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I don’t know why we decided to fly to Estonia. We’d been travelling for a few months already and had been through a lot of Europe’s more obscure countries (…Albania, Iceland, Luxembourg…) but all of those happened out of convenience or from travels plans hatched years ago. Estonia was both spontaneous and out of the way. But someone we met on the perpetually sunlit Flåm Railway told us that Estonia had herring pancakes, elk pies and if you could hold your breath for long enough you could swim across a lake to Russia. And because we didn’t really have anywhere else to be, and thought that sounded pretty cool, we booked the next flight there.

We hired a car and by the afternoon had picked up a group of hitchhikers with flowers in their hair. They were photography students on a school excursion staying in a grim Soviet looking gym littered with beer bottles and sleeping bags. We passed up their offer to bunk in and instead stayed in a little red cabin on a trout farm. We caught our own dinner and gave it to a boy who gutted it and baked it in foil. We ate on a wooden table by the lake listening as the trout we didn’t catch slapped the water with their tails.

The students drew us a map of all the good places to go out in their hometown Tartu so we headed there next. Somewhere between the first and second red dots on the map we made the fabulous acquaintance of several Estonian kids who lived life on the edge of a cutthroat razor. Gorgeous, ironic, bright young things - we willingly followed our new friends to a party out of town where we found ourselves at a newly renovated homestead in a forest. Twenty years ago the host’s parents were vegetable growers who sold their produce at markets in St. Petersburg on the weekend. Now they were a pair of leather-jacket wearing legends currently touring Finland on motorbikes.

Out the back was a little wood-stove sauna. A few hours later it had been heated to 110 degrees Celsius and I was shooting vodka like a Russian oligarch before stripping off naked and sweating off 8 months of dirt between five ludicrously well-hung Estonian men. When it all got too much we pushed out of the heat and ran naked helter-skelter through the hollyhocks to dive into the river running below the garden. Slammed by the temperature shock we rose shrieking to the surface feeling more alive than a couple of lucky uncooked trout on adrenalin shots.

I don’t know why I ended up in Estonia but I certainly wouldn’t mind ending up there again.