The next stop on our long northern journey took us to a rather strange island shrouded in history, mystery and avant garde film… We left Stockholm at 4am — the sleepless morning after an incredible Paul McCartney concert — for a long bus ride to the port of Nynäshamn, and a slow rolling ferry to the island of Gotland. I’ll be writing about Gotland and Fårö in the January / February issue of...
I’ve dedicated the past decade and a half of my life to traveling the world’s marginal places. I started off exploring forgotten regions, like Central America’s Mosquito Coast or the Mongolian Gobi. But I’ve also conducted a very long inquiry into expat life. I have a checklist in my head. It’s sort of a list of my ideal criteria: what would be the perfect place for someone like me? The place...
My northern journey continued by boat from Helsinki to the Åland islands. I wrote about our adventures there in Outpost magazine Issue 107 Sept/Oct 2015. I hope you grabbed yourself a copy: From Åland we sailed on to Sweden, threading our way through the Stockholm archipelago and approaching the city from the waterline. I think it was meant to be visited this way, because it is a nautical town...
I promised to tell you how we navigated the Baltics and Scandinavia without any air travel on this 7 week journey. We drove through Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, of course. But when the time came to cross the Gulf of Finland, I chose to travel by Baltic ferry. These massive ships ply the waters between all the major capitals and ports in the region, with multiple sailings a day to anywhere you’d...
My Baltic adventures came to an end in Tallinn. But Scandinavia was just beginning. We drove to the ferry port through early morning rain, and said goodbye to the brand new rental car I’d been driving for the past 3 weeks. The streets were deserted, and Tallinn felt the way a station does when no one comes to see you off. We boarded a Tallink Silja Line ship for the 2 hour crossing of the Gulf of...
Tour guides have called it the most haunted place in Estonia. And you can wander around the empty halls and rooms of this vast abandoned structure entirely on your own. It was built as a sea fortress under the orders of Nicholas I of Russia (ca. 1828) to protect the sailing route to St. Petersburg, and finally completed in 1840. The vast sprawling structure covers an area of 4 hectares (10...
The Lennusadam Seaplane Harbour in Tallinn is home to one of the coolest museums I’ve visited anywhere in the world. The museum is housed in the old seaplane hangar, which was built 100 years ago on the order of Russian emperor Nicholas II, to become a part of the neighbouring naval fortress built by Peter the Great. It’s a massive, cavernous building, and was the first column-less thin shell...
Tallinn was the last town on our Baltic route, and the third in a UNESCO “old cities” triple crown, alongside Vilnius and Riga. The distinctive round towers with their orange cone-shaped roofs give Tallinn a character that sets it apart from the other two Baltic capitols. It’s a lot more polished, and very well restored. But it somehow lacks the gritty atmosphere of Riga, or the homespun charm of...
I find myself drawn to visual arts like painting, photography and installations because they give me new ideas for writing. I’ve rarely drawn inspiration from other writers. Music and lyrics have probably provided the greatest source of new ideas for me in the past, and the greatest influence on my work. And in recent years I’ve found a great deal of inspiration for my writing in the visual arts...
Never fear… If thermonuclear destruction rained down on Latvia, your fearless Communist civil leadership would survive. Or at least, that was the intention behind the massive Ligatne bunker, a 2,000 square metre secret facility whose existence was only declassified in 2003. I’m fascinated by Cold War sites, and I’d never pass up the opportunity to explore one. So we drove out there from Riga one...