By Linda Thalman & Pierre Nagel |
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Estonia 25-27 June 2009
No customs, no passports just as it had been between Lithuania and Latvia. All three Baltic states are in Europe and there are no border checks points. We arrive in Parnu. This was our first really fully hot sunny day. So we took advantage of the sun to do our first camping in an idyllic spot on a river and ate fresh fish we'd bought at the Riga market. On to Tallinn which has a ravishing old town, UNESCO listed, and our hotel was 2 minutes from the cobblestone streets of the old town. It's youthful, full of outdoor cafes, lovely views from up on the hill. We visited the Maritime Museum, and wandered along the city walls and just had fun getting 'lost' a bit. Pierre found an advanced text book on the history of Estonians in English, though we were really trying to find a book on the Hanseatic League. He also picked up a cookbook. Pierre finished reading a fascinating book, Tycho & Kepler by Kitty Ferguson about Tycho Brahe's and Johannes Kepler's intertwined lives during a Christian fundamentalist epoch. A few scientific notes: 1. If there are only 2 bodies, you cannot differentiate which is orbiting the other. Thus it really needed an analysis of all planets to differentiate Copernican and Ptolemaic theories. 2. Until Tycho, precision was 10 minutes of an arc; he got it down to 2-3'.
3. Kepler was also looking for a force in the sun which made the planets move. He was the first to seek physics explanations in Astronomical studies. 4. It took another 75 years for Newton's universal gravity force inverse square law. 5. It took 2000 years to discard the purist's circular hypothesis. Saturday, 27 June Barely 200 kilometers to the Estonian-Russian border and very little traffic. Surrealism to come. We left Tallinn at 08:30 for the European border at Narva, where Russians and Estonians (or Swedes actually) have fought for centuries. There are two mirror forts built in 1492 across the Narva River. We made it by noon to the border crossing even though the signs were completely misleading or didn't even exist. Found the queue of 20 cars. On our turn we discovered we did not have the required green slip. The obtuse chap in the booth told us off in Estonian and pointed on a map to a place 5 kilometers away where we could get this green slip.
We parked in a gigantic asphalted parking lot and took our white slip to another booth. The attendant ignored us completely, dealing with the others instead. Finally someone explained in sign language and Estonian or Russian that the current number is 275. A young man, also waiting to cross the border, explains to us in English that it will be at least 10 hours before our number comes up. Merde alors! This wait is going to go into our annals of travel delays. 14 sodding hours. Memories of a five-hour border wait in Romania with just 12 cars in front us 25 years ago, the 7 hours at the Taiz airport to fly to Aden in Yemen and an overnight stay in the airport in Denver due to fog. This parking lot was the world of Kafka. Depression sets in and we resign ourselves to wait the time making best use of all the work we can do in the meantime. So clean up photos, read books, eat lunch and watch a video on the laptop. From time to time a short speaker announcement blurts out something (a number?). We see people rushing from the trucks or cars to the booth to get their green slip.
Meantime, Pierre smoke his first cigarette in eight years and opens the vodka bottle. Linda makes friends with a Russian fellow and his grey cat also waiting to get into Russia. He hopes to make it before the bridges at St Petersburg open for the night as he lives north of the river. We hope to make it to our hotel before the wee hours. Still 150 km to go after clearance. Pierre tries to start a new book: a science fiction recommended by his favorite science journal. It's about these people who travel the universe using cyphers. But they have to have their own private keys to encrypt and decrypt their being or they may get copied by nasty aliens along the way. It is a risk some of them take because the keys are scarce. At last our number is nearly up, Pierre waits at the booth and waits and waits: It was altogether an hour of staff pause from midnight to 1 a.m. We get the magic green slip, race out of the 'parking lot from hell' and back to the border post to present that all important green slip. On the European side, inspectors check if our car is being smuggled out; On the Russian side all goes very smoothly. We're IN Russia!
Baltic Trip By Linda Thalman And Pierre Nagel
Email – Linda@wfi.fr
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Copyright since 1995 by Linda Thalman - all rights reserved. |
Crossing the border at Ainazi into Estonia was simple.
That is what was needed to differentiate circular and elliptic orbits (for Mars which had the largest eccentricity).
At that "transit area" we showed the car registration papers and were given a small white slip with the number 564 on it.
Another speaker blurt gets people running for their vehicles as the gate opens to let a precious five vehicles
make their way to the border post.
Paris
