The road to Bukit Lawang

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I did not come to Indonesia to do road trips. But now that I’ve done half of one, I can say at least they’re educational. If like Dorothy, you want visceral assurance you are NOT in Kansas, a drive through parts of Sumatra delivers. Our experience Sunday afternoon also solved a mystery for me, namely I had been unable to imagine how it could take four hours to go 65 miles in a nicely maintained Toyota SUV. Now I know.

We wound up on the road trip because we wanted to see orangutans in the wild. Steve and I have tracked both chimpanzees and gorillas (in Uganda), and we’ve hung out with bonobos in a sanctuary in the Congo. There’s only one other species of great ape in the world — orangutans — and they live only on two Indonesian islands. My first impulse was to seek them in Kalimantan, the Indonesian portion of the island of Borneo, recommended by Lonely Planet as the best choice for observing the hairy orange guys in the wild.

When I started planning this trip back last October, it looked like we could easily fly to giant, exotic Borneo from Java (the island that has long been the center of power in this country). Connections on one of the best of the many small domestic airlines were good, and I found a trekking outfitter who seemed respectable. This all fell apart, however, when the flights on the good airline vanished from the Internet (and for the month or two in which I was obsessively checking, they never reappeared. Who knows why). We could only fly to Borneo on a mediocre airline at an inconvenient time. Frustrated, I shifted gears and set my sights on the jungles of Sumatra.

I learned we could fly from Jakarta on one of the better outfits (Citilink) to Medan, the biggest city on Sumatra (and the third largest city in all of Indonesia). I also connected with a well-reputed outfitter just outside Gunung Leuser National Park — one of the richest rainforest ecosystems in the world. (It’s home not only to orangs and other primates but also tigers, rhinos, elephants, and leopards.) I booked a room in the Orangutan Discovery lodge ($23 per night). For an extra $50, the manager said a driver would pick us up at the Medan airport and transport us the 65 miles to the lodge. This seemed reasonable.

Happily, all our travel connections went flawlessly, until we walked out to where the driver was supposed to be holding a sign with our name. There was no sign of him…

Sadly, we were not from the Fuso shop.

…but he did show up after an hour, apologizing and explaining that a truck had overturned on the highway. We piled into Hari’s small SUV, and he announced the drive usually took four hours. This sounded astonishing but also kind of fascinating. How could it?

At first the mystery deepened, as Hari bombed along at 60 miles per hour or more on a well-maintained tollway. But it wasn’t long until we left that and turned onto the main (maybe only?) highway to Bukit Lawang, our destination. The asphalt wasn’t in horrendous condition but it threaded through one human beehive after another; moreover most of the bees appeared to be buzzing around on some kind of wheeled contraption: bicycles and cars and trucks and buses and a vast army of motorbikes, each carrying between one and five people between the ages of newborn and ancient.When you’re all barreling over two narrow lanes, driving becomes vastly more freestyle than anything you ever see in the US or Europe, People thread their way up the wrong side of the road. Many folks favor straddling the faded middle divider line, probably to enhance their readiness for passing. Not passing is NOT an option. You simply must get around all the barely motorized vehicles carrying improbable loads.All this chaos feels remarkably dangerous, and we saw direct confirmation that, yes, it is. We passed the large truck whose crash had delayed Hari. Someone had somehow got it upright again, but it was still stuck by the side of the road. Further along, we whizzed by a demolished motorbike whose driver was still struggling to get up from under it.

Apart from all the scary bits, it was an interesting ride. At times we drove through palm-oil forests. Vast tracts of native rainforest have been torn down to make way for these squat, heavy-crowned trees bearing seeds from which oil is squeezed to fry all the zillions of tasty Indonesian tidbits. If I hadn’t know that Indonesia contains more Muslims than any other country (and Sumatra is known for its especially religious ones), the ride would have educated me. Every minute or two, we passed another roadside mosque — many topped with amazingly colorful and/or flashy domes that contrasted sharply with their homey bases. My head swiveled, too, at all the broad rivers we crossed, most the color of coffee with cream.

The further we drove, the more the road condition deteriorated until at times we had to slow to a cautious creep over the most busted-up sections. Around 5:35 the light was starting to dim and I cringed at the thought of it vanishing altogether as we rattled along for another 75 minutes. But then Hari piped up that we were almost at our destination! Indeed we bounced over dirt road for only a few minutes, entered a jungly stretch of road, and then stopped at a sign for the lodge next to a dirt path leading into a thicket of green. The sun still hadn’t set when we greeted the owner.

For all the ruined stretches of pavement and the death-defying traffic, just a bit over three hours had passed since we left the airport. So why had Hari told us it usually takes four? I suppose it’s possible he was trying to prevent our being disappointed if an eastbound truck turned over like the westbound one that had delayed him. I think it’s more likely, however, we’re in a part of the world where people relate to the interval between numbers on a clock differently than they do in San Diego. I suspect time is vaguer here; less precise. If so, that’s a good thing to be reminded of at the start of our sojourn.

Departing soon for one of the spiciest, shakiest places on the globe

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That would be Indonesia, land of thousands upon thousands of islands — 14,000? 17,000? I’m not sure anyone knows. Also home to more humans than only three other countries (India, China, and the USA.)

Situated on the Ring of Fire that rims the southwestern Pacific Ocean, Indonesia also is arguably the planet’s most geologically unstable country. Earthquakes, killer tsunamis, exploding volcanoes (Krakatoa!) — it’s all routine. That’s not why I had no strong desire to go there for a long time. It was more just ignorance. I had no clue what was there.

Now that Indonesia has worked its way up to the top of Steve’s and my Want to Visit list, we’ve been reading a lot and getting more excited the more we’ve learned. Varying wildly from one island to the next, I’ve come to wonder if Indonesia won’t feel a bit like Poseidous, the watery planet Steve and his co-author Roy Wysack created in their (fictional) guidebook for exoplanetary settlers (the Handbook for Space Pioneers).

Over the next three weeks, we’ll barely scratch the surface of the place, sleeping on only four of all those islands (Sumatra, Java, Bali, and Flores). We’ll make our way among them on airplanes, trains, boats, cars, and motorscooters. With luck, the land and sea will behave themselves throughout the course of our visit. But whatever happens, I’ll do my best to share some of what we experience.

Time travel

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Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

I’m embarrassed. The message that went out yesterday was a mistake, a “re-publication” of the very first travel post I ever produced, back in February of 2010, when Steve and I were starting our 41-hour transit to South Africa. It happened because I’d been fiddling with some of the blog’s design elements (something I almost never do). Among other things, I added a “category cloud” to the right-hand column. It’s a list of the categories I’ve assigned to most of my posts over the years. I liked the idea that if someone is going to a place I’ve written about, it should help them quickly and easily find what I had to say about it.

The problem, however, is that if a blog writer forgets to select a category, WordPress automatically declares it to be “Uncategorized.” Seeing that word in giant letters on the list bothered me. (I was pretty sloppy about categorization in those early years.) So I went in and changed the “uncategorized”on that very first report to “South Africa.” When I updated it, WordPress treated it like a new post — and sent all my loyal subscribers a (confusing!) email.

Sorry!

Steve and I won’t actually be setting out on our next adventure until May 11, when our destination will be Indonesia — the fourth most populous country on earth. We’ll only get to a handful of its 17,000 islands, but highlights should include tracking orangutans and komodo dragons in the wild, visiting the largest Buddhist temple in the world, and relaxing during a weeklong home exchange on Bali. Indonesia will be the 81st country I have visited.

I’m startled to reflect that South Africa was the 30th. Steve and I have covered a lot of ground since then. And this fall we’re planning to return to South Africa, along with some other places in the southern half of the continent. I promise to try to categorize everything properly.

And to refrain from sending out any emails when I screw up.

Hailing to the big chiefs

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I probably never would have visited the Presidential Libraries in Southern California were it not for our friends Donna and Mike Guthrie. Donna is an imaginative traveler with a passion for big creative projects. To name just one, she and Mike recently visited every National Park in anticipation of a big birthday. Among their current missions, they are targeting all the Presidential Libraries. They started with Harry Truman’s (in Independence, MO) and Lyndon Johnson’s (in Austin, TX), then suggested that a few friends from San Diego might accompany them on a short excursion to all (two) of California’s Presidential Libraries. Steve and I privately wondered how much fun this would be. Those facilities celebrate the lives and administrations of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, neither of whom we ever came close to idolizing. But we assented, and the experience surprised us.

It was so interesting and entertaining I felt driven to write this post (one of my rare reports on adventures At Home.) Three days into the new year, we left San Diego for the Reagan facility, located in Simi Valley (about 40 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles.) Traffic was good and it took only about 2.5 hours to reach the sprawling property, set amidst lovely rolling hills. This is not the site of the famed Reagan Ranch (that’s further north, near Santa Barbara), but rather land acquired by Reagan supporters to house the complex. We grabbed a quick lunch in the cafeteria, then spent several hours making our way through the head-spinning concentration of films, photographs, artifacts, memorabilia, and exhibits documenting the 40th American president’s life.

What quickly charmed me was the fact that this facility is not merely a Great Man Monument but also an excellent history museum — one focused tightly on the 90-plus years when Ronald Reagan was alive in the United States of America (1911-2004). I was paying at least some attention to the world around me for at least part of that period, but it was amazing to see how much I’d forgotten, and fun to have it be brought back to life. The museum conjures up moments that shook the world — the internationally televised demand Mr. Gorbachev tear down “that wall” is an example.

A section of “that wall” stands outside the museum.

Others, like Reagan’s Golden Retriever, Victory, wagging his 3D tail next to his animatronic master on the ranch are sweetly mundane. I found almost everything engaging.

You can’t actually take a ride with Ronnie on the ranch, but you can say you did.

The Reagan museum/library also immerses visitors in some settings most of us have only glimpsed. You get to walk into a life-sized reproduction of the Oval Office the way it looked during the former movie star’s administration. Even better: you can board and stroll through the very first Air Force One. Kennedy rode in its presidential cabin on his way to that fateful rally in Dallas; LBJ was sworn in as his replacement on the return trip, JFK’s corpse close at hand. Nixon and Kissinger plotted their strategies on this plane when they journeyed to China for the first time.

After touring the Reagan site, we spent the night in Pasadena, then headed south the next day with Yorba Linda programmed into our Google maps. It was on a modest Yorba Linda ranch that Nixon’s father erected a home for his young family, using a mail-order construction kit. A year later the Nixons’ second son, Richard, was born in the building. It’s way too small to hold a Presidential Library; the large museum/library structure lies just a short walk away. But having the family home located on the property somehow makes it feel intimate and meaningful.

The Yorba Linda building in which President Nixon was born.

No one in our little group was ever much of a Nixon fan, and we’d thought we might breeze through the complex in an hour. To our surprise, we wound up staying for almost three hours and concluding it was the better of the two sites. The years when Nixon sat at the highest levels of American political power were at least as epic as the Reagan’ years, and the displays seemed better organized and more coherent. Moreover, the Nixon facility feels less hagiographic, more balanced, with extensive attention given to the Watergate break-in, the subsequent cover-up, and Nixon’s resignation in disgrace. No presidential aircraft live here, but in this Oval Office replica — decorated as it was when Nixon occupied it — no rope barriers prevent guests from strolling up to the replica of the room’s famous Resolute Desk and taking the helm, if just for a moment.

Here I recapture the moment when I find out I’m likely to be impeached.

If you had asked me on New Year’s Eve what I thought of both Reagan and Nixon, my reply would have been withering. But the libraries reminded me of what I can easily forget: both men were complex characters, brimming with qualities both admirable and odious. Here are two examples of things I learned about Richard Nixon that enriched the way I think of him. In a section filled with pictures of his early childhood, a display explained that by 14, the future president knew how to operate a motor vehicle, and every morning he would get up early, drive to the produce market in Los Angeles, stock up on fruit and vegetables, return to Whittier, and set up what he’d bought in his family’s fruit stand. Then he’d go to his classes at the high school. Caught up in the Watergate, he may have been vindictive and paranoid and conniving. But he was also once that spunky kid.

I found maybe an even better example at the display explaining the recording system Nixon ordered set up in the White House. It captured everything at all times. Visitors to the Yorba Linda facility can select various recordings to listen in on. The damning one in which President Nixon ordered the CIA to block the FBI’s investigation into the Watergate break-in is not among them. The one I chose instead captured one of Nixon’s daughters, I think Julie, calling him to talk about whether the family could go out to a restaurant for a dinner on Valentine’s Day. She sweetly suggests that Trader Vic’s has a nice secluded table and good food. He seems willing to make his girls happy, but kind of clueless. He says she should check with “Mommy,” and if Mommy wants, they can all go out to Trader Vic’s. The museum shares this absolutely private, pedestrian moment and reminds those who listen that Tricky Dick also could be a good dad and a nice guy. That’s some accomplishment.

Finnish fun

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Part of why I booked us a session at the Löyly sauna was because I thought I might be desperate for bloggable material, desperate enough to try roasting myself and jumping into the freezing Baltic Sea. 

Not that there’s anything to dislike about Helsinki. Here was our first view of it, approaching on the ferry from Estonia:

But it’s not much older than San Diego and looked perhaps less interesting. On our first full day (Friday, Sept. 23), Steve and I followed our pattern and roamed the streets, guidebook in hand. The weather was nippy but dry, and we spent more than five hours taking in many of the major sights.

A striking contemporary church called the Temple of the Rock draws a steady stream of tourists.
Helsinki residents have an enormous music center…
Lovely parks…
And waterfront food tents offering inexpensive and interesting snacks.

It was all pleasant, but not much to write home about, nor did our outing Saturday to the island fortress known as Suomenlinna provide any of what you might call excitement.

You reach it via a short ferry ride.
The fortress didn’t much impress us, but we enjoyed strolling around the islands.

On Sunday, our last full day, we did a test run on the tram from our apartment to the central train station, a magnificent building to which fast airport trains connect frequently.

Helsinki’s central train station matches any we’ve seen elsewhere.

Then we walked to the central library nearby. It opened less than three years ago, and I can attest: both its design and contents are spectacular; it’s no mere book repository but rather a comprehensive cultural center.

You can borrow musical instruments and experiment with them in a sound-proof studio. Or play video games with your friends, or work on sewing projects, or fabricate a prototype.
Readers can luxuriate on a celestial upper floor.

It made me briefly imagine moving to Helsinki just to get a library card. Instead we walked to the National Museum of Finland a few blocks away. The exterior looked almost grim. But inside we found the polar opposite of that boring grand ducal museum in Lithuania. The Finnish institution grabbed our attention with one clever exhibit after another. In a room that focused on medieval times, for example, the push of a button showed what x-rays had revealed about each of the carved wooden religious statues in the room — which trees they were hewn from, the original paint job, etc. Pushing a button in another gallery devoted to portraiture transformed some of the portraits into our (sort of) doppelgängers. (That’s Steve in the middle; I’m on the right.)

Some effects were simple but moving: a scroll of photos taken of individual Finns every single year from 1900 to the present.

In other rooms we learned about the Finnish love of coffee and the passion for heavy metal (along with headphones with which to listen to some of the country’s most famous headbangers.) Another video montage let visitors watch how the landscape around Helsinki evolved over centuries, compressed into just a minute.

We would have lingered but had to hustle to our sauna appointment. Steve, who hates both extreme heat and cold, had to be talked into this, but acceded, a good sport as always. I thought a sauna visit was important because saunas are such a big deal in Finnish culture and elsewhere in this part of the world (particularly Estonia). I’d read all my life about how these far-northern Europeans enjoy getting overheated then jumping naked into snowbanks (while beating themselves with birch switches?!) I’d always dismissed this custom as being somewhat deranged. When would I ever have a chance to get more insight into it?

Visiting a sex-segregated facility, where the ladies and gents (usually naked) swelter separately seemed creepier than patronizing a sauna where Steve and I could don bathing suits and sweat together. The upscale Löyly offered this option. Housed in a low-slung wooden building on the waterfront, it took about 20 minutes to walk to it from our flat. An inviting bar and restaurant takes up a big chunk of the complex.

But we went inside and from the front desk, we collected towels and a locker key, then followed the instructions to each enter the changing room designated for our sex. After donning our swimsuits and showering, we met up and found the first of the facility’s two sauna rooms. 

We pulled on a clear glass door and climbed up a steep set of steps to find a dimly lit L-shaped space lined with two levels of benches. I was startled by how packed it was. I’d had to make a reservation for 3:15 precisely, which I’d assumed was intended to control overcrowding. But the benches were so full it was hard for us to find a space to squeeze into. Once we did, I sized up the folks around us in the gloom. The vast majority looked to be in their 20s or 30s, with young men outnumbering the women. Some exchanged short comments with each other, and we heard some British accents, but clearly this wasn’t a conversation space. In short order, I started sweating, and the heat intensified whenever someone threw a dipper of water into the heating contraption at the base of the steps. After maybe 5 minutes, I was ready to get out.

We knew Löyly had two types of saunas, one “Finnish-style” (where the heat is produced with electricity) and a more traditional wood-fired one. The smell of burning wood in the second made it clear which was which. The wood-fired sauna felt at least as hot as the first had been, and it was even darker. Again we groped to find a perch. This time we struck up a conversation with the girl sitting next to us, an Ohio native who worked for a Finnish company and was visiting Helsinki for a business meeting.

She’d already gotten into the sea a couple of times, she told us; her evident survival inspired me. When I felt close to fainting from the heat, I signaled to Steve I was ready to take the plunge. At Löyly, you don’t literally jump into the Baltic (actually the Gulf of Finland); rather you walk to the end of a platform and descend a ladder. Normally, I’m someone who can’t enter a 75-degree swimming pool without shrieking. But this water was so cold it belonged to a different realm.

Unlike any swimming pool, there was no getting used to this cold — so intense it would suck the life out of anyone who lingered long. To the extent my brain was functioning, it registered amazement I was still breathing. I even treaded water; took a few strokes. After maybe 15 seconds I climbed out and stumbled back to the wood-fired sauna, which warmed me up as efficiently as it had the first time. After a while I went outside and re-entered the ice-water. Steve wouldn’t immerse himself, but at least he put his feet in.

I would have cycled between the heat and cold a few more times, but we had to shower, dress, and move on to our final dinner before starting the journey home. Steve ordered sautéed reindeer, while I savored little whitefish known as vendace, breaded, fried, and served on a mound of buttery mashed potatoes.

Both were delicious, as was virtually every meal we ate in all four countries on this trip. I felt so relaxed it was almost surreal, and it was hard not to credit the sauna for that. It took a little while, but I had learned something I didn’t expect, and not just about saunas.

Adventures in house-trading, Nordic edition

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Home-exchanging first came into my life back in 1990, when we traded our house in San Diego for a spacious ground-floor apartment in Paris’ tony 16th arrondissement. Our exchange partners had three young boys; we had a five-year-old and a toddler. We loved saving money by paying nothing for the lodging, and we loved pretty much everything else about the experience. In the years that followed, exchanges all over Europe and North America made our travel much more affordable, and we felt it gave us deeper insight into where we were.

Over time, we got more adventurous. In the summer of 2000, I found accommodations for us in the Shibuya neighborhood in Tokyo. Ten years later, when our sons finally stopped accompanying us, a white South African couple let Steve and me stay in their big house in a Cape Town suburb in exchange for the mere possibility they might get to San Diego sometime. (They never did.)

We only stopped trading when we started traveling in countries where exchanges didn’t make sense; either because they weren’t available (e.g. East Africa) or where we wanted to move around rather than basing in one place (Peru, Southeast Asia, Ethiopia). But during those years the home-exchanging model was growing in complexity. Whereas in the beginning all the trades were direct (you were in my home at the same time I was in yours), trading platforms like HomeExchange.com added a twist in which you could let someone stay in your home for “guest points” that you could later use to stay somewhere else. Because of the flexibility this enables, I’ve started dabbling in house-trading again — never more successfully than for this current trip.

Using our Guest Points, I secured a three-night stay in Vilnius, four nights in Tallinn, and four in Helsinki. Only in Riga did we stay in a hotel (3 nights). We saved a bunch of money, and as in the past, the trades made our visits more interesting.

Mind you, this mode of travel is not for everyone. It’s like having a friend or relative let you use their place when they’re off somewhere else. The spaces usually are more cluttered than any hotel would be. But home-exchange makes us feel less like tourists. It’s more of an adventure — starting with the challenge of getting in the door.

Our hostess in Vilnius, Eva V, had told me in advance she would leave the keys to her place at a hair salon just down the street from her building — not the one immediately next store, she cautioned. Her hairdresser, Daiva, was scheduled to be working when we arrived.

From the Vilnius airport, our Bolt driver quickly got us to Eva’s address. While Steve stood in front of the gate with our suitcases, I darted down the street to the salon that obviously matched Eva’s description. The inside was empty except for two stylists, neither of whom spoke English. “Daiva?” I inquired. They both looked baffled. I think one of them asked me Lithuanian if I wanted a beauty treatment. (After the trans-Atlantic flight, I certainly needed one.) All I could do was bray, “Daiva? Keys?” They women seemed to shoo me toward the salon down the street — the one Eva had clearly said wasn’t the right one. But I apologized and exited. I was halfway down the block when one of the two women ran after me, embarrassed and laughing. She clearly had forgotten she was supposed to hand Eva’s keys over to a foreign visitor. Why she didn’t instantly acknowledge her name indeed was Daiva I’ll never know.

Keys in hand, Steve and I got through the gate, even though the electronic code that opened it wasn’t working. (Eva had texted me that it was acting up and instructed me in how to open it by pushing a hidden button.)In an inner courtyard, we used the key from Daiva to get into the correct building, and up on the third floor, the key functioned perfectly to admit us.

There was no elevator and inside Eva’s place, we had to lug our suitcases up yet another flight of stairs to reach the master bedroom. But that was really the only drawback of the place. The colors and design choices were extraordinary; making it perhaps the most elegant trading house we’ve ever stayed in.

The kitchen was small but chic. It worked for us.

The master bedroom

In the days that followed, we also appreciated how central the location was; we could easily walk to almost everywhere from there.

For our stays in Tallinn and Helsinki, I found something unusual: a woman (I’ll call her Lina) who had apartments to trade in both cities. In fact, she also appeared to own two additional places, one on an Estonian island (where she and her husband would be staying) and a flat on the French Riviera. I arranged to stay in both her Tallinn and Helsinki digs. Since then I haven’t learned much more about her (like her nationality), except I can tell you she is not a native English speaker, a fact that complicated our interaction from time to time.

To enter the Tallinn home, Lina gave me the street address and the code to get through a gate into an inner courtyard. There we should look for some bricks under a balcony, she instructed. We’d find the key under one of the bricks. Miraculously, all this worked fine.

The gate to our place in Tallinn was between the two big buildings.

The inner courtyard with the balcony that marked the spot!

Bingo!

We were in…. er….Almost.

The key gained us entrance into the doorway with the number that matched her address. Only then did we realize Lina had not mentioned which of the five apartments inside the building was hers.

I tried frantically calling her phone number but got no answer. I messaged her. Nothing. I was pretty sure it was one of the three units on the second floor, but none of them were marked with any names. Finally Steve just tried the key on one of them. A startled young man opened that door. (He said he’d just moved in an had no idea which of the other units was Lina’s.)

Happily, it was the next door on which we tried the key (something Lina confirmed when she finally messaged me back a minute later.)

The living room

And the kitchen/dining area.

We did encounter a few more glitches. The switch that clearly should have turned on overhead lights in the kitchen only resulted in crackling noises with an occasional flash. The overhead lights in the bedroom also appeared to be broken. “I haven’t had a possibility to be there still to make those well,” Lina messaged.

Her written house instructions (a universal fixture in trading homes) were pretty bare bones, and Steve struggled to operate the insanely complicated Bosch washer/dryer. When we asked for Eva’s help, she wrote, “Only thing what I know is that the door is not correctly closed 🙂 then there is a small door light.” Steve somehow managed to get a load washed and more or less dried. (After first freaking us out by saying the drying cycle would take 12 hours, the dryer finally sobered up and actually took only about three hours.)

Another complication arose a day later, when Lina sent us a photo of an envelope with my name and her Tallinn address on it. Her message stated, “Hope all is good in Tallinn! My cleaner made a mistake and took the keys with her so I need to send you my key here from Saaremaa!” From this I deduced she was talking about our tool for gaining entrance to the Helsinki apartment, our next stop. Lina said she would mail us a key, and the followed exchange between us ensued:

As things turned out, it was FAR from easy to figure out what a postautomat is and where it was lurking at the market. The envelope also didn’t arrive for two full days. But we didn’t mind because it was so interesting to learn about this cool Estonian mailing option. Tucked inside a lonely nook outside and in back of the stylish market, the “omnimat” looked like this:When Lina finally texted me the six-digit code, I keyed it into the screen and one of the little doors popped open. Voila! There was the envelope containing the house key.

We felt mild irritation over some of these things, but it dissipated quickly because the good aspects of staying in Lina’s home were so good. We could walk from the flat to the heart of Tallinn’s Old Town in less than 15 minutes; the immediate surroundings were a hipster hotbed. If some of the lights didn’t work, the heating in the bathroom floor tiles did, and we loved that. Even more wondrous was the built-in sauna!Lina’s scanty home instructions said it could be warmed up in 45 minutes. I had every intention of using it until Miina (our private guide on Tuesday) said the newspapers were reporting that heating up a home sauna just once would cost 50 euros (due to the sky-high cost of electricity.) I felt so kindly toward Lina by then that I resisted cranking up her sauna.

Now that we’re installed in her Helsinki flat I feel even more grateful. It’s much bigger than the one in Tallinn and in an even more beautiful and central location.

It’s located on a beautiful street.

It has a spacious office off the large living room.

The view from the office into the living room.

Armed with the key that I received in the omnimat, we had no trouble getting into the building or the apartment, which to our amazement, has a double set of doors (for protection against noise? Cold? We have no idea.)

I’m writing this post sitting at the big round wooden table in the well-lighted kitchen. It’s not home, but it feels like what a Finnish version of that would be.

Bolting around the Baltics

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This part of the world may be flat but it’s a metaphorical Tower of Babel, so complex I never considered trying to learn any of the local tongues. The folks in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland each have a different language. We were told that Lithuanian and Latvian are sufficiently related that folks speaking each at least can guess what the other is saying. The same is true for Estonian and Finnish, which belong to the “Finno-Ugric” language family. Still, here’s how you say “Thank you” in each.

Lithuanian=Aciu (with lots of diacritical marks that WordPress can’t accommodate).

Latvian=Paldies

Estonian=Aitah

Finnish=Kiitos

Learning this, I moved Google Translate to the first page of my iPhone.

We’ve heard a lot of Russian in all four countries, and sometimes that’s the other language you see on public signs. Sometimes you see English, but not always. Despite all this, it’s been remarkably easy to get by because so many folks in the service sector (restaurants, museums, etc.) speak at least some English. And to my delight, getting around has been easier still.

In the cities we became enthusiastic patrons of Bolt, a ride-sharing service I had never heard of before we went to Vilnius. Created in 2013 by an Estonian high-school student who developed the first version of his app with 5,000 euros borrowed from his parents, Bolt today operates in more than 500 cities in at least 45 countries (according to Wikipedia) and has more than 100 million customers globally. I particularly loved how it showed up on Google Maps as an an alternative to walking, driving, or public transportation.

Bolt cars seemed far more available than Ubers. They rarely took more than 5 minutes to come, wherever we summoned one. And they typically cost about $5 or $6 a ride (including a big tip.)

To move between the countries, we used Lux Express buses, one of several alternatives. I bought those tickets online before we left San Diego. These vehicles proved to be spotless and comfy, with amenities that included TV screens in the seat backs, a decent onboard toilet, and free hot coffee. The journeys from Vilnius to Riga and then from Riga to Tallinn each took less than 5 hours, gave us a look at the countryside, and cost only $26 a person for seats in the “premium” section of the bus. The rides were smooth enough for me to work on my blog posts.

It was even cheaper and faster to take the ferry from Tallinn to Helsinki — only $22 a person for the two and a quarter-hour transit across the Gulf of Finland. Our ship was the Finlandia.

The weather was fair and the sea was calm. But it was nice to know the Finlandia carried at least a few lifeboats.

The boarding process was fast and efficient.

Our last view of Tallinn, Estonia

Disembarking from the ferry, we were back in a country with American-style transportation prices. The Bolts and Ubers in downtown Helsinki seemed to be few and far from our ferry terminal, so we got into a regular taxi driven by an African who spoke good English. The ride to our apartment here took less than 20 minutes, but it cost $21. It made me feel nostalgic for those former Soviet republics.

A peek inside the hobbit hole

jdewyze4 Comments

For all the fun we’ve been having, something has been missing: any substantial contact with Lithuanians, Latvians, or Estonians. It’s so easy to get around the Baltic states (more on that in a short post coming this way soon) we haven’t felt any need to hire a driver/guide. (In addition to driving and guiding, such folks are usually a rich source of local insight.)

We’ve seen plenty of city tour groups marching en masse over the cobbled streets, but we haven’t signed up for any. God knows we’ve enjoyed some excellent walking tours over the years. But they can also serve up excessive amounts of questionable history, and on this trip that somehow hasn’t appealed.

So after arriving in Tallinn (Estonia’s capital) Sunday afternoon and settling into our apartment there, we spent the next day doing what we did in Vilnius and Riga: following a self-guided tour through the medieval city center and prowling around in it. Tallinn matches its sister capitals to the south. A high stone wall studded with iconic towers surrounds streets that don’t look all that different from what they must have been like half of a millennium ago; the whole quarter has been declared a UN World Heritage site.

The Russian Orthodox cathedral on the hilltop in the Old Town is quite spectacular.

We found an interesting twist inside this Lutheran Cathedral: few religious objects but a plethora of wonderfully ornate coats of arms of the noble families buried here.

Like Riga, Tallinn has its own KGB museum. Note how the basement windows have been bricked in, to keep passers by from hearing the screams of those undergoing interrogation.

Signs of support for the Ukraine were easy to find.

That night we identified the museums we most wanted to visit during our remaining two days. But I also chanced upon a paragraph in my guidebook in which Rick Steves sang the praises of three Tallinn locals offering private guiding services. On impulse, I shot off emails to all three, asking each if he or she might be able to fit us into their schedules. Two of my queries paid off.

Miina Puusepp messaged that she was planning to visit her boyfriend in the seaside spa town of Parnu but would be happy to walk and talk with us for a couple of hours starting at 10 am Wednesday morning. We met her at the entrance to the big, hip marketplace 5 minutes from our apartment. Wearing a (faux?) snakeskin coat and a royal blue hat adorned with a felt flower, Miina immediately challenged us to explain the significance of the Estonia flag we could see in the distance. We were clueless. Turns out that the top (blue) bar represents the sea, the black in the middle represents all the suffering Estonians have historically endured. And the white stripe at the bottom stands for hope that the future will be better. “Under the Soviets, if you wore those colors, that was grounds for being arrested,” Miina stated.

She talked fast, and I spotted the hallmarks of a great guide: strong opinions; deep local knowledge; a sharp sense of humor. Lithuanians, she said, were always harping on their grand ducal history. “If I had a euro for every time I’ve heard about how their country once extended all the way to the Black Sea, I’d be rich,” she said with an eye roll.

She contrasted pretentious Lithuanians with her fellow Estonians. “We’re hobbits. Just leave us alone. If we bump into you in the street we don’t apologize. We hope you didn’t notice.” Within less than 5 minutes, we had a clear fix on Miina’s opinion of Russians (both those in the gigantic country to the east and the hundreds of thousands who are permanent residents of Estonia). Loathing is not too strong a word.

I felt like I could ask her anything. “If you’re born here, does it still bother you when it’s dark almost all the time?” (Just one of the many things I had been wondering.)

“I hate the sun,” she shot back. “I could never live in California. So bright all the time.” She shuddered, then ticked off some of the delights of living where the sun barely appears for months every winter: you can wear a lot of nice clothes; turn your home into a den of uber-coziness; read (which Estonians reportedly do more than any other people on the planet); enjoy the saunas.

From the look of the produce stands all around us, at least in the summer and early fall Miina and her fellow countrymen have access to agricultural bounty that rivals that of SoCal.We took it in for a moment, then whizzed through the market in her wake as she showed us all manner of quirky stuff for sale: the distinctive felt hats folks wear in the sauna to keep their heads from overheating. Reflectors that everyone is legally required to affix to their clothing in winter as a safety measure.

Miina said you could be ticketed if you didn’t sport at least a small reflective patch.

We did so much with Miina in the three hours that followed I won’t try to describe it all. But highlights included taking a city tram to the enormous Kadriorg Park created by Peter the Great for his beloved Catherine (the First).

The park includes a beautiful palace that today displays international art.

Behind the palace is the official residence of the Estonian president. It’s Estonia’s White House (except it’s pink.)

We happened to arrive just before the changing of the guard. Those are the ONLY guards around the residence, by the way.Also charming are the white boxes on the front lawn. They’re bee hives. (Miina said the president is into apiary.)In another part of the park, she led us to the Kumu art museum, a striking limestone, glass, and copper structure that houses the country’s biggest collection of Estonian art.

Miina wanted to photograph us on these Instagrammable “armchairs” in the lobby, but I’m embarrassed to report I couldn’t get up on one. The seats are almost shoulder high.

Steve and I would have been happy to part ways with Miina and explore the place. But she had other ideas for what we should do. She led us through more of the park to reach Tallinn’s famous song-festival grounds. We actually were thrilled to see this, as we’d learned what a pivotal role it played in Estonia’s drive for independence from the Soviets in the late 1980s. Unlike its neighbors, the country has an deep tradition of choral song. These are singing hobbits — people say the passion continues today, shared by Estonians of all ages.

In August of 1989, the intensity of people’s hunger for independence drove them to ignore their fears of arrest and gather at the site of a singing festival started 100 years earlier. About 300,000 people filled the festival grounds, about a third of the entire population of Estonia. Attendees complied with the government’s orders and mouthed the requisite musical paeans to Communism, but the program ended with all those voices swelling in a tribute to their love of Estonia — a stunning act of defiance. It didn’t instantly bring independence; that came two years later. But it was the spark.

An idealistic 20-year-old at the time, Miina was in that crowd, and the emotions of the day played across her face as she told us about it. Then it was time for her to catch the train to the seaside. We said our goodbyes, not before she instructed us in what else we should do that in that afternoon.

One of our stops after we parted was a history museum stuffed with interesting Estonian tidbits.

One of the outdoor attractions was an exhibit of famous Communists, many of which barely escaped being melted down for scrap metal.

Steve and I loved every minute of our time with Miina. We learned so much I suggested we probably didn’t need to meet the next day with a second guide named Mati Rumessen. He’d been tied up with other work Tuesday but said he’s probably have a couple of free hours Wednesday morning. I wondered aloud to Steve if anything remained for him to show us — we’d already covered so much ground. But Steve was adamant we should get another informed perspective; see if Miina was an outlier in her hatred of the Russians. Get Mati to show us something other than the posh parts of town.

So it was that we climbed into Mati’s black Mercedes Benz van Wednesday morning. Fifty-five years old (born two years before Miina), Mati turned out to be just as entertaining. Maybe he was a tad less blunt than Miina in expressing his hostility to the resident Russians. But the two covered the ground and obviously had similar feelings. Many Russians who marched in to defeat the Nazis stayed, and over the decades, Soviet strategists sent in literal hordes to further “Russify” Estonia. Today Russian and Estonian-speaking residents attend separate schools. A large percentage of the Russians have no interest in learning any Estonian (according to Miina and Mati). As a result, they can’t become citizens or vote, and they resent that. At least Mati could articulate the attitude of many of the Russian Estonians: “My grandfather came here and fought to free you guys from the Nazis! I was born here. This is my country too. Why should I leave?” That widespread attitude combined with Putin’s expressly stated dreams of restoring the historic boundaries of Greater Russia send shivers down Miina and Mati’s spines.

Mati seemed only a bit taken aback by Steve’s request to see some of Tallinn off the tourist path. He gamely drove us into one of the fast shrinking areas that were pillaged and all but destroyed as the Soviets packed up and finally left in 1994.

Criminal Russian gangs occupied wrecks like this one.

Mati was just starting out as a taxi driver back then, and he told us how he and his fellow drivers all carried loaded guns to protect themselves against assailants. We drove down streets where every house has now been completely renovated. Now they look great.

A typical example of a Tallinn style building: mostly wood surrounding a (fire-resistance) stone core.

Farther from the town center, Mati showed us huge apartment complexes built under Brezhnev to house the Russians sent to Tallinn to work on the 1980 Olympic sailing competitions. Shoddy when built, they’ve also been rehabilitated. Now they house middle-class Russian-Estonians, and they look pretty nice too.

Close to Tallinn’s wide, sandy Pirita Beach, Mati motored past mini-mansions all owned by Russians and all worth more than a million euros apiece. He said Russians own half the property in the Old Town.

We gobbled up all of this, but my favorite parts of our time with Mati were two quick stops toward the end of our time together. One was at the city’s television tower, scene of a frightening standoff in August of 1991 between Russian troops and defenders of the brand-new Estonian republic. Mati was there; he still vividly describes how twitchy the scared young Russian soldiers were, fingers near the triggers of their Kalashnikovs.

After that stop, we entered a wooded area. I asked if it was a park but Mati replied it was a place where all of us will wind up sooner or later — a cemetery. Most of us won’t wind up in any cemetery like this, however. Miina had told us the previous day that Estonians bury their dead in the forest. But I had no idea what she was talking about. Now we were driving through the middle of one. I asked Mati if we could stop so I could take a photo. Now I can say: this is what it looks like.

There may be another place on earth where people find spots among the trees for the remains of their loved ones, but I’ve never seen it. I’m glad we didn’t miss this glimpse of how the hobbits of the far north do it.

The rain in Riga stays mainly on the internet

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We took the bus Thursday from Vilnius to Riga (the capital of Latvia). The weather looked threatening when we set off at noon, and during sections of the four-and-a-half-hour ride, rain smashed down hard on our vehicle. When I checked the weather on my phone I found this:

I was horrified; rain would be disastrous in Riga, which is most renowned for its architecture, much of it created about 120-130 years ago in a flamboyant style known as Art Nouveau. Topping my To Do list there was a self-guided walking tour to see that.

After checking into our hotel and targeting a dinner spot, we found the streets wet, but nothing was coming out of the sky, a situation that persisted throughout the evening.

The next morning, as clouds flirted with sunny blue patches overhead, we dashed out early to squeeze in our touring before more bad weather descended. I can now confirm that the city’s reputation is well-deserved. I’d never heard of Art Nouveau before, but it’s worth going out of your way to see it. The movement apparently sprang from the pages of a Munich magazine that promoted the idea of a youthful new building style, one that embraced, even glorified, wild levels of ornamentation. Bustling, energetic Rigan architects took the idea and ran with it. Today the city counts something like 750 examples, more than anywhere else in Europe. Here’s a peak at what we stopped and gawked at:

Some of the facades are more simple.

Some are fantastically complex.

You could spend a lifetime photographing all the faces.

After our architectural prowl, it didn’t rain as we cut across one of the city’s beautiful parks……and meandered through the twisting streets of the medieval old city……a compact area crammed with ancient churches and more Art Nouveau treats and a stirring monument to Freedom that somehow survived the decades of repressive post-war Soviet rule.

By mid-afternoon, rain seemed so unlikely we caught a little boat that putted down the wide Daugava River and up the canal winding through the center of the old city.

We walked home that night from our Russian dinner (at a restaurant called Uncle Vanya’s), without once opening our umbrellas. Along the way, a demonstration supporting the Ukrainians also was undeterred by any threat of rain.

A sizable crowd was gathered in the distance to listen to speeches and music.

Saturday morning the forecast on my phone still looked bad, but the skies were clear enough to embolden us to head for a grim former Soviet tower that’s today topped with an observation deck.From it we drank in excellent views of this oh-so-flat part of the world. Near the tower we could see the former World War I zeppelin hangers that have been turned into a huge central market — our next stop.

Lots of great looking produce, cheese, meat, and more.

The only disappointment of our entire stay in Riga came after lunch, caused not by weather but by my underestimating the appetite here for insight into the recent bad old days. Riga has at least three museums (probably more) dedicated to the Soviet and Nazi occupations and the heroic resistance to and eventual victory over them. The one I most wanted to visit is known as the Corner House — former headquarters of the various incarnations of brutal police enforcers.

It’s a nice looking building, but in the bad old days, you NEVER wanted to get anywhere near it.

Inside, we were able to visit a room filled with posters documenting the reign of terror directed and carried out from this building: arrests, interrogations, torture, executions. But the 1 pm guided tour of the cells where the KGB carried out the darkest parts of all this was sold out, and we didn’t feel like standing around for two hours to wait for the next one.

Instead Steve and I walked back to our hotel for a break before our final sightseeing outing of the day: a small museum devoted to explaining more about the Art Nouveau movement. By 4 pm, when we set out for that, it was finally raining! But just a little, and the museum was only a few blocks away.

Housed in the private home of the man who designed more Art Nouveau wonders than anyone (Konstantins Peksens), it was great fun to visit, filled with both technological breakthroughs (a flush toilet! a refrigerator!) and objects of beauty.

I’m writing this now on the bus to Tallinn, capital of Estonia, our third and final formerly Soviet Baltic country. My phone says it may be raining some on Tallinn. I’m not too worried.

The power of expectations

jdewyze3 Comments

Never before has so much time passed between my leaving San Diego and producing a post for this blog. Steve and I set off from home 8 days ago (9/7). But we began with a five-day detour through the Midwest to take part in the long-anticipated wedding festivities of a niece. We didn’t board our Finnair flight to Vilnius till Sunday evening (9/11); we settled into our home-exchange apartment in the Lithuanian capital this past Monday afternoon.

Our place was located in the medieval heart of the city.

Since then, my fitness trackers tell me we’ve walked close to 20 miles, trying to cram in as much as possible. As we’ve done so, I’ve been mulling over the power of expectations.

Observation #1: Overly high hopes can lead to grumpiness.

I’d expected our visit to the Palace of the Grand Dukes of Vilnius (yesterday afternoon) to be a highlight of our stay. My Lonely Planet guidebook declares, “If you only see one museum in Vilnius, make it this one.” The palace dominates the grounds of the country’s grandest plaza, Cathedral Square, and its origins go back almost 700 years. I figured it would give us a crash course on the juiciest chunks of 11,000 years of local history.

What a letdown! We paid a euro each for audioguides to “Route #1” — one of four programmed pathways through the giant complex. We are conscientious little tourists, so we hit the buttons at dozens upon dozens of numbered stops, staring glassy-eyed at sections of ruins in the basement, models of the palace grounds, chipped stove tiles and other trinkets from hundreds of years ago.The narrator droned on and on but never mentioned any of what sounded like the really fetching parts of this history: archeological finds that go back to 9000 BC; pagans who roamed these forests and were the last hold-outs in all of Europe against Christianity; epic casts of bloodthirsty grand-dukes. We glimpsed these things from wordy posters on the walls. But they were almost indigestible.

After about two hours, exhausted in a lonely section of an upper floor, we found panels that stopped us, open-mouthed. They explained that the grand-dukes centuries ago began spending most, then all, of their times in Krakow (Poland was part of The Grand Duchy of Lithuania back then.) The ducal digs in Vilnius fell into ruin, and around the beginning of the 1800s, when a Russian tsar conquered the territory around Vilnius, someone tore the whole palace down and sold off the bricks. Only after Lithuania regained its modern independence in 1991 did folks start talking about rebuilding the complex to regain and celebrate their ancient heritage. From what we could tell, they only finished up about 2018. So everything we were seeing was a modern re-creation.

I felt a bit less frustrated when I learned that. It’s all so new! Maybe over time the folks here will get better at sharing their story with visitors.

Observation #2: Low expectations can lead to unexpected delights.

I didn’t expect the Baltic region to stun me with its wonders. Unlike Turkey (which did), Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania were never countries I lusted to visit. But it’s a corner of the world about which Steve and I know almost nothing. Its recent history is intriguing: free for 30 years after so many years of occupation and oppressive overlords. In two weeks (all the time we had) we could cover a lot of ground. I figured it would be… interesting.

Held to that low bar, Vilnius did a fine job of entertaining us. A horde of eye-popping churches dot the old city center (the only part we explored).

Despite the constant threat of rain, we managed to walk for hours, including to Uzupus, a quirky artists’ enclave that declared its (unofficial) independence in 1998. Its “Constitution,” engraved in more than a dozen languages, adorns one of the streets. The English version makes for amusing reading.

In Gediminas Castle, on a hilltop at the heart of the ancient settlement……I stumbled upon a couple of delights. A case set in the floor in one niche housed the skin of a strange creature studded with silvery needles. When I asked a guard if she spoke English, she looked embarrassed and said she didn’t know much. But she knew the creature’s name: wolf.

An audiovisual display on another level showed me that someone in Lithuania knows how to make history interesting. Huge panels that looked like the tower’s windows displayed what appeared to be panoramic scenes from the castle’s history: a fiery battle; views of the growing town.

But it was a single paving stone in the vast Cathedral Square that moved me the most, almost to tears. It bears the impression of two bare feet. No placard explains it. You have to know the story; know that it marks the end of the human chain that formed in 1989 and stretched north from here across Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, ending near the coast there. Something like two million people formed it by holding hands in solidarity and defiance of their Soviet overlords.

It could have ended in bloodshed, become a Slavic Tiananmen Square. Instead it kicked off the drive to independence that liberated all three of the Baltic states a few years later. Proving yet again that sometimes things turn out better than you might expect.

We took pictures of each other, standing on those footstep.