After getting organized I arranged for a taxi to drop me off at Terminal D down at the port. I got there at 6.40, in time to buy a cut-price day return ticket, which at 406 Estonian Crowns (€23) was at least €40 cheaper than the travel agent wanted me to buy them for the other day. Within no time at all we were all boarding the ferry and on our way out of the iced-up harbour towards Helsinki.
Originally posted 2025-01-15 16:05:04.
After my tour of Toompea in perfect conditions yesterday, I spent the evening deciding whether it was worth attempting to take a ferry trip to Helsinki today. I felt it was doable if I got my act together and so I made sure that I got up bright and early this morning in anticipation of giving it a go, but when I drew back the curtains I could see that it was chucking it down with snow. In my mind’s eye, I had visions of sailing across the Gulf of Finland under a bright blue sky; this wasn’t what I had in mind at all, so I decided to give it a miss and go for Plan B instead – and there was always tomorrow anyway.
Plan B involved using the Hop-on Hop-off bus tour, which coming from England as I do, sounds mad because back home a few flakes of snow means all the bus services grinding to a halt, and to be honest, as I trudged across the snow to the bus stop in Viru Square, I wasn’t convinced this was going to happen either.
When I arrived at the bus stop for the first Red tour at 10 o’clock, there was nobody here and there was snow piled up all around it. 10 o’clock came – and went – with no sign of any potential passengers or bus. It was looking ominous, and I didn’t really have a Plan C. Then suddenly, out of the blue came the big red bus – which promptly went straight past.
It pulled in just a bit further up the road at a bus stop which had obviously replaced the one I’d been stood at, but if I got my ice skates on, I might just be able to catch it. Fortunately, unlike bus drivers back home who watch you race up to the bus stop and then pull away just as you get there, Estonian bus drivers are more considerate and he waited for me. I clambered upstairs and said hello to two English ladies who were also daft enough to be on here. They say that mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the mid-day sun but, but they also go out in the bleak mid-winter as well. There wasn’t going to be any hopping on and off for me today in this weather, but at least the bus wasn’t open-top.
The bus company at the time was called Tallinn City Tour, but I think another company operates the service now, so it’s more than possible that the routes are different. There were three routes in total – Red, Green and Blue: They were all an hour long and you could hop on and off of all of them if you wanted. The Red Tour was a drive around the inner city excluding the Old Town. The points of interest were a mixed bag of museums and such like but it has to be said that the route itself wasn’t like the picturesque Old Town I saw yesterday because quite a bit of it looked as though we were still in the Soviet Union.
Originally posted 2025-01-06 16:42:28.
Toompea is a plateau around 150 ft above sea level, which may not sound very high, but was high enough to give commanding views of the surrounding area, and no matter who’s been in charge of the country during the last 800 years, it’s been where Estonia has been governed from – and still is today.
Originally, the main route up to Toompea was via Pikk Jalg (Long Leg Street), and was built with horse and carts in mind: It’s the oldest street in Tallinn and also one of the longest, but the shortest route up from St Nicholas Church is by taking Lühike jalg, which if you haven’t already guessed, means ‘Short Leg Street’. You may have also noticed that I said ‘shortest’ and not ‘quickest’, and that’s because it’s the steepest street in Tallinn. The names of these two streets have given Tallinn the label, the city that limps, just like I was doing by the time I reached the top, and before I forget, Short Leg Street also has the dubious honour of being the most haunted street in Tallinn. After climbing the final steps and under the medieval tower I emerged at Toompea and the Russian Orthodox Aleksander Nevsky Cathedral.
Originally posted 2024-12-21 13:48:31.
The Baltic States in the middle of winter may not be everyone’s idea of a pleasant trip abroad, but we curtailed our traditional summer holidays when low-cost flights enabled us to become travellers rather than holidaymakers. Places I would never have considered as a destination before suddenly appeared on my wish list, as I quickly realised that I was more welcome in a back street bar in Wroclaw for example than a pavement café on the Champs-Élysées.
We don’t normally get a lot of snow where we live, and although I wouldn’t be so keen now, I wanted to book a trip to Tallinn in the winter of 2010. My wife Kay was initially up for it, but after memories of our trip to Riga in January 2007 came flooding back, she changed her mind. Nothing new there then! She’s never stopped me doing stupid things though, and I had her blessing as I headed off towards Stansted Airport.
Easyjet not only had flights to Tallinn but Helsinki as well which also appealed to me, and although they’re in two different countries, I thought it might be possible to cover both cities on one trip. I’ll be talking about how I managed to get to Helsinki in another post, but for now I was just going to book a return flight to Tallinn.
For me, coming to cold places means staying in a comfortable hotel, and the one we stayed at in Riga was brilliant. It was called the Hotel Reval, which was the name of Tallinn between the 13th and 20th centuries. With that in mind, I booked the modern Swissotel in Tallinn which was a little way out of the old town but within walking distance, and very reasonably priced compared to western hotels of the same standard. Not only that, with a room on the 19th floor, I had some great views as well, or I would have if it stopped snowing. When I arrived it was not only snowing but getting dark as well, and so I decided to unpack and have a meal in the hotel and start some serious sightseeing in the morning.
Originally posted 2024-12-09 16:52:49.