top spire and feels somewhat makeshift but we are grateful to be able to get up there and admire the views on what was a perfect clear sunny day.
We then wandered through the tacky markets and along the castle walls, admiring
the cannonballs lodged into the side of one of the towers which were from the war between Sweden and Russia in the 18th century. And with that we were off to catch our bus to Riga for the next Baltic adventure.
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