Islands (Part 1)

Last week was mostly spent visiting the Estonian islands. It was a fairly small group which became even smaller as one person was busy with... something and would join us later and another person just didn't show up at all. So in total there were four students, two organizers, and one driver for the first couple of days.


(Picture from Tallinn Summer School)
Our first stop, after a short ferry ride, was Muhu, the third largest island and has a population of less than 2,000. And yes, even the Estonians think Muhu is a funny name. The first place we visited was an ostrich farm. In this picture from left to right, Olga (Estonian), Adrienn (Hungarian), Rosa (Finnish), an ostrich (Avian), Gerli (Estonian), Darrell (American), and Sabine (German). I'm looking away as I was watching the ostrich. In an earlier picture, we had been standing too close to the fence and an ostrich tried to grab Rosa's glasses.

It seemed that the ostrich farm was more a tourist attraction than a farm and set up like a small petting zoo. They had a few other animals as well, such as emus, rheas, kangaroos, and some very small ponies.


A more interesting stop was to a traditional farm. Our guide was an exception to what I had discovered on previous tours, he didn't speak English well, but he kept it short and simple instead of droning on and constantly repeating himself as other guides had done. It also helped that he was funny and rather animated. The orange hat that he is wearing is a traditional hat wore by men on Muhu.


Overall, there really wasn't anything all that unique to farm life on Muhu, however, I found this well fascinating. Instead of pulley system used on pretty much every well I've ever seen, they used a lever system to lower the bucket in. The bucket is not attached to a rope, but rather a long stick. The well is about 11 meters deep, so the stick is a bit less than that. Our guide said there is another well on the island that is 20 meters deep, so the lever is also much taller.


This statue is of Juhan Smuul, a writer from Muhu. This statue was originally Tallinn, however, it was torn down after independence as he had been a communist. The people of Muhu still liked him though, so they had the statue brought to the island. In the process of being torn down, the statue lost one of its fingers, the one pointing down, so it was replaced with a finger from a statue of Lenin.

We then left Muhu to go to the larger island of Saaremaa, where we would stay for the night. We stayed in a cabin at a campground right next to the beach. The plan had been to go swimming, but it had been cold and rainy all day, so having brought my guitar along, I stayed up and played silly songs for everyone.


Although, we quickly determined that swimming at this beach might not be possible. If you look at the above photo, you may see a dark shape near the horizon. That's a person walking in ankle deep water. The next day when we did go into the water, we never got past knee deep before we turned around because it was getting dark. Basically, the water around the island is incredibly shallow. This is important when thinking about the land rise. While Saaremaa only gains 2mm in elevation every year, it will only be a few decades before everything between where I was and where that man was walking, will be dry land. This is problematic for the people of Saaremaa and Muhu as their two islands are slowing growing together and it seems that neither side likes the idea of this.

So that was the first day. I need to meet with some people today, but hopefully I'll have time to post more later this evening.