Winter in Estonia

Today you arrive in Tallinn. Your driver-guide meets you in the arrivals hall at the airport and drives you the fifteen minutes into town, to Hotel Telegraaf on Vene street inside the medieval walls. After a pause to settle in, you set out on foot together through the Lower Town: Town Hall Square, the merchant houses on Pikk street, and the lanes up to Toompea, the cathedral hill, where the viewpoints look out over the snowed roofs to the frozen edge of the bay. In January the daylight goes before four, and the walk is timed around it. You are back at the hotel by dusk, and the evening is yours.

Today you leave Tallinn for Lahemaa, Estonia's oldest national park. Your driver-guide collects you from the hotel after breakfast and drives east along the coast road. The first stop is Jägala waterfall, the highest natural waterfall in the country. After a run of hard frost the spray freezes into curtains and columns of pale ice, but in a mild week it simply runs, and you see it as it is. The ice itself is not for climbing, and you look from the bank. Further east, inside the park, you visit Palmse Manor, the Baltic German estate restored with its period rooms, its park and its old distillery. By mid-afternoon you reach Vihula Manor, a restored estate in the forest, where you stay for two nights. Dinner is at the manor.

Today is the bog. Your driver-guide takes you from Vihula to the edge of Viru bog, where a local nature guide meets you with snowshoes and gaiters. You walk out beyond the boardwalk across the snow-covered bog, past small pines and frozen pools, to the viewing tower, and the guide reads the tracks in the snow and explains how a raised bog grows a millimetre a year. Halfway round there is tea and a snack. If there is no snow, the walk goes ahead in bog shoes or on the boardwalk. After lunch your driver-guide takes you north to Altja, a fishing village of wooden net sheds and farmhouses on the shore. In a cold spell the bay freezes over and the sea goes silent, though that is up to the weather. You are back at Vihula before dark, and the evening is for the spa and its saunas. On a clear night, step outside: the northern lights are seen in Lahemaa now and then, but they are rare and impossible to predict, so treat them as luck rather than a plan.

Today you start slowly, with a late breakfast and time on the estate. Late in the morning your driver-guide drives you to Käsmu, a village on a peninsula where sea captains built their houses in the nineteenth century, and where large granite boulders left by the ice sheet lie along the shore and out into the shallows. In winter they stand in snow or in sea ice. After a walk through the village and along the shore you drive back west to Tallinn, about an hour and a half. In the afternoon your driver-guide takes you to Kalamaja, the old district of wooden houses outside the walls, and the Telliskivi creative quarter beside it. You are dropped back at Hotel Telegraaf, and the evening is yours.

Today is unhurried. The morning is yours: a last walk on the walls, a coffee in a vaulted café, or the spa in the hotel cellars. At the time you agree the evening before, your driver-guide collects you from Hotel Telegraaf and drives you the fifteen minutes to Tallinn airport for your flight home.