Rapla, friendly people and great destination to see Talinn

We had planned to spend a weekend with the wacky parachute jumpers who'd asked whether it is possible to take the back door off our plane and jump from it, but circumstances got in the way.

Rapla houses a young and enthusiastic bunch of over 100 jumpers. They are media savvy and know how to work social networking. This meant that they had an article about us published in the local press and 3 hours after we touched down a TV camera from Channel 2 news rolled up along with a print journalist. Fantastic!
Only problem, we didn't check up on permissions for travelling to the Baltic states and it turns out that w had to ask permission to bring our home build into Estonia, d'oh!

So figuring that discretion is the better part of valour 2 months into a 6 month trip, we decided not to wait until business hours to return the missed phone calls from the Estonian aviation authority, but to depart the next day (Saturday), leaving Kuressare, a reportedly beautiful island and town and Kihnu an island where locals wear traditional dress every day for a future trip. Just as we'd been getting keen on trying parachute jumping and celebrating midsummer with the jumpers after their glowing reports :-(

If I were planning a trip to Estonia again, after getting permission, I would fly into Rapla instead of Talinn airport (contact the Rapla club first) and leave the plane there for a few days and take the train to Talinn - it's around 60km away and the train trip would be quicker than the formalities of an international airport.

Coming in to Rapla

Talinn

We really didn't know much about the Baltic before we arrived.  So we were pleasantly surprised with Estonia, the people are very polite and friendly and enjoy sharing their culture of singing and dancing with tourists (!); everyone speaks excellent English; if they do something they do it right first time and are generally brisk and efficient.  They explain this attention to detail and go ahead attitude as being due to a Germanic aspect of their culture, Talinn having been a Hansa trading guild city ruled by German merchants from 1285, who remained powerful after the Hansa disintegrated, even under Swedish and later Russian rule.

Talinn is a beautiful old walled city

The old town has two sections: upper (back of photo) and lower

The wall towers

View from upper to lower old town

Some of the Talinn highlights for us were the museums.  Kumu, the contemporary art museum cut out of a limestone hillside and the architecture museum.

Kumu, great museum, fun exhibition of busts

I loved this sculpture at Kumu

The recent art at Kumu was really good.  I posted with a video a while ago, and there were several other thought provoking exhibits (no Tracey Emin bs!). Another aspect we found really interesting about this museum was that it had sheets in each room explaining Estonia's recent history as the background information to the art.  The audio guide was of the nature of: in the middle of this painting you will see a big yellow... so I can't recommend that.

One of the displays at the upcoming garden show

Funny combinataion of flavours?  No it's all marzipan...  

The airport itself was a big international airport with all the going through security big charges hassles that you'd expect.  It cost us around €80 for landing, handling and 2 nights parking.  Knowing what I know now I would chat to the lovely people at Rapla (EERA) 35km south of Talinn and take a train up to Talinn from Rapla.

Off to Finland, oh make that Estonia

Well all good things must come to an end, and with approaching fronts we decided it was time to get on our way to Helsinki.

weather....

And in the Finnish archipelago everything looks much nicer!

Helsinki is a most attractive city from the air...

Here the port with some of the archipelago in the background

All those nicely renovated and maintained classical buildings.

In Helsinki we had to accept that all good things come to an end sooner rather than later, after 3h on the ground we admitted our defeat after finding only one hotel room available in the whole city (for €215 a night), took our bikes apart and headed off to nearby Talinn, Estonia, after checking that accomodation was no problem there (and more like €40 a night).