Direction Helsinki. Only now the moon rises with an effort over the horizon,
big and yellow.
The night passes in taking turns with driving. By the
time it starts getting light we are 300 km from Helsinki. Early. Trees
are frozen, the view is spectacular. I use my leading position to take a
photo-stop.
I devise a plan that if we reach Helsinki in good time then we can change the ferry ticket for an earlier ferry. Unfortunately we keep circling in the city searching for a gas station and then searching for the way to harbor. We enter the ferry terminal just in time to hear the last call for check-inn from loudspeakers. Damn, with these two hours I could have translated 4-5 sentences of Sanskrit. Instead I finish Brett Dakin's memoirs from Vientiane. These do not make the capital of Laos jump off the printed page, as suggested in the introduction, but it's about the frustration of a young American, who is used to rationality, over the inefficiancy of a developing country.
The ferry is sunday-ish, a few people, sun shining in through the windows. In the left from me a young woman is writing something, on the other side a middle-aged man sets himself to sleep on the bench, somewhere children can be heard running around. By the time we arrive in Tallinn, Paul Theroux has taken me from London through Paris, Vienna, Budapest, Bucharest, part of Bulgaria, Istanbul, Ankara and Trabzon to Tbilisi. The sun rolls along the horizon towards Tallinn and falls then into the blue sea.
Useful new knowledge:
- the movement of clouds has some kind of predictable system;
- nordic lights have to be chased, the camera of a sleeping tourist doesn't catch nordic lights.
Of help were:
http://www.foreca.fi/Finland/Enontekio/map/cloud
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/today.html#satenv
http://helios.swpc.noaa.gov/ovation/Europe.html
In total we drove about 4100 km. If I'd been alone I'd probably not bothered to move around that much and would have missed half the nordic lights. So thanks Tanel! :)
I devise a plan that if we reach Helsinki in good time then we can change the ferry ticket for an earlier ferry. Unfortunately we keep circling in the city searching for a gas station and then searching for the way to harbor. We enter the ferry terminal just in time to hear the last call for check-inn from loudspeakers. Damn, with these two hours I could have translated 4-5 sentences of Sanskrit. Instead I finish Brett Dakin's memoirs from Vientiane. These do not make the capital of Laos jump off the printed page, as suggested in the introduction, but it's about the frustration of a young American, who is used to rationality, over the inefficiancy of a developing country.
The ferry is sunday-ish, a few people, sun shining in through the windows. In the left from me a young woman is writing something, on the other side a middle-aged man sets himself to sleep on the bench, somewhere children can be heard running around. By the time we arrive in Tallinn, Paul Theroux has taken me from London through Paris, Vienna, Budapest, Bucharest, part of Bulgaria, Istanbul, Ankara and Trabzon to Tbilisi. The sun rolls along the horizon towards Tallinn and falls then into the blue sea.
Useful new knowledge:
- the movement of clouds has some kind of predictable system;
- nordic lights have to be chased, the camera of a sleeping tourist doesn't catch nordic lights.
Of help were:
http://www.foreca.fi/Finland/Enontekio/map/cloud
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/today.html#satenv
http://helios.swpc.noaa.gov/ovation/Europe.html
In total we drove about 4100 km. If I'd been alone I'd probably not bothered to move around that much and would have missed half the nordic lights. So thanks Tanel! :)
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