Motorbikepacking expedition 2: Riding to Nova beach from Tallinn
My second trip this year, is to visit a public camping site on Estonia’s northern coast that I’ve found thanks to the super useful forest management agency, Riigimets’ (RMK) online map of all hiking routes, camp spots, and nature places.
I load my Yamaha 660 Tenere up with my winter expeditions tent, some food, water, a sleeping bag, and other essential items for what I’ve started referring to as ‘motorbikepacking’ trips. As you’ve probably already guessed, Motorbikepacking trips are essentially the same regular bikepacking trips, albeit with a motorbike instead of a pedal bike. The main advantage is you can explore places that are further away, yet still a moderately low cost.
Whilst motorbikes and mountain bikes are similar in principle, the addition of a combustion engine clearly means there are more things to go wrong, so I want to improve my technical knowledge of motorbikes before I take on bigger, more ambitious trips in the future.
It’s late afternoon in mid-November and so it’ll probably be the last motorbike trip of the year and for a little while, so I’m heading out on a personal project of exploring Estonia’s public camping sites and then documenting them so other busy professionals, digital nomads, and students can find them and use them a little easier. My vision for the long term is to start bikepacking and fatbikepacking races in the future when I know my way around a little better, so checking out these campsites also has a long-term utility.
The ride to Nova beach is around 2 hours from Tallinn, and I love exploring the countryside when I get a chance to get outside of the capital, Tallinn. I ride past the beautiful Keila waterfalls that was my first bikepacking expedition in early summer, the seaside town of Paldiski that I’ve ridden to on a day trip, and then start to enter into new territory and so it feels like an adventure.
The concept of having so many open spaces for public camping feels quite alien to me as a British digital nomad, as whilst writing this there is an ongoing legal battle for the right camp on Dartmoor, a national park in Devon. As someone whose work and livelihood revolves around computer screens, the need to be out in nature and decompressing from running my own business is high – especially in the years after the pandemic and recovering from a quite traumatic mountaineering accident. Estonia is perfect for this, with over 50% of the country forested, there is an abundance nature to access.
I get to the camping spot, pitch my tent, unroll my sleeping bag just as it is getting dark, so I make some food and read some of the adventure book that I rarely find time to indulge in.
I wake in the dark around 7am the next morning and find a thin blanket of snow, so I’ll have to ride back extra carefully. Sunrise isn’t until 830am so I’ve plenty of time to heat up some breakfast and hunt the best places to photograph the sunrise – which turns out to be over the beautiful lake I’m camped next to. I make a note to research other camp site next to lakes that have somewhere I can pitch a tent on the north side to capture more beautiful pictures like I do today.
Riding back to Tallinn is chilly, so I resolve to definitely buy some ‘pogies’ for when I take the bike out of hibernation in spring. I stop in cafes many times on the way home to warm up, and plan other outings to explore this beautiful Baltic country in the coming years.
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