Tallinn, a city by the sea
A crowded touristic destination
July is passing away, but instead of days getting shorter, they're becoming longer as I am more to the north. We are, Rosaura and me, fused together as a hybrid Centaur, half man and half machine. After 4,000 km the rider gets merged with his bike. You learn every of its responses, quirks and faults, and of course its noises. Good engine this parallel twin is, and easy on gas; but the bolts tend to come loose and, worst of all, it has a nagging noise —not yet identified by me or any mechanic— in the rear wheel when the bearing (or something else) gets hot. Not a nice issue for a BMW barely one year old.
More to the north I've said, and more to the north I ride. On a sunny morning, portending yet another hot day, I leave behind beauty Viljandi vaguely thinking of another, longer visit on my way south. With the sun on my back, I set a course for the Republic's capital. Always driving on secondary roads I cross the flatlands and marshes of this country, so scarcely populated that I hardly come across a town deserving this noun; only farms and more farms where young peasants, blond like ripe wheat, blond like sunrays, endeavour in labours along their seniors, maybe ignoring that in the far south there are nations where a golden mane and sky-blue iris open doors better than the best professional education.
At the top end of these Baltic regions we arrive to Tallinn, the millennial city by the sea, sold by the Danish in the late middle ages to the Teutonic Knights, and lost by the latter five centuries later to the Russian tsars, upon which it faced the same doom as its neighbours: twice invaded by Germany and twice regained by Russia, until the recent Estonian independence. Today, it's the European capital with a larger percentage of native Russian speakers: almost half of the population. It is a pity that those minority tongues will eventually yield, in future decades, to the puissance of much more pragmatic and international ones. Sooner or later, Estonian language will pass away, stifled by the very weight of Finnish or Russian. The same will happen to Galician or Basque with regards to Spanish and Portuguese.
I choose a hotel right at the pedestrian zone downtown, but then I have to park the motorcycle out of sight, which I do in a square 200 m away, by a building gate with video surveillance, just in case. It is hot, and after walking that distance carrying a side case in each hand, I'm all sweaty. The hotel is a very old building of a labyrinthine architecture, the ground floor half carved in the stone, and my room lies at the end of a narrow and rambling hallway. First I was offered another room two floors higher, with a nicer view, but as there's no air conditioning I'd rather take this one, that keeps the coolness from the very rock. Once I get a shower and change clothes, I go sauntering along the city.
Same as Riga, yet prettier (to my taste) and more medieval-looking, Tallinn is a very touristic capital, with its neatly preserved walls and its castle on top of a hill towering above the city, dominating a red sea of pointed roofs, the church towers' needles and also the other sea, the blue and cold Gulf of Finland. 100 km across, from the populous Helsinki, every day thousands of Finns in their cars take the ferry to Tallinn for fueling up and filling up the trunk with cigarettes and alcohol; quite a saving. In the old town, a throng of tourists can be seen spread out along the hundred terraces and restaurants, filling streets and lanes, parks and avenues. There are plenty of hotels and youth hostels, high occupancy rate this summer, and all over the place people can be heard speaking in English, Spansh, Russian, Polish... Retiree groups on touroperator trips, young couple of backpackers, weed smokers on dirty flip-flops, Polish families, Russians in suspicious gangs, solitary travelers on expensive adventure-fashion clothing, sets of slender Estonian girls hunting for a fun foreigner, locals guys chasing after some sexy tourist, and a legion of moochers, sellers, musicians and jugglers on medieval attires striving to feather their nests. Pity that, despite the beauty and historical purity of the old town, commercial tackiness has managed to make its way through, undoubtedly buying some political wills, to accomplish what I now see: a McDonald's neon right in front of the ancient stone walls. Nothing against the USAn franchise, but authorities should at least have banned the tasteless neon in this location.
For a change, the good thing about this land is, no matter how hot it is during daytime, it always cools down at dusk: as soon as the twilight-red sun sets below the sea after having begotten the best of the wall towers' profiles, you need to put a pullover on. And as I don't have one with me, I finish off the beer I'm drinking at a corner terrace and I head for my hotel, not without first taking a look at the motorcycle. I know I'm tempting fate by leaving Rosaura there, but such are the hazards when traveling, and we ought not to think too much about them if we want to enjoy every day's journey. And what about tomorrow? God will tell. Before falling asleep, I ponder about Tallinn being well worth an extra day, but I'm not going to stay; I'm eager for crossing the gulf and setting my feet once again on my beloved Finland; though, when I come to think of it, I don't really know what I'm expecting to find there; maybe it's just the feeling that, across the sea, a new stage of this journey will begin.