Estonishment

I was prepared to find a sturdy naked man bent over a small stove against a wall filled with an empty beer bottle collection. I wasn’t even flustered by the glistening sweat dripping from his back through his body hair. It was the green felt cap on his head that really got me.

The sauna keeps an almost sacred place in Estonian households. Removed a little from the main building to prevent possible fire to jump over to the main house, the older the sauna, the better. It is a place for relaxing and socialization, with its own little particular rules. Like the fact that during the breaks in the relax room, grandfather gets the first sip of every beer passed around. And after a few rounds, there is the beating with the warm wet branches to get the blood to the skin surface, but this only happens once or twice a session. As all negativity are kept out of the sauna, it is also the best place to ask someone a favor, especially if a few cans have been emptied already.

I was assured that sauna will help against every small physical discomfort, so after three consecutive nights of sauna I found myself down with a nice case of sinusitis. Maybe I should have stayed in the sauna longer.

It seems that Baltic cities are still trying to find out how they feel towards cyclists. Their attitude is rather ambivalent: at one point there is a fantastic asphalt bike path going through a green part of the town, parallel to the main street, but away from the heavy rumble, and at other moments there is a shadily drawn bicycle on the side of a potholed cobblestone road where trucks turn, or the fancy bike way suddenly ceases on the opposite side of the highway leaving you facing oncoming traffic and a separating fence in the middle that could not be cleared by a human alone, let alone one with a bike full of packs.

My experiences in the Netherlands and Cyprus have told me how it can be different in opposite directions. In Cyprus, cyclists are seen as adversaries by all other traffic. Bike roads don’t exist, traffic is a jungle and you are lowest in the food chain. In the Netherlands, we do not know how well we have it. Like third generation feminists, we wonder why the rest of the world is so up in arms about. What, “Critical Mass”? Cycling in a monthly tour around town with as many bikes as possible to stop the traffic? Doesn’t that smell of activism? But the truth is not that we Dutch don’t care about our rights as road users. We don’t need Critical Mass because we already have a critical mass of cyclists on the road going from A to B on their steel studs, without anyone but the odd tourist raising a single eyebrow about it.

But not only empowered cyclists play a part in the proliferation of cyclification in the Baltics. Another reason is more down to earth: when requesting funding from the EU to build a road, a bike path needs to be included or the cash machine says no. This explains why sometimes on the weirdest places bike roads pop up and suddenly disappear: the road renovation paid for by uncle Europe got lost in its own silly set of rules.

With too much admin surrounding the Russian visa, I have decided to stop the Eastern move and continue North-West for now, circumventing the Baltic sea. Tomorrow I take the boat to Helsinki, and from there it will be slowly honing in on home via Scandinavia, once again strange terrain for me. Enough room again for improvisation, so all tips and ideas about this part of the world are welcome.

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