Tallinn, Estonia: Hopping through the rain

Above: A Hop-on/Hop-off bus is a cheap way to see the sights.

Sea-cruise 2015 report continued: Tallinn, Estonia, is about as approachable a tourist destination as the former Soviet Union has to offer. Unlike other cities on our Baltic Sea cruise, its heart – Tallinn’s Old Town – is barely a 15-minute walk from where the cruise ships dock.

Like all tourist experiences, though, the ease of that approachability depends on weather. And as it turns out, the rain that had hit the night of our return to Warnemünde, Germany, followed us east. And so we found our arrival in Tallinn to be marked by both rain and wind – the kind of wind that can turn umbrellas inside out.

So we opted for what many European (and other) cities these days offer: a hop-on/hop-off bus tour. For just 20 euro (about $21.66) a person, you get access to a double-decker bus, off-on service to a predetermined list of tourist destinations and a cheap set of earphones that gives you access to a prerecorded explanation of what you’re seeing. Never mind that much of what is said is either unintelligible because the system at your seat doesn’t work, offers up information that is too obscure to be of any real interest or is self-aggrandizing to the point it would gag Donald Trump.

(And as an aside: Not every hop-on/hop-off experience is the same. We got good use out of a similar service a couple of years ago in Delhi, India, especially because the service there had hired an actual English-speaking guide instead of relying on a recording. But the service in Rome, which we used on two separate occasions, is run by employees who take glee in racing past official stops filled with paying customers waving their arms.)

But in a rainstorm, you take what you can get. So hop-on/hop-off it was. We hopped off ever so gingerly after a short tour around the modern part of Estonia’s capital city (pop. 413,782), which included looks, as I recall, at a lot of apartment buildings. Tallinn is known as a technological center, and for tourists it boast a few museums and even a zoo, but not much of anything the city has to offer was available during the limited time we had – especially considering the weather forced us to find shelter whenever we could.

So we concentrated on the Old Town, which is definitely worth the effort, though again rain and wind caused us to skip past much of even that small area, which is split into Upper and Lower sections. Narrow stone streets lead past churches, small shops and restaurants, each of which was calling our name – especially one inviting eatery that allowed us both the luxury of drying ourselves off and at least three of us getting some pretty good food (my “risotto with roasted tomatoes” tasted like something canned by Chef Boyardee, but maybe the rain was affecting my mood just a bit).

Anyway, following our lengthy lunch, we tentatively made our way back down the stone streets, trying not to slip into the Gulf of Finland, eventually joining the others who were returning to the cruise ship Silhouette.

Oh, and I bought a stocking cap that says “Estonia.” How cool is that?

Verdict: No way did we see anything close to even some of what Tallinn has to offer. But the taste that we carried away was tantalizing – even if mine seemed a bit canned.

Next up: Why the Russians revolted.