Lahemaa – wood, coast and bog

29 August 2018

We have a car. Exploring! We’ve gone to explore Lahemaa National Park. While driving there we’ve passed plenty of road signs that remind me to mention how charming the Estonian language is. We drove past Balti Spoon. Also Koogi, Vikipalu and Kaberneeme. And in Estonian “shop” is “pood”. There are so many Poods in Tallinn that I can’t stop smiling about it. In Telleskivi there is an e-Sigaretipood. Pood!

Anyway, back to Lahemaa. The park is a mixture of rural backwaters, old wood-framed German manor houses, extensive old pine forests, occasional bogs and twisting coastline. It’s all lowland. The whole Baltic is lowland (the highest point is a 300m hill in southern Estonia!). So there are no seacliff views, the forest just ends at the shore.

We found a very atmospheric walks through the pine forests, lunched on fried snacks at a little boat marina in the middle of nowhere, and rambled out to a bog watchtower as it got towards evening. We admired a huge glacial erratic; very strange to see such a titanic lump of rock on what is otherwise a dead flat landscape. The bog is quite interesting too. If you look at the photo carefully enough, you may just be able to see that the middle of the bog is higher than the surrounding forest. The peat builds up over centuries and centuries, so that eventually the squelchy bog and mirror-like ponds are higher than the landscape around it.

Anyway, generally an amiable day, and the sunniest one so far. Nothing that you could call a highlight, though the forest walk at Oandu was probably my favourite. The towering straight pines have real character, with the verdant carpet beneath and our boardwalk stretching away between the trees.

Back to Tellesviki for a casual evening meal at Kivi Paber Kaarid, a bar/restaurant that translates as Rock, Paper, Scissors. Seems we rather like this little hipster quarter. Hm. Is it really hipster? The beard quotient was actually kinda low.

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This entry was posted on Monday, September 17th, 2018 at 9:48 pm and is filed under Estonia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.