Living on the Road - Stage 4: Traveling from Denmark to Estonia

Winter has come with cold and snow. My winter clothes are in Lithuania. I wanted to be back in Lithuania much earlier, but then I stayed much longer than expected in Denmark. When I arrived in the German port city of Rostock late in the evening by ferry from Denmark it was snowing, the temperature was eight below zero, and there was this chilly wind. After two hours I finally found a shelter for homeless people. I stayed in this shelter for more than a week but this shelter is open only during the night, from 6pm to 7am, so what to do during the day? I found a library where internet access was free but there was a time limit of half an hour, and there were only three very slow computer places available, not very pleasant working conditions. I was walking around waiting for things to come or spent some time in a Cafe where I met some interesting people from time to time. Once I met a man who listened to the stories I had to tell, and after that he gave me some money. I became a storyteller. It was Winter time, too cold for hitchhiking. So I traveled back to Lithuania by bus ...

I arrived after eighteen hours in a bus in Vilnius. Such a bus trip is boring and expensive, hitchhiking is much more interesting and free. I stayed more than a week in the Lithuanian capital surfing three couches. Most of the time Seva was hosting me, a young man from Belarus who studies philosophy in Vilnius. He told me that he was on a hitchhiking trip in the United States, so we could share some experiences, and I had the impression that he belongs to a new generation of travelers who is ready to accept the challenge to discover new things. Another bus brought me to Riga, the Latvian capital, another five boring hours.

In Riga I have to change the bus to go to Valmiera where a couch for one night is waiting for me, the next morning I take another bus to Valka, a border town which is partly Latvian and partly Estonian, the Estonian name of the town is Valga. I have to walk from one side to the other, and when I asked for the way I came in contact with an elderly woman who spoke German, and she walked with me the ten minutes to the other side of the border, time enough to tell me the story of her life. She told me that she was Estonian, and that she was deported by the Soviet occupiers to Siberia in 1941 where she was forced to speak Russian. But luckily she survived, and later she returned to Latvia where she was living now. During the Soviet occupation in 1940/41 and from 1944 on hundreds of thousands of Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians were deported, the majority of them died In Siberia, and only a handful of them was able to return to their home countries. In Valga I found another bus which brought me to Sänna, my first destination in Estonia.

Stay tuned - there is more to come ...