2010 Tartu-Odessa-Tbilisi, Part3 - Valka-Bauska

Text: Me
Photos and other stuff: We


Valka-Bauska


That’s the thing with crashing places for one night. If it is a building - half-built, just abandoned or whatever else what has a roof and a floor: in the evening it is a practical solution to the problem, in the morning it has gained a smallish “home touch”. It’s not plain roadside building any more, it is a roof under which you’ve slept. Is it the general feeling of a morning, or expectancy of departure, or those ten little things everybody does in the beginning of a new day - but it feels special. It already has YOU written over it, and it has written itself in you for an eternity we call life. This feeling I’m groping about here is awkward, frail, but I suspect it in smiling and knowing something I still don’t.
We had coffee. With a little merited coffetiera I carry around. Coffee itself was something average as my favourite, carefully hoped for supply for the year abroad – “Sao intenso” – got mangled in humane logistics and was somewhere in Austria by the time we took off. This is my morning thing nr 1. Coffee. And it has to be good.
We washed our eyes. Brushed teeth while embraced by uncut grass around the house. Packed our things. And the road again, aiming Riga. There was another issue to compete with an obvious aim to move on: eyewashing and teethbrushing and coffee drinking had had a diminishing effect on our water supply, siding a complete lack of a food supply.
We got picked up - and morning might really be wiser than evening: after not so long of a waiting time – by a drug salesman. Young talkative guy, diligent, and as a salesman very comfortable in conversation. Easygoing ride. Felt awkward to sit in this clean car of a suit-wearing seemingly successful youngster and remember about morning on pallets. He took us to the outskirts of Valmiera, to the neighbourhood so common around cities - trade areas which are built more for cars than for people, and we had to have an inappropriate walk for a kilometre or so out to the nearest suitable hitchhiking spot. Now me and Him were carrying Comrade Suitcase between us, with a Egyptian head scarf for one shoulder and leather strap remaining from camp wheel solution for the other.
This felt like a real thing already. Near some indifferent overpass, getting hungry, singing some stupid songs, doing some stupid things. Trying to use that limited amount of options there for hitchhikers to kill waiting time without leaving the roadside as good as we could. And here being a bunch of three has its benefits. You can make jokes and have somebody else laugh on them. You can sing and get actually stopped for sound contamination. Or they tag along, and honestly, secretly I’ve been thinking (wishful thinking) that if there is one person who is worse singer than I am, then this is Him. All this crap what is visible at the roadside is just so much easier to bare, if there is someone to whom to reflect impressions. With whom to share a bubble of existence, sanguine bubble devoted to better future down the road (or in a car).
Old Soviet Paz-bus stops and She goes there. I am further away trying to manage all my flabby stuff. And it is somehow intense this moment where you are about to find out who the driver is or – as is the case with one particular Peugeot on Tallinn-Tartu stopping mostly for girls – if he, for example, is wearing clothes or not. First he says, Paz-driver, that we should get on, chop-chop, and when She asks where are they going, he goes: “What’s the difference where we are going!? We are going straight ahead! Straight! Clear!?”. Crystal clear! We climbed on board.
Jolly company, old men, rough around the edges. The bus driver had his own world in its full right and time hadn’t moved much in that world of his, say, since late seventies.
All those old Paz’es in Baltics have streamers and stickers around drivers place. Always there, telling a story where this mature bus has been (carrying diligent worker groups, summer days maybe, a motivational excursion, joint personnel ride to pick potatoes), where the driver has been, or where he would like to be instead (if sporting variety of stickers from the “west”). A good old Paz bus is like a book with drivers picture on the cover. Interactive book – you sit there and read, imagine and remember with your whole body.
Hichhikers sometimes have favourite rides, wished and longed for, statistics neatly kept. Collecting car brands or types, or aiming for most expensive, or cabriolets, or rides on “vehicles on duty”. I like “old and awkward”. These guys definitely qualified.
Not too much of communicating during this ride, though. We shared only Russian as a language and seemingly that as well only with the driver. But still there were accompanying jokes and sly smiles - just have to be! - about going off the road, when we made a little detour to go to some old gas station - which shared it’s era of prime time with the Paz bus - and filled some huge plastic canisters with petrol. When hitchhiking you don’t always exactly understand what is going on or why. And then you discover yourself carrying huge bags of dog food somewhere in a little Muslim village in eastern Greece, for example. You get somewhat used to that, not understanding.
They dropped us at the roadside in a place with two distinctive features: red brick old bus stop and a sign on the other side of the road, near to a turn to a small-small road. Sign said “Inciems”. They turned left, took a small dirt track. We stayed there for two hours.
This was a place which offered a view on Latvia where nothing is actually visible. Field. And some trees there, scattered around, some bushes. I have spent some serious roadside thinking time trying to find some way for to describe this type of a hitchhiking setting. Thing is – they are rather common in Baltics. But so utterly characterless, that it is even hard to effectively insult those.. those.. places. And weather offered embracing drizzle from its chummy side. There we reached the common condition of hitchhiking nr n, where jokes and stories get a bit stupid, mildly said; we built theories about Inciems being a secret Las Vegas of Latvia, just there, at the end of this tiny dirt road, and jolly old men, like our ride, they know, play and are building it even bigger.
We dreamed of sandwiches. This wise girl of a She had brought some candies. Life savers. But we were slow-witted enough to forget to bring a little Estonian flag, for waving as soon as you see Estonian car plate. Those little things really work, and the spot guaranteed a fine amount of reminders of the lack passing by.
Relief came in a shape of a red car, this time. Driver, he was studying agriculture or rural economy or something like that and was working as something and his face I cannot remember either. Sometimes all those drivers you meet, they just melt into some vague mental image, revolving around third or fourth or whatever little unimportant issue. For example, him - and I think he might have had dark curly hair - I remember it was weird to look for shared themes for conversation as none of us knows anything about agriculture, and I remember He said something nice about that, his selection of profession that is, and I think we did find something common which might have been films – but – the issue here, in his case, around which all that revolves, is a picture in my memory: two apples.
He took us - another little detour - to a place at (ex) Rigafilm studio area, as told the metal typesetting above the gate. Huge fenced territory, now filled with little companies - oil change for cars, tires, some refurbished office of a starting business, stuff like that - and an occasional prop or part of set remaining here and there. He went to get something from one of those small businesses, germinating all around on the shabby remains of the glory of the soviet film industry. And we waited in the car. Now – the apples: there was an apple tree near the office. And She told me to go there and pick some apples. I have a memory of smiling to some people standing near to the door, and getting closer to the tree. And I have a memory of eating an apple in the car and really enjoying it. But I can’t remember if I imagined it or did it. (I remember a second thought as well, thought which wondered around the politeness of such a straightforward act against apples in this country. I really could imagine a little Latvian grandmother who makes jam for all the office in the autumn. Well, I couldn’t imagine her sitting there with a salt gun, watching those apples, but yes, we, at this point, at the outskirts of Riga, we were really-really hungry already. But this is irrelevant, isn’t it) Unfair towards this maybe-curly-haired driver, but – we don’t choose ourselves what defines us. Sometimes all that we are revolves around two apples maybe imagined in some ones head.
I don’t remember Riga. How did we get to the bus station? I have no idea. Standing there, in the corner of the hall of the bus station, with all my bags and His bag and Her bag scattered around me. And feeling like shit – I was tired, hungry and sweating heavily.
Somewhere along the way plan had developed. According to one really basic and practical principle of hitchhiking - when in transit avoid the cities, they suck you stuck - we thought of flinging ourselves out again as fast as possible. It’s a mess to use public transport in unfamiliar urban area to get to good hitchhiking spots. Public transportation systems are never meant for that. Sometimes it’s much wiser to get some kind of intercity solution, and reach to some small place on the desired direction. Some town what would be small enough to walk through, and where there is a nice possibility of speeds being low and roads rather narrow. It will cost you some money, but worth every santim paid. There is a very nice train option, almost perfect, if coming back to Estonia and already in Riga; but for going the other way around we had to take a bus to Bauska, as went our best guess.
He and She were looking for tickets, I guarded the luggage. They came back with the tickets for a bus in something like forty minutes. A fact that enthused us to but some speed on the other part of the plan – to eat at the buffet on the second floor. And use civilized toilet facilities. They in principle ran upstairs, and sure, fuelled by the stomach in need, I would have had also, but now Comrade Suitcase was solely on me, and pulling this thing up on to the second floor made me feel like my body just started to digest itself.
Eating can feel like a bliss. Simple contentedness. And then you have a coffee. And don’t talk much. Observe the quiet comfort of digesting.