hidden europe

An Estonian oasis

We warmly recommend a rural spot of studied tranquillity just north of highway E20 from St Petersburg to Tallinn

There are some drives we wouldn't wish upon anyone. That from St Petersburg to Tallinn is most definitely in this category. You may suppose that the highway skirts the Baltic coast, but it doesn't. The main E20 heads southwest from the Russian city, crosses the Narva River into Estonia under the shadow of Ivangorod's great fortress, and tracks west to the Estonian capital. It is not that the landscape is awful. On the contrary, the route traverses some appealing forest country. But rather it is the road itself and its immediate environs that make this drive so despicable. Three hundred and fifty kilometres of litter and lorries. Add to that a tired road surface that should have been renewed a decade back, and you have the makings of a five hour nightmare.

But, for all its trials, the route from the city of the Czars to Tallinn does offer some intriguing diversions.

Tags: Estonia

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This article was published in hidden europe 6.

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Diverted via Paris

Remember the ash cloud in 2010? It had a silver lining in making stranded travellers think creatively about the journeys they wanted or needed to make. And similarly with the seasonal doses of wintry weather that play havoc with rail schedules across the continent. When we left London mid-morning yesterday, we thought we were pretty sure to arrive in Berlin by late evening. Little did we imagine that our roundabout journey would lead us to Paris (just in time for an early supper by the Gare de l'Est), nor could we foresee to be many hours later on a train full of skiers returning from the Swiss Alps to Hamburg and later breakfasting in the company of wild deer in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.

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Çanakkale is a mere dot on the map, but mere dots in distant lands so often turn out to be bustling cities. And thus it is with Çanakkale, a seaport and fortress town on the east side of the Dardanelles. Çanakkale is a community of more than 100,000 people. Choose your vantage point on the waterfront with care, and you will be rewarded with fine views across the water to the great fortress at Kilitbahir across the west side of the Dardanelles.

Frisian waves

We map our way around Europe using antique guidebooks, just as we map our way through the year using long-obsolete ecclesiastical calendars. So we are in a small minority of Europeans who happen to know that today, 16 January, was long observed as the Feast of St Marcellus. Quite what happened to St Marcellus we don't know, but it seems he was ousted from his January perch by this or that papal reform sometime in the last century.

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