Berlin to Stockholm - Gumball rally (part 1)

Berlin to Stockholm

16 AUG - 18 AUG

Back in the Summer of 2009...(oops, hold it right there, did I just go a little 'Bryan Adams-esque' on myself there?) - Lets strike that from the record and how about I just go with the Summer before last, my cousin, Big V , (I call him that because he's significantly taller than me, although that's no real achievement, and his name is Vladimir, I'm sure you're intelligent enough to figure out the rest), made his way to Australia for a few months. During his stay we decided to head south over the new years period, taking in the epic administrative and bureaucratic highlight of Canberra, the capital that just keeps on giving (mostly nightmares of the insanely banal), the much suprising emerald coast down near Bega/Eden, Melbourne ofcourse and then onto one of the top ten drives on the planet, the Great Ocean Road. As you probably know, 'one' may well be the loneliest number but when it comes to two in a vehicle over the course of several days and cabin fever suddenly strikes at the heart of every best intention, well sometimes you're able to find fault in the most solid of foundations, please see Jordan-Elisher circa 2002. Thankfully at the end of the journey there were no reprisals, there was no hate mail, no swearing or cursing of one another's mother, which between you and me would have just been plain weird because of that sister relationship thing! It was all just cool and it ended up being a great experience.

Hamburg on the run

Tearing up the bitumen of the south-east we strolled in and out of many topics of conversation such as whether the EU was a social and political experiment that was just waiting to implode, the genius that is Jim Jarmusch, whether ninety mile beach is what it proclaims itself to be (Wikipedia it's arse if you're interested), and Big V's interest and love in the diversity of terrain of our continent and some of its incomrprehensible distances. For me, eh, Australia is home but I don't quite get the same sense of wonder or pleasure in driving the 1000kms between cities and then walking into an identical K-mart or chatting with a guy in the same language and with the same accent of the place that I'd left 10hrs earlier. The mentality, the culture and the attitude remains the same. I guess being stuck on the world's largest island tends to do that. Europe ofcourse is a vastly different proposition, whicn in turn strangely reminds me of a quote by Ronald Reagan when he returned on from a 'foreign affairs' exercise to South America back in the early 80's, it went something like, 'You'd be surprised at their attitude down there, they're all different countries!'. Now apart from Ronnie believing in alien life forms, his wife running the country with the aid of clairvoyants, and Arthur Laffer selling him the 'benefits' of supply-side economics, I 'get' the dumbass quote for its simplicity however. In Europe you can move 30-40kms, encounter a new language, new mentality and have whole gammut of culinary treats ready to go. So when Big V sent me a message via facebook a few weeks back and suggested that he'd pick me up from Berlin and that we'd drive the 1500+ kms up to Stockholm all I could say was, 'Oh yeah, ROADTRIP my man!'.

 

Border hop - into Denmark

The Great Belt bridge - between the islands of Zealand and Funen - Denmark

The challenge of taking on this type of drive is right up my alley. If something is a little difficult to do or is a bit out of the way to reach then sign me up for that wacky adventure and I like the fact that Big V has the same sort of mindset when it comes to these things. V's perspective might be a little different from mine however in the fact that for many years Serbia had been under sanctions and it's only been in recent times that it's citizens have been allowed to travel the EU freely without having to encounter the nightmare of filling out 50 page visa applications for the countries they were wanting to enter. Never the less, when V turned up just after midday at Berlin's Tegel airport it was high fives all round and then onto the business of sorting ourselves a course onto the E26 and pointing ourselves north to Sweden via Denmark.

Heading west out of Berlin and making the most of the opportunities that German autobahn's present, we were gliding along like a 747, pushing the pace somewhere close to the 160kph mark. Still, when you're moving along at 160+ and then get taken at speed by a by a guy called Helmut on his way to a pretzel appreciation convention, well, you've got to ask yourself questions. I'm not sure what those questions maybe, although perhaps I'd first go with why I nominated a dude call Helmut to be pushing 240kph+ in his Volkswagon Golf? Sometimes the sums just don't add up to what the total should be. With that said the German motorways are a lesson in what the world should be and what Pepsi Max has been pushing for the last decade, 'a world without limits'. Cutting through what appeared to be the boring city of Hamburg and then heading north via Neumunser and Flensburg, we covered the near 600km run in something like 4hrs and a few listens of Powderfinger's live Vulture St album. I tell you, after not really having listened to any music for nearly two months and constantly being in the midst of flashbacks to the Mohammed bros of Chefchaouen belting out 'Berber hits of the 70's' on their two stringed violin and tamborine, this CD was like an auditory orgasm. I owe my cousin big time for having racked that album from me last year!

You know it

The Drogden tunnel, setting you up for Oresund bridge - Denmark

....and then...and then my friends we hit Denmark. Than land of the 'nice Germans'. Now really, what the hell has Denmark ever offered anybody other than a few finalists in the Miss Universe contest, the Laudrup brothers and some funky currency called kroons which kind of remind you of silver doughnuts. Via road there's really only one way to get in and  out of Denmark and that's to take the E45 up the guts, turn right halfway up this great state and then make your way to Copenhagen. I wonder how our little hometown girl Princess Mary travels when she's galavanting across her new homeland? For Big V and myself we were kind of dismayed at the average state of roads across this little multi-islanded state. Having to limit yourself to between 110-120kph when you'd just broken every speed limit in 98% of the countries around the world was kind of disappointing but on the plus side, do these guys know how to build a bridge or what? The Oresund bridge connects Denmark and Sweden between the Danish capital city of Copenhagen and the major Swedish industrial city of Malmo. In term of function the bridge connects the highway network of both countries allows Sweden to be connected by road to both Central and Western Europe quite directly. This cable-stayed bridge is quite an engineering feet, nearly 8kms in total length (7,845m), it runs from the artificially built Danish island of Peberholm and covers approximately two thirds odf the distance between the countries. The remaining distance is completed under Drogden Strait on the Danish side, with the Drogden tunnel picking up from where the Oresund bridge drops you off. There about 4kms of tunnel on the Danish that takes you some 270m below the strait and leaves you virtually on the doorstep of Copenhagen. Quite an intruiging run when you consider the country skipping involved.

Oresund bridge - Denmark/Sweden

Oresund bridge - Denmark/Sweden

Pulling into Malmo (Sweden) somewhere after 10pm we were getting onto making the critical decision of whether we should bunker down for the night or whether we'd go for broke and try to make the Berlin to Stockholm run in one stretch. Eyeing off the 700kms+ from Malmo to Stockholm my cousin made the call that I kind of secretly hoped/knew was coming, 'lets go for Stockholm!' - 'I love the way you think big brother, lets do it'. Off we set into the middle of a dark Swedish night with fits and spurts of fog attacking us quite a distance up the coastline. By the time we made a turn inland and lined up with Jonkoping (a few kms up the road from Huskvarna) we had entered a new day and my cousin had been in the hotseat for well over 12hrs. I'm not sure what his physical condition or mental state was but the Swedish roads were having an hypnotic effect on me, so much that I found myself smacking my head against the head rest for the next two hours as I drifted in and out of sleep. I felt like a vegetable for having ridden shotgun for so long and there was nothing I could do to keep myself awake. Thankfully somewhere about 3am Big V came to his senses also and we parked our vehicle for a few hours rest somewhere close to Norrkoping.

'Somewhere in Sweden' - moose and deer abound!

Our 'digs' in Stockholm

Big V on the pier, post recovery

In what turned out to be a relatively mediocre dawn we started up again sometime after 5am and made up the remaining distance to Stockholm in somewhere close to 2.5hrs. The weather for the final stint was kind of odd with rain coming down in 3-4min spurts, stopping for 30-45 mins and then starting up for another 3-4 mins, kind of like an 80yr old man with a handful of viagra. Thankfully we made it to our destination without a problem and by the time we had located the residence of my aunt's friend who was kind enough to be putting us up for the next few days all we good really do on arrival was smile, say thankyou for the hospitality in advance and crash out on the beds that she pointed us to. Nodding off at somewhere between 9-10am my cousin, barring the two fitful hours of sleep in the Swedish wilderness surrounded by wild moose and deer, had been motoring for 22hrs. He had already started snoring as he was falling from a prone position onto his bed, and as for me, well I was thinking that he had just enough 'Serbian craziness' in him to try and convince me of taking the return leg from Stockholm to Belgrade in one hit...but that was going to be a discussion for another day.

Berlin - Ich bin choice bro

Berlin (Germany)

14 AUG - 16 AUG

I had a bad time getting to Berlin, I mean there were several elements that just didn't work in my favour when I flew the 'bastard cousin' of Aeroflot, Air Baltic,to the capital of the German republic. My air travel anxiety and lack of sleep from the Russian 'hippy, groovy, cool cat' techno club from several floors below my hostel might have be the logical place to begin this entry, but alas, the roots of this sojourn were surprisingly already well founded several decades in the past. To figure out what the hell it is that I'm talking about you're going to have to indulge me in a little bit of historical back tracking and in some elements that make react physically in a most unpleasant fashion.

A few months ago I sent a message to my friend Dina who now resides in Berlin. The crux of the message was, 'hey, I'll be travelling through the Baltics sometime in August, now make a pitch and sell me Berlin!'. For the life of me I don't remember the content of her response barring a couple pinch hit words that caught my attention from the outset, 'most debaucherous'. Aha, one of the 'most debaucherous' places in Europe apparently, and there were many an online list that I found in my research that echoed that same sentiment, it was therefore a relatively easy decision for me at that point, SOLD!, ticket bought ...although you see, having friends in foreign lands when you spend most of your time on the other side of the planet often has an accompanying story, and so too does this. So you're going to have to follow me a little further.

Berlin Telecomms Tower

Berlin - Germany

Back in 2006 I was having what could only be regarded as a fairly ordinary year I recall my boss spinning in his seat one day and pointedly saying, 'H, why don't you go travelling for a while, get your mind off things'. In that precise moment I wasn't sure what the right response was. I mean I know that wear my heart on my sleeve and that when it comes to emotions I'm fairly transparent but when you get called out so blatantly, well, all you can do assess the advice and take it for what it is. Several weeks later I was on a plane to Sweden, up on the edge of the Artic Circle with a great mate of mine, carving up the Swedish slopes and having a blast. It was the right thing to do at the right time...anyway, this is all leading me in to where THIS story actually begins. A few weeks after hitting the piste in Sweden I found myself back in my second home of Belgrade. Doing the calculations with my cousin just a few days ago we estimated that over my lifespan to date I'd spent approximately 2yrs of my existence here. Whilst still being an outsider here the place feels very much like home and with family around you, well, there's not much more that a typical Cancerian like me could ask for. In any case on one of those bleak Winter days in Belgrade my mum rocks into my room and says the following, 'We're going to see an old high school friend of mine,please come along!'. What you'll notice about the 'please come along' statement is that it's more of a command than a request. My response to that 'command' was, 'What the hell am I going to do there? I'm going to be bored out of my mind! Thanks but no thanks!'. Now for some reason my mum was uncomfortabl persistent, almost getting to the point where she was saying 'You will be going', and at the same time nearly pushing me to the point where I was going to throw out unecessary expletives - something that I NEVER do with my parents, but you get an idea of the sort of tension that was in air. Her final 'selling point' to me was this, 'They have a niece and nephew around your age, you'll be able to speak with them'....'Oh f***, really? Man that sounds TOPS! Can't wait to be bored out of my mind by people that I'll totally not be able to relate to. Sounds like a fantastic way to spend an afternoon. SUPER'! In the end my mum ends up winning the battle and I mentally prepare myself for hours of physical entrapment and mental torture.

Pretzel envy - 'you've got a huge one mate!' - 'but so does your wife!?'

Berlin - Germany

Walking down the street I'm quietly berating myself for being so soft. I listen to my mum drivelling along the way how about her 'high school friend' was perhaps actually a high school boyfriend of sorts, and all of a sudden I have that sickening feeling in my stomach, my mind mentally leaps to a place where it should not ever go. Now I have to trangess through the anguish of imagining my mum and some random older guy having 'made out', or worse', some 45+ yrs ago. Oh yeah, things were looking 'mighty fine'. We walk through the gate and stand at the door. Soon enough it opens and we're met by a couple that are roughly the same age as my parents. We take a seat in something akin to a sitting room and the conversation ensues. A moment later the inevitable happens, the introduction of 'the children' to one another. I sitthere and think, 'God, please make this freakin' easy on me, really, I'm not asking for a hell of a lot, especially not in my current state'. A girl walks in, introduces herself and says something to me, I don't remember what it was but I distinctly recall a pronounced Kiwi accent - 'aha, now this occurrence is a little out of leftfield!'. From this point I'm intruiged and a little invested. We trade some banter, I regress into my usual sarcastic/wit filled test pattern and get matched on each count with an equally shrewd response....'Alright young lady, you're kind of cool and I like your style'. We go on like this for a little while and I find Dina (D) to be many things, a bright spark, full of purpose, a person with great sense of humour and if I'm being brutally honesty, yeah, easy on the eye. A while later we all sit down for lunch and then the game of family one upsmanship begins. I'm not sure who opened fire first, whether it was my mum or D's aunt but it kind of went something like this, 'Do you know that Henry has a degree in business'...'Oh really, well Dina has a degree in psychology'...'Oh,as a matter of fact, Henry has completed his masters in blah'....'Well Dina has completed her masters in blah'...'Henry is just finishing his JD '...'Well Dina is moving to Prague to complete her Phd in blah!'. Man, it was hilarious, it really was. We both looked at each other in the midst of this game of verbal battle ship and kind of rolled our eyes at both the hilarity and how typically Serbian this kind of garbage was, but that ofcourse is another story. In any case it was an odd way to meet considering the troubles that we both went to in order to dodge the afternoon but I'm glad it worked out as D is one cool cat. So it was, 4 years after meeting her for the first time I was now on my way to the capital to hang out with D and her best friend Silver for a few days.

Memorial for the murder of European Jews - Berlin - Germany

Now, getting back to my escape from Riga. The hostel that I was staying at was comfortable enough but it sat a few storeys above a Russian nightclub whose penchant for brutally bad techno made the quest for sleep a necessary voyage into my untapped depths of meditation a necessity, something which I'd unfortunately not quite mastered as yet. As my mind skipped through thoughts, sorted out answers to some cheap and humble questions of life, and also demanded sleep, time skipped on by and when the Italian contingent returned from their Friday night exploits early on Saturday, well, it was already time for me to get going without so much as a real rate of return on my investment. I moved bregrudingly, jumped my ride to the airport at 5am and hoped that the Riga to Berlin transfer would be seamless. Ofcourse coming on the back of Friday the 13th it seemed that the hangover had lasted and I was going to be dealt the final blow under a blanket or rain and storm clouds. 'Freakin' storm clouds!', the death knell for an anxious flyer!

Brandenburg Gate - Berlin - Germany

Brandenburg Gate - Berlin - Germany

From my basic understanding of the standard operating environment at Riga International, Air Baltic in parallel with the Rigan Airport Authority go out of their way to make the flight boarding process of their patrons as miserable and difficult as possible. The queues for Air Baltic with their Soviet style length and their lack of satisfactory explanations as to what was happening at any stage of the process automatically had you, as in me, mentally second guessing my basic flight information.'My flight is on Saturday, right?', 'It is out of Riga, right?, 'I can't be so much of a dumbass that I booked myself out of a totally different place, could I?'. Waiting for nearly two hours to make it to check-in the crowd around me were all at their wits end with the lack of information and torturous progress through the boarding rigmorale. Not only had I not slept andnot only had the onboarding process been a lesson in futility but then, when I saw the machine that was going to lift me some 10kms above the ground and 'apparently' hit mach 0.9 somewhere above Latvia, well lets just say that my heart did not fill with the joy and goo-ish warmly sentiment that you normally reserve for bunnies and marshmallows. This piece of shit DC-10 looked as though it had been lent out by Aeroflot (Russian for 'We'll try and get you there') to Air Baltic on the proviso that it's 'mechanical issues' be resolved in time. As the pilot throttled up at the top of the runway and I went through my standard panic ritual of asking why I'd put myself in this situation once again, the French pilot of Air Baltic, (who sounded like he'd already been onto his sixth shot of Absolut), pointed us skyward and we were away. From this point on this bloody aircraft did everything it could to make the 1hr 35 min journey to Berlin as mind fucking as possible. The weather enroute was a disaster and we bounced across the top of Northern Europe in the same manner that you'd skip a stone across a pond, although as we all well know, in the end that freakin' stone sinks like a brick. Through dark rain clouds the plane dropped in and out of pockets of turbulence and it was more than audible when the pilot decided to throttle up or down in order to get through the worst of what we found ourselves in. When we finally made our approach into Berlin Tegel airport we could see nothing of the ground until we were about 100mtrs above the deck as the fog had kindly decided to blanket the city on this fine day. We touched down with a bounce and I cursed whatever almighty power it is that decided in their infinite wisdom to impart me with the travel bug! If I ever get to see you supreme being we're going to have words about that little oddity!

Rocking up to D's place on Karl-Marx-Straße this Saturday morning I was greeted with a friendly smile and the banter that I expected. Even though I hadn't seen her for four years and in reality didn't know her all that well it all felt pretty cool and very cruisy. I guess with some people you're just able to take up from where you left off and with D that's certainly was the case.Later that morning 'Choice Bro' tours hit full stride as D took myself and her friend Silver on a 'masterful' sightseeing tour of the centre of Berlin. Aside from the Kiwi commentary that accompanied our sightseeing mission it was a fair attempt to take two newbies around parts of the city that our tour guide may very well have seen a hundred times before, but eh, friends, sometimes that's the type of crap you sign up for when you enter the kingdom of 'friendom'.

That looks like one cool cat - clouds above Berlin

A sleeping E.T. perhaps?

It's strange place Berlin, I mean I'm making my assessment on having been there for just two days but it didn't have that same romantic feel that you might find in say a Paris, Rome or Vienna. It has a fantastic layout, ordered, but it felt a little bleak, although that might have just been the rain talking. Quite often it takes a sunny day to bring out the good vibes of a town, so perhaps I'll let that notion slide. I've heard Berlin described as kind of grungy, edgy and a little gritty. With a now 21 year east-west reunification and the type of nightlife that this place is famous for, yeah, I guess it's style kind of makes sense. It's the type of place that I'm sure would get under your skin and draw you into its arms in time and perhaps the type of place where if you'd established a great social network then you'd have a ball. For a daytripper however it was just a capital city, notorious for its position in history but not somewhere that you (I) could immediately hold dear. There's a little part of me that feels sorry not giving this place the time and dedication that it deserves but for this one dance, and in this time, there are plenty more willing maidens on the horizon, so onwards it must be.

D and Silver with their 'Escape from Berlin' sale - '1 Euro, anything for 1 Euro' -

Mauerpark - Berlin

The next few days were great value. From the few drunken candlelit evenings that the three of us spent talking jibberish until the early hours to the 1Euro yard sale in Mauerpark that D was offering on her 'Escape from Berlin' clothing sale, it was all relaxed, chilled and good fun - although I wish I had given myself the opportunity to take on karoake in the park on the Sunday, for an undercover extrovert such as myself singing in front of 1000+ people would have been a rush. Still, once the new week commenced and the clock had ticked us over to Monday morning it was time for me to continue on with my life of transients. The dawn of Monday now meant that I had a cousin to catch who was at that moment making his way for an airport rendevous with me at Berlin Schoenefeld, and as for D, well she'd done the slightly crazy thing and decided in good conscience to sign up for an expedition to South America? What now????? So I'll be catching you on SEP 23 sunshine, it's going to be 'choice bro!'

Starlight starbright

Now that's a karaoke crowd!  Mauerpark - Berlin

Riga - Latvian night moves

Riga (Latvia)

11 AUG - 14 AUG

Busting out of Tallinn at midday on the 11th I headed south on a 4hr journey into Latvia and onto it's capital Riga. Strangely, after being 'on tour' for some six weeks now, I was getting a little tired of hitting new places and convincing myself that I had to see the 'highlights'. This time all I wanted to do was get to a place and just let it wash over me, and if I didn't catch the 'most important' sights , then so be it, I wasn't going to let it become a major issue.

Clocking into Riga

Cheers and beers in Riga

I'd been advised prior to making it into Riga that the Old Town was similar to Tallinn in construct in that fact that it was bar, after cafe, after bar, and for that there was just no stopping the influence that it may have on you. Walking around the old town on arrival I started to get a sense of what they were saying, it was Wednesday afternoon and this place was buzzing with people. Yes, admittedly mostly tourists, and admittedly we were still in the midst of a European Summer, so perhaps it shouldn't have been as surprising as it first appeared but I couldn't help but think that a Sydney Summer felt very, very different to this. I somehow feel that Sydney and it's residents don't make the most of their opportunities during the Summer months. There's no vibe, no buzz, just an acceptance that aesthetically we're a damn good looking city and that should be satisfaction enough - slightly pretentious of us, no!?

Riga - Latvia

Daugava river - Riga - Latvia

Walking down around the north end of town I dropped into Shot Bar in search of an Happy Hour margarita only to be advised by the girl at the bar that 'kick-off' was still another 20 mins away. 'No problems lady, I'll be back', and with a kind of half smile and a little raise of the eyes she shot me back a look that smacked of sarcasm as she coupled it with a spoken response, 'I'm sure you will'. This ofcourse stopped me in my tracks. Well, just for that little display of attitude young miss I will be back and I'll 'happy hour myself until kingdom come!'. So once the bell struck 4pm I strolled back in to prove my word was as strong as oak, and yeah, maybe to check out the little bird that caught my attention with her dose of sarcasm and cutsie looks.

Freedom monument

Freedom monument - Riga - Latvia

Two margaritas to the good and an interesting conversation in tow I found Inga to be just my style of girl. Cool to speak to, a great laugh, more then well versed in English and with a cheeky/flirtatious grin, she threw out the challenge to make it back to the bar for the 1am-2am happy hour. A challenge hey, since when do I back down on any of those? 'Oh yeah, you are ON sista!'.

So, what about Riga hey? What does it hold for the wandering spirit?

Very much in the same vein as Tallinn, the old town of Riga has an old 18th century style of charm. Cobblestone streets, stone buildings, hidden alleys and open squares, this place is a hive of activity during the Summer months. I had heard stories of tourists trying to make their way down from Tallinn via Riga into Lithuania only to see their minds and wallets succumb to the charm and atmosphere of city whose cafe and bar culture are what can be considered to be a legal form of entrapment. Something that I was to find out for myself in the early hours of the next day. Betweeen now and then however I did my usual 'walk until you drop' routine, meaning that every corner or any achievable place thatcan be made on foot within my designated hours of walking comfort are scouted out and absorbed from a typical 'outsiders' perspective.

Rounding out midnight and ending up back at the Shot Bar just before 1am I took up residence in a darkened corner of this packed dive and waited for the witching hour. As I sat quietly and pondered my last few weeks of movement I traded smiles with Inga on a few occasions as she worked the bar and the outside terrace. Sitting there for 10 or so mins she dropped by to my table with a couple of shots in tow, a more than welcome freebie and more than welcome addition of company to the Latvian real estate that I'd rented for the time being. We chatted for a while before the buzz of the bar drew her back into the fold. Not sure what it was but I just found her to be really engaging and yeah, particularly cute.

Once the evil of a 1am-2am happy hour was off and running I siddled up against the bar and went for broke. This my friends was an unravelling of the 'reality fabric' that usually accompanies most of my night moves. From this point out I entered into a type of surreal vortex of manufactured thoughts and sounds. From having additional shots at the bar with Inga and organising to catch up with her the next day at the bar she part owns, to the random Italian guys that for some reason were dosing me up on pyrotechnical B-52's, to the barmen that laughed in a type of sinister but sympathetic manner each time I tried to light the bar on fire with my 'disco inferno straws' discarded from the B-52's, the early hours of this Latvian dawn were sowing the seeds of what would become my epic journey home.

Start of my 'Latvian nightmoves' - the 4hr journey home - why I took this shot, I have no idea but this was the beginning of the end!

Somewhere between 3am & 4am I bid farewell to the Shot Bar and promised Inga that I'd catch her that afternoon, 'I'll see you then Henry'...hey, how the hell did she know my name? Forgetting ofcourse that I'd written it down and perhaps told her 10 times within the last hour. This moment was the trigger for my bungy jump into the abyss as for the next 3hrs I do not have the faintest idea of where I went or what I did. In a sober world the walk back to the hostel would have been a comfortable 10 mins but in a post apocalyptic Latvian dream such as this, it took me 4hrs. Some of the vaguest fragments that come to mind was some Japanese guy telling me that I couldn't sit on the curb as the Rigan dream police would be sure to pick me up. Then there was the three circles that I ran or rather stumbled in a desolate carpark where my final resting spot was amidst gravel, dirty and the early morning beams of an Eastern European sunrise. There were calls by randoms who for some reason had noticed me, 'Hey, isn't that the Australian guy from the bar?', and then there were the kind requests of assistance, 'Hey, do you need some help?', to which my now tried and true response was 'No mate, I'm all good!'. You've got to ask yourself, in what scenario does a person with torn jeans, a shirt soaked in dirt and the inability to stand on his two feet ever NOT need assistance? Still, I must have been convincing enough as these good Samaritans decided to leave me to my own devices.

As the new light of day became the clearness of a new morning I remember thinking that it was virtually going to take a miracle, in the state that I was in, to find the place that I was staying. Stumbling onto another new street in the dawn of this new day I stopped, looked up and sighted the Belgian Beer Cafe! Home to many a successful evening back in my hometown, this I now recognised as a beacon of potential success as it was one of the landmarks that I'd pinned to my subconscience as a logistical signpost to my digs...and so it was, that sometime after 7am, some 4hrs after leaving the Shot Bar, that I managed to find my bed and crash out for most of the day.

Stirring to semi-consciousness sometime around 3pm I had a run of horror thoughts that entered my head within a 30 min period that I was unable to shake and for which the necessary accounting could only take place once I visited my belongings. Thoughts such as 'Where is my passport?', 'Where is my camera?', 'Why the hell is my left knee throbbing', 'Why am I mentally strruggling to spell my name?', all compounded to present a motsa ball of confusion and anxiety. Struggling through my belongings with that aweful anxious ferver I drew blanks against the wallet, camera and even passport. All that was coming to mind was me hitting the deck a few hours earlier and that accompanying sickening feeling that I'd either left these critical items behind or that somehow I'd been fleeced by some opportunist. Searching my mind for some last ditch probability that I had actually been sensible in my drunken stupor and left all these items in a logical place, I located the keys of my locker, turned open the door and found the space to bare - 'Oh f***!!!!'.....'OH F***!!!!!', where the hell do I go from here!? Trying to calm myself down the best I could, I unzipped a most unlikely pocket in my main luggage only to find all said items safely intact! 'Dude, you had just well and truly played yourself'. So, ofcourse, what is the next move that a man makes once he's dodged sizeable bullet? He heads for his back pocket, right? ...and why pray tell? Because that my friends is where I would locate the address details for Inga's bar and where I'd be heading to in the next few minutes once I picked up my basket of wits off the floor.

Thankfully her bar was located 5 mins walk from where I was staying. The map that I'd been given was thankfully accurate, although I couldn't quite figure out why I'd been provided with a 4pm arrival time as the bar didn't even look open. Walking in however I saw that Inga was just getting the place together for that evening and that it would be a few hours yet before the place opened, sweet. So we chatted for ages, listened to some of her favourite bands (Tool, Dream Theater,etc), had a drink or two, and that was unfortunately that. Even though I asked her out for lunch the next day, quite tactfully I thought, on several occassions, I was successfully dodged with some airy non-commitment. So Inga, as I know you'll read this, you OWE me lunch and a tour of the town the next time I make it back to your neighbourhood !

Tallinn - Build it and they will come

Tallinn (Estonia)

09 AUG - 10 AUG

One thing that I didn't know about Tallinn was that it was actually an Olympic City, not in the prime hosting sense but in the fact that little old Moscow didn't have the capacity to host yachting events and thus Tallinn was given the honour. Thus it was with that infinite sense of Soviet purpose and grandeur that they went to work on constructing a monolithic Olympic style dais which also doubled as a promenade, one that opened up right onto Tallinn Bay from its pride of place in front of the old town. The hope, it was said, were that tourists would come to Tallinn and bare witness to how grand, wonderful and intriguing a city it is and how this particular representation of the Soviet Union was so different from the Western propaganda that had infiltrated the minds of these foreign Big Mac merchants. And then, the good 'ole Soviet Union made a slight faux pas and in 1979 invaded a little country to the south called Afghanistan. Can someone say 'Oops' and can someone also add to that,  'ramifications'! In response what most western nations therefore chose to do in terms of showing their anger and the contempt of the Soviets in invading The Ghan was to boycott the their prize piece, the 1980 Olympics. For Tallinn therefore the expectation of a tourist influx and the chance to show itself off never really eventuated. Also it should be remembered that they were only hosting the YACHTING for goodness sakes, who the hell was going to sit on the shore for hours of a day and watch boats 2kms off the promenade hit their marks against an imaginary course!? In any case the mighty promenade, the sign of Soviet strength, grandeur and supremacy became the classic white elephant, and that as they say 'is all folks'. There it now remains in front of the old town walls of Tallinn, an old Eastern bloc style construction that stands starkly on the bay with no heart, no soul and no sign or intention from the Estonians of ever really utilising it or ever doing anything constructive with it. Still, I'm surprised that the young Estonians haven't rocked it as yet, perhaps they will. An outdoor Eurovision one year? Just a thought!

View of Tallinn old town from St Olaf's - at one time the tallest structure on the planet

Old town - Tallinn

Estonia has been an independent state for going on twenty years now. Russians comprise approximately 20%-25% of the population and it appears from chatting with some of the people around the town that there's no love lost between the groups. From the Russian side it seems that they feel, or at least try to convince themselves that the Estonians accept them. It sounds like the typical head in the sand type of philosophy to me. The Estonian perspective seems to be quite different and whilst there's not any real outward aggression the consensus is that they wish these guys would just buzz off, go home, and leave this little big country to find it's feet in the EU.

So let me get this right, with a seat belt or not, it's still going to be a bloodbath

View onto the bay of Tallinn- was kind of trying to get the colours of the Estonian flag in the photo...can you see it, can 'ya!?

Enough of the facts now, back to what I've actually been doing. Over the past few days I've been crashing out at the Dancing Eesti, a hostel run by an Australian, located practically in the middle of the old town. What is starting to both amuse and frustrate me a little bit on this adventure is the number of my countrymen that I keep running into. I heard a saying recently, in Estonia of all places, that goes something like this, 'You find Germans everywhere and you find Australians anywhere'. It's incredible and amusing but it also appears to be the case that everywhere you turn in Europe, (and it's true for other places also), that you will inevitably hear a familiar accent. I was in a bar called the Hell Hunt with a group of mostly Australians a night or two ago, some Germans, English and a smattering of a few others national denominations. I then managed to tack onto the end of a conversation that I could hear emanating from the bar which sounded like it was an Australian Lawyers Convention in full swing. I jumped in on this one and found out that the guys were in fact lawyers, a few years out of uni and two of them had just worked out that they'd done the same degree at UWA. Kind of amusing, kind of small world-ish in its outcome, and as I said earlier, a little frustrating to be truthful. It's almost as if there's more Australians outside of Australia than there are back at home, why are we all travelling people? What is wrong with us? LOL ... I think the way we Aussies figure it, and the way we explain in to everyone that asks us is, 'Hey, we're so bloody far away from everything that when we go, we need to go global!'. In addition, and with no disrespect to New Zealand, because it's a great destination, there's only so many times that you can jump the Tasman and go mental in Queenstown before figuring out that going mental in other places might be equally as amusing, and the Kiwi's are so damn nice, really, sometimes you just need some vodka inspired fury to get those endorphins going!

St Olaf's Cathedral - Tallinn

Alexsander Nevsky Cathedral - Tallinn

There's no perfect blue buildings here

Night view of Tallinn from the 'grand' Olympic dais

In any case our bar hopping turns into a one stop shop and I start chatting with this cool American girl that works as a masseuse on the European Poker Tour. She has as one of her clients, amongst others, Daniel Negreanu, who is an absolute legend in the poker world. A dude that is shrewd, witty and can basically read your thoughts even before you've fully formulated them yourself. She is an employee of a company that is employed by the tour and basically she travels from city to city, working on the guys whilst they're in tournament play. So, at the end of our drinking session we all ended up making it back to the Dancing Eesti digs at about 2am after a great night out, I then discover that this girl is a pretty damn good salsa dancer and has salsa, bachata and merengue preloaded onto her iphone just ready to go. It wasn't a difficult decision at that point, as the young Estonians would say, 'lets rock it'. We cut up the hostel floorboards until the sun came up, finishing up somewhere close to 6am, it was freakin' awesome.

Tallinn - If you can't fix it, rock it!

Tallinn (Estonia)

07 AUG - 09 AUG

Recycling was the way of the old Soviet Union, it was their methodology and in some ways it made a lot of sense, well now days in any case. If something could be used for another purpose, changed, altered, melted down, cut up, taped, glued, whatever, it was done so without even a hint of sentimentality.They were the atheistic McGyver crew. On the other hand this was not typically the Estonian mentality but a borrowed one.

It can be visibly noticed around outside the old town of Tallinn and it's the reason why in old factories, powerplants, nuclear silos etc, if they can't find a way of fixing the space, morphing it, or using the spare parts for anything particularly interesting, well then it's free game for concerts and dance parties. So the saying in Estonia goes, 'If you can't fix it, then rock it!'. I really like that philosophy. There's something a little indie or punk about the whole thing but I like the attitude. 'So it won't work, yeah, why don't we rock it!'. Something that we should learn to adopt back home rather than building grand car parks or deliberating for 30 years as to Sydney needs to upgrade it's rail infrastructure. Imagine 'rocking' a train! How damn good would that be!

Tallinn Old Town

Alexsander Nevsky Cathedral - Toompea Hill - Tallinn

Tallinn Old Town - with the town hall spire in the middle

Onto something else, another amusing story that was told to me the other day. I was in a discussion with a guy that explained to me that people from the northen part of Estonia are strangely particularly adept at speaking Finnish, or at least, have the capacity to understand it to a reasonably complex high level. Let me also add that Finnish is not the easiest language in the world to understand or speak, it ranks right up there with Chinese and Hungarian. As for the Finns, well the same does not however work in the converse, meaning that Finns will usually not understand a word of Estonian, no matter how slowly the poor Estonian pronounces their words or how widely they gesticulate. The hypothesis for 'why this is so' is a little amusing and works a little something like this. Back in the middle to late 60's the Finns built huge television towers on their coastline to transmit TV signals within a predetermined circumference. This capital investment,not just inspired by Finnish ambition and power but also sponsored kindly with the aid of CIA dollars also meant that the TV signals transmitting from TV central Helsinki could also quite easily traverse the Gulf of Finland via the Baltic Sea and make it to a little place 60kms to the the south called Tallinn in Soviet occupied Estonia. The Estonians, picking up on this little oddity were able to point their sattelite dishes in the direction of Helsinki and receive news of the western world in the Finnish language, thus allowing a generation of Estonians to easily pick up on their Finnish language skills...this however is not where the story ends....

...It was however an offence in Soviet Estonia to be caught with your 'Finnish pants down', so to speak. Meaning that you weren't legally allowed to tune into Finnish TV and the accompanying western propaganda that these infedels transmitted . Whilst punishment for covert tuning into Finnish broadcasts existed, they (the punishments), weren't actually as extreme as some people might have imagined. Meaning that you weren't going to end up in the gulag somewhere in the middle of Siberia for catching Juka and Silvie discuss their finances in a home made sauna.The reasoning behind this however was more interesting than the actual circumstance. Apparently the KGB used Tallinn as a type of 'test environment', a rat laboratory if you will, in order to see how 'Soviets' would behave or respond to western influences, ideas, etc. Whilst there were 'poxy' attempts by Moscow to scramble incoming Finnish TV signals, over time the Soviets accepted its existence and did not crack down on households as stringently as one might have expected of the state. In an even more interesting and kind of odd sidenote to this event, which stangely enough relates back to THE HOFF!, doesn't everything!? The local Tallinn police, during the time that Knight Rider was being aired, were asked to keep a look out for kids on the street talking into their wrists near 'good looking vehicles', aka, in 'THE HOFF' Knight Rider fashion. In those instances they were then asked to follow the kids to their homes as those residences were 'more than likely' to be the ones pointing their antennas/satellite dishes to the north and tuning into good 'ole Finnish broadcasts. Seriously, I think just busting kids with light sabres would have been far easier, or even just listening particularly intently for Wookie impersonations!

Apparently it's quite continental, and a little sado-masochistic

In another, totally unrelated Estonian story that I found as amusing, apparently the CSI equivalent here in Tallinn, the Crime Enforement Agency or something close to that has been storying drugs form various busts over a number of years. It had somehow leaked out that in a certain amount of time, call it 3 yrs or so, that over 100kg of drugs had gone missing. When the agency were asked to provide an explanation to the media

as to what had eventuated their 'official explanation' was that 'it had simply vaporised'!? Man, imagine working in an environment where that quantity of drugs was just floating in the atmosphere around you, how off your head would you be? When the director of the agency was asked to provide a more detailed explanation his successful spin doctoring turned up this little gem, 'There's far more serious issues to be concerned about then 100kg of drugs disappearing from our agency'!? Who the freakin' hell are you dude!? Muhammed Saeed (Iraqi Information Minister during the early days of the USA occupation). He'd say such ludicrous things that you couldn't help just be amused!

The old and the new

Town hall

There's something a little 'Pink Floyd' in this

All this somehow brings me to my time in Tallinn, which has been amusing, fascinating and a lot of fun, which thus far on this trip I've had a lot of luck with. The Old Town of Tallinn, whilst being a tourist mecca, is beautiful and one that you can easily stroll around for hours and not get bored with its cobble stone streets and 14th-15th century medieval feel.. What's more, the prices in Estonia ,(well in Tallinn at least) , are significantly cheaper than those in other Scandanavian countries. EverywhereI went in Helsinki I felt that there was some Finnish guy in a backroom laughing hysterically and saying in Finnish, 'He paid what for a cappucino!?'. Admittedly I've a caffeine addict and habits like that are hard to break but when some geek throws up 5 euros for a coffee then he bloody well need to explain his way out of it! The only way that I'd accept a coffee at that mark was whilst sitting on the Champs Elysees, that I can't understand, but if I'm in downtown Helsinki with nothing on going around me except a drunken Finn called Niko telling me Australian jokes, well, I need to know, WTF? ANYWAY, Tallinn is not Helsinki, it's got it's prices in order and head screwed on and I'm liking it.

In'spired'

Cool little place in the town hall

It's my shadow dedication to Brett Holman - yeah, it's all good Brett

OK, so now to the last of the Tallinn oddities and one that I believe it generally well known. It's fair to say that when God decided upon conceiving the Estonian race, he messed with genetics, BIG TIME. All the genes for the good looking part of the population went to the females, I mean seriously, out of all the countries that I've been to they outrank all comers on the looks scale by a fair margin. How these poor females put up with their skin head ,flat headed, mutated, bright polyester suited partners, I have no idea! I mean, it's not even a secret that's 'generally' known, this is discussed out in the open. For some reason the Estonian or Soviet male feels that to show his masculinity he needs to crop his hair to army regiment levels, suit himself up in the gaudiest garb possible, and then all of a sudden he's Riko Suave...(perhaps Riko Suave of the Albanian mafia). I really 'get' why this town has been 'invaded' by males of all other nations, their of picking up something very attractive increases 100 fold once they touchdown on Estonian soil. I have to say from a completely biased perspective, Estonian men, keep doing what it is you're doing, the rest of the world love you for it!!

...and finally, the JJ guest book bombing serious continues, this comes from the funky Tallinn bike tour

BOOM!