Author: Stanfords

Estonia, a small country in north-eastern Europe, has neither grand landscapes of deep canyons, breathtaking mountains nor even proper uplands. The highest point of Estonia, and the Baltics – the Big Egg ‘mountain’ – is only 318m above sea level. Nonetheless, the country is a real treat for nature lovers and walkers with wonderfully bucolic and wooded scenery. About half of Estonia’s territory is forest, inhabited by many animals that are very rare or no longer found at all in western Europe, like wolves, brown bears, wild boars and lynx. Its national parks are great for wildlife spotting, and especially birdwatching, due to the country’s key position on north-south migration routes.

Soomaa National Park is one of the most alluring places to enjoy nature at its wildest. The name stands for ‘land of bogs’, and indeed, the land abounds with floodplain grasslands, meandering rivers, forests and raised bogs. The land is so susceptible to flooding in the spring that the floods are regarded as the ‘fifth season’ in Soomaa. The rivers cannot contain all the melting snow and the water flows over the flood plain creating islands from steep sloped bogs. Some springs have seen the water level rise several metres, leaving many roads flooded, thus effectively isolating Soomaa from the rest of the country. The park is a haven for rare species of wildlife such as black storks, golden eagles, flying squirrels and larger carnivores such as wolves and bears.

Soomaa and its waterways can be explored by canoe. Some tour operators offer traditional Estonian dugout boat excursions – called haabjas – on many of its rivers. Haabjas are one of the oldest types of canoes of the Finno-Ugric peoples, carved from a single tree trunk. Alternatively there are numerous elevated board trails for walkers. The trail that I took had oodles of mosquitoes and horseflies in the beginning, but as soon as I left the denser forest, the insects disappeared. The landscape was dotted with lonely pine trees and the terrain was really quite wet, interspersed with small lakes, and the higher ground covered in lichens, mosses, heather and cranberry bushes. The turf layer in the bogs has been forming for thousands of years (at just 1mm per year!) and is usually 6-9m thick; however in some places it can reach up to 16m. It is even possible to take a dip in the lakes. The water is brownish in colour due to the leaching of tannins from the peat moss, but as peat is used in water filtration and has beneficial functions in freshwater aquariums, it is perfectly safe to swim in.

There is limited accommodation available on the grounds of the national park, that’s why I would suggest staying in a nearby seaside resort town of Pärnu (about 40km away). It is the summer capital of Estonia with a lively entertainment scene and a wide sandy beach.

My recommended books and maps from Stanfords are the Lonely Planet guide to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and for maps, the Regio 1:150 000 Estonia Road Atlas and the Regio 1:100 000 Soomaa jõed/Rivers of Soomaa map.

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Author: Vadim Tsaikovski

Day trips in my family tend to take the form of several hours in a hot car on the way to the south coast, followed by 40 minutes wandering aimlessly over sand-dunes as storm clouds gather, and then another couple of hours in the car, in order to arrive back home in a foul temper. The temper is partly induced by having to spend what seems an inordinate amount time in a confined space with our nearest and dearest, and partly by the fact that whenever we choose to make these day trips, every single restaurant, café and hot food stall on the south coast has closed for the day, forcing us to eat our ‘emergency’ bacon sandwiches, which have spent the journey down congealing in a sorry brown paper bag.

Perhaps one day I will reminisce about these trips as the crowning joy of my youth, but I sincerely doubt it.

It seemed almost too good to be true, then, when I was offered a family outing to Bruges for the day, prompted by the film ‘In Bruges’. Pouncing on the idea, I assured my father that the journey would be painless and cheap, and so we had booked and paid for the Dover-Calais Eurotunnel crossing within minutes of the mini-break being suggested – I use the word “mini-break” hesitantly, as it conjures up the image of couples ensconced in Paris hotel rooms, but I’ve run out of synonyms, so you’ll just have to grin and bear it. We decided to travel by car, as opposed to Eurostar, because the flexible ticketing system allowed us to deviate from our schedule as much or as little as we wanted.

I didn’t escape from the emergency bacon sandwiches, which were furtively packed into the well of the passenger seat just before we left home at five o’clock in the morning for Dover. The journey, however, was as painless as I had promised. Four hours door to door, most of it was spent on the fast-flowing, seamlessly flat motorway in Flanders which delivers you straight to the outskirts of Bruges.

It must be noted that Bruges is a picturesque but very strange place. I have never been to a city before whose inhabitants subsist entirely on pralines and lace, or so it seems, at least, when you look at the shops in the city centre, which uniformly alternate between chocolatiers and haberdasheries. Having said that, I’m not entirely sure that I can claim to have actually seen any natives of Bruges during the eight or so hours we spent in the city, as there were more tourists than you could shake a Thomas Cook brochure at. But when you get used to the idea that Bruges is essentially a life-size version of Disney World, and actually buy into the whole thing, you begin to enjoy it. We took a boat ride along the city’s canals, and climbed the belfry, and lunched on traditional Belgian Waterzooi stew. We even visited the quieter residential districts of the city, with their architectural mix of modernist and traditional Flemish styles, and their liberating lack of Segway-touting tour groups, which plague the city’s two main squares.

For a city of such small stature, Bruges has an incredibly rich variety of sights, from the manicured Beguinage monastery to the enormous Gothic town hall, and the small but perfectly formed Groeninge museum, which houses one third of Belgium’s national collection of Flemish art. If you’re prepared to spend half a day travelling and half a day soaking up art, culture and food – and why not? – then Bruges could be the perfect day trip.

> Bruges travel guides and maps

Author: James White

Yerevan – a little slice of California in the Caucasus?

Ten minutes across the border from Georgia into Armenia, my taxi is pulled over by the traffic police. Out steps the archetype of the corrupt police official – big uniform, big hat, big belly. Who knew that being a policeman in provincial Armenia was so lucrative? Our crime, it seems, is that the taxi is Georgian-registered and the driver himself is Georgian. Spit spit. Actually, there’s no love lost between Armenia and any of its neighbours, certainly not Turkey because of the Armenian genocide, in which up to 1,500,000 Armenians were murdered. Definitely not with Azerbaijan, with whom the dispute over the territory of Nagorno-Karabagh does not look like being settled for a very long time to come. Armenia, then, would be isolated, if it weren’t for two things – firstly, its close relationship with Moscow, which posts its soldiers along Armenia’s sealed borders, and, secondly, the enormous Armenian diaspora, particularly in California, whose remittances keep the country well in the green.

After a ham-fisted attempt at bribery, my taxi driver goes on the offensive and threatens to call the Georgian embassy. That seems to do the trick, and the policeman suddenly remembers that it was another car which was supposedly speeding. We drive on, my driver fuming in broken Russian about Armenia and the Armenians. “You can’t trust them, they’re devious”, he says. In fact, I rather like them.

We stop off at the Unesco monasteries of Haghpat and Sanahin, high in the forested hills around the Debed Canyon. The scenery is stunning, with views from the 10th-century bell tower over lush ravines. In the cloisters of the complex, Khatchkars – intricate Armenian crosses – rise from the moss-covered floor, and birds nest in the delicately carved roofs of incense-filled chapels. The driver stays in the car with the window down, chain smoking.

After an eight-hour drive from Tbilisi, we arrive in Yerevan in the evening. Crossing into the city over the Hrazdan gorge, I see villas built by diasporan Armenians which seem to have been transported directly from some Florida holiday-home development. Their squat brashness is oddly out of keeping with the stark natural beauty of the surrounding landscape. The city itself again seems to have come from the States by way of the USSR. High-rise blocks are everywhere, but made in a distinctly Soviet fashion. It’s actually quite attractive, but in a perverse kind of way.

The opera is the centre of Yerevan, another Soviet megalith of a building. Around it there are stylish open-air cafes and basement clubs, where most of the city seems to congregate all day, drinking soorch – Armenian coffee. It’s a shock to discover that anyone actually does any work in Yerevan. Other highlights include the incredible Cafesjian Museum of Art on top of the monumental Cascade, a terraced series of fountains with views over to mystical Mount Ararat.

If the big city gets too much, a day trip to one of the ancient sites around Yerevan is an insight into a purer Armenian culture. But it still conjures up strong contrasts; at the monastery of Khor Virap, on the plain of Ararat, I climbed down the snake pit – where St Gregory the Illuminator was incarcerated for years on end – before witnessing a live goat sacrifice. Next to me sat a group of Armenian-American teenagers, who huddled together speaking English whilst their parents, guilty about abandoning their native land and heritage for the US, straddled the goat, knife in hand.

Take the Lonely Planet Guide to Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, written by authors who have travelled for years in the region, plus provides interviews with locals. We stock a large, indexed street plan of Yerevan.

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Author: James White