This week I walked through Kõrve trail (80 km), which is one part of Estonia’s longest hiking trail (370 km – goes across the country). It took me three days, two nights, and I was totally alone for the whole time. It was an enchanting experience.
The hiking trail is created and administrated by the governmental organisation RMK, which is responsible for all of the public forests. I was extremely positively surprised by this trail as it really offered a holistic and diverse overview of the (North-)Estonian nature: the unique and wild Estonian forests with lakes, valleys and hills, desert-like wilderness areas and swamps, wild moose and other animals. Together with the autumn fog and rain it offered a mystical, even dramatic scenery. The nature was preparing for the winter – most of the animals, birds and all of the bugs were gone, and everything was dreadfully quiet – very unusually quiet. At nighttime I could only hear the rain, and trees moving in the wind.
The biggest challenge for me was dealing with having so little daylight – during the very limited light-time I was continuously racing to get to the next camping area. It got particularly harsh on the second day, when the route was long and most of my body started to get in pain from the intense physical effort. So the last part of the route (wild forest) I still had to go through in darkness.
When it got dark before 4 PM , I had more than 16 hours to spend in my sleeping bag. As it was constantly raining (for the whole three days), it wasn’t pleasant to go out of the shelter I had – the sleeping bag was also the only warm and dry place to be, but I couldn’t read there or use my phone (had to keep the battery).
Here are the pictures together with my comments:
