26th August, day 15 - Tallinn -> Helsinki. Home!
Soooo tired. Slept as badly as the first bus journey. I donāt mind sitting on a bus for a long time, but I donāt think night buses are for me. At least ones that are completely full. Just could not get any sleep. Though, the last time I did a night train was almost as bad.
At Tallinn 7am in the morning. Tired walk over towards the harbour. Tired zombie staring at laptop at a cafe. Tired queuing into the ship. I did take a small cabin because I knew I would need the sleep. Two hours of being completely passed out in the cabin.
Helsinki. Home. It was a great trip.
What went well
- Didnāt run into any major problems along the way. The most annoying thing that happened was the covid infected occupant in the hostel room in Copenhagen. But even that turned out good thanks to a great person who I met up with, who let me have their sofa. Thanks again š
- I definitely chose the right backpack. The great thing about the Osprey Radial is that while you have your stuff at the hotel, you can have it in the smaller 26L configuration, and when you need all your stuff, the 34L configuration. The metal frame that keeps the bag upright is just golden, makes life so much nicer being able to just set the backpack down, and it wont fall over in random directions. With every night I found that packing the bag became much more routine, everything going into the right places. And even with the full weight, it wasnāt too bad to carry around.
- I packed the right amount of clothes. And only bought one t-shirt on the way! :D Needed to do laundry two times.
- The ājust the shorts on meā strategy worked fine, i.e. had no major food accidents :)
- All in all, I think I did a pretty good job with packing, taking only the essentials. Could even fit my hoodie in the backpack up until Vilnius, where I bought souvenirs, after which the hoodie needed to be carried. The great thing about travelling light is you canāt buy a lot of things on the way. Who wants to spend the day shopping anyway!
- I didnāt catch covid and especially didnāt get the trip interrupted by it \o/
- None of the trains or buses got cancelled.
- I didnāt lose my camera or anything else that would have been costly and annoying.
What didnāt go well
- It was way too hot. Being 27C to 31C every single day was way too much for me, especially getting to the end of the trip. I knew this was a risk, but I had bought the Elbriot ticket already some while ago so I needed to travel there at least. I think in the future Iām going to seriously avoid travelling anywhere south in the July-August period.
- The trains and buses were full. Again, avoiding August, the main holiday month, is probably a good idea.
I started properly locking down my trip only around early July, which was leaving it a bit late considering it was a holiday season. Luckily the only thing I had trouble finding a reservation for was the hotel in Turku. The rest was really easy. The first thing to do was to map out approximately what days I would be spending where, and put them in a sheet. After that I started going through the reservations a day at a time. Obviously there was the risk that a connection would be fully booked for some part of the journey I wanted to make, but as I could be flexible that wasnāt a real concern. My main idea was to always end travel in a hotel, to avoid the mess of missing connections due to delays. Within a few days I had booked most of the journey. And most of the trip was refundable or at least rebookable.
The most important advice I have received on doing trips like this is to gather everything into one sheet. Dates, times, from, to, hotel details and link, etc. It helps in both planning but also makes it easy to find things on the road. For trains, in Sweden I reserved directly via SJ, and the rest via DB up until Warsaw. From there LuxExpress buses to Tallinn. The boat trips were reserved directly from Viking Line. For hotels I used hotels.com, except for Turku where I had to find the hotel by going through all available hotels in Turku manually. If interested, you can see my travel sheet here. I copied and adapted it from someone else :)
While a spontaneous idea, I had fun writing this trip journal. I hope someone has found this interesting and maybe gotten inspired to go on a land based journey themselves. While no travel is free from environmental issues, land based travel has a way smaller carbon footprint to air based travel, by a huge margin. I think from the perspective of this trip, the hotels I stayed at were probably the biggest contributors to my environmental footprint on the way. Using hostels is probably one way to decrease one's footprint a bit more. Unfortunately during covid times that carries other risks, like I ran into.
Numbers
- Kilometres travelled (approx): 3400km
- Kilometres cycled: 146,16km
- Festivals: 2
- Moshpits joined: 2
- Trains used: 5
- Boats used: 2
- Buses used: 2
- Hours on train, boat or bus (counting delays): ~54
- Trains broken down: 1
- Hotels/hostels stayed at: 6
- Countries visited (without Finland, went through Latvia during the night): 7
- Cities stayed at: 6
- Items lost: 3 (charger left on a broken down train, earplug and a pin lost in a moshpit)
- Items bought (discounting souvenirs): 3 (replacement charger, t-shirt, pin (later lost in moshpit))
- Times needing to eat meat: 0
- Laundry times: 2
- Photos (after editing): 236
- Highest temperature: 31C (Warsaw and Vilnius)
- Times needed hoodie: 1 (when arriving to Tallinn)
- Times leaving camera somewhere: 1 (I have a habit of doing this)
- Tinder matches made during the way: 2
- Tinder matches met during the way: 0
- Beers drank: (letās not discuss this..)
All the previous posts and photos available at https://jasonrobinson.me/streams/tag/jasontravels/ (reverse order and confusing grid layout).