Another pre-warned change – the Balti (main) station in Tallinn is having building work this week, so all journeys need to start at one of the smaller satellite stations. For southbound journeys like ours, that means Kitseküla. I’d booked a Bolt taxi with a taciturn driver…until I noticed his screens were in Cyrillic and I mentioned to this him. He was late 50s, I’d say, and Estonian, but obviously of the generation that learned Russian at school, rather than English, or even Estonian. When I said I knew a little bit of Russian and lived in London, he was off – one of his relatives loved London, visited every year for a few days…I didn’t everything he said(!) but we parted as friends 🙂. Kitseküla is not a “proper” station, it’s two platforms either side of the tracks that you walk across rather than use some kind of woke footbridge or politically correct subway. There was some confusion about the platform we needed (I’d assumed “tsoon” on the seat reservation meant “platform”…it in fact means “zone”. Thank you, Google Lens! But apart from some metal girder-benches, no facilities here!
The train was spot on time, small (I was glad to have gone through the faff of securing seat reservations – a couple with big rucksacks were expressing their disbelief that they couldn’t sit in first class as they had first class Interrail passes. All the few first class seats were booked and the conductor was neither speaking English nor showing any mercy) and unfortunately had no coffee etc on board. We had a stash of food and drink (remaining cherries,…but we’re missing our coffee.
I definitely sensed a generational tension in Estonia – central Tallinn is hypermodern, under construction but open for business, Estonian language and English used interchangeably, cool, pleasant and expensive. You don’t have to go far from the centre to see it’s not like that at all – Nōmme was much more basic and traditional, and older people (like our taxi driver) more comfortable in Russian than Estonian. As we know from London Vs e.g. Doncaster (or lots of other places), it’s entirely wishful thinking to assume fostering a fun paradise for the wealthy in one city will lead to positive effects on others…at least not without some hard politics.
We arrived at Valga smack on time, with 4 hours stretching out ahead of us before the train to Riga. We found the slip of paper pinned to the board confirming the train times and that the Riga trains depart from platform 2. Great. We found the lockers in the far right corner of the main station concourse. Nice simple lockers – put a euro coin in, turn the key, take key out. Like a swimming locker! Mire surprising – open them back up and the coin comes back out! What a bargain.
We walked around through town, feeling awkwardly metropolitan in this decidedly provincial town – Tallinn, it is not. But the parks are nice, the centre is nice and the area “celebrating” the border through the town is quite cool.
Valka used to be a town in the territory “owned” by Sweden, Tsarist Russia etc, so it was always one town, simple. In 1920 though, post WW1 and the Russian Revolution, Estonia and Latvia declared their independence, quite reasonably, and it had to be decided exactly where the border was and how it affected Valga. Step forward some guy from UK, who made the decision, and split the town into two halves, Valga (Estonia) and Valka (Latvia).
We also found an excellent restaurant – we’ll, seat61.com mentioned Lilli, so we went there, and indeed it was great, friendly, decent kids options, would go again! 🙂 Oh, and I finished my meal with a coffee and glass of Vana Tallinn liqueur – very nice, like a less intense Drambuie.
Back to the station for the 1452. The train is there for a while allowing you to board early. There’s not much on the train – maybe loos, but I haven’t been brave enough to look yet. I did use the loo at the station – 50 cents to do so (enforced by a lady with a till). Definitely no food or coffee, no first class and not even seat reservations. The heptagenerian conductor was out like a flash when the train started to check our tickets. This took some work. I’d added the journey to our interrail pass, and had a fresh QR code…but there was no question of her scanning this QR code. In her device, she showed she needed the Interrail pass number. Ok, I thought, that’s the pass cover number – I have those (in workflowy, where else). BUT, her input field is only numeric…ok, so try taking the “I” prefix off…still no. Clearly she has done this before, as she enters only the final 5 digits of the cover number…and it works! But she does insist on repeating this for all four of us – the most thorough ticket checking we’ve had all trip!
Timsformational 