Musings from a rusty Estonain bus.

Musings from a rusty Estonian bus.

(Note: I was flipping through my journal the other day, and found a few of the blog-worthy pieces that I had put together while on the road recently in Estonia and Latvia. Here's one of them - more to come.)

Currently it's Sunday the 12th of April, and I'm trundling down the highway in eastern Estonia on a rickety old bus that in any other country with the exception of Russia, Ukraine, Bosnia or Moldova would have long since been consigned to the scrap heap (oh, by the way, I think we just left the transmission on the road about 100m back...).

Accompanying me is a busload of overstyled eastern European teeny boppers, more babushkas than I care to count and an entire regiment of the Estonian army.

Since I'd planned to be on this bus for about two and a half hours, I have of course brought my trusty mp3 and my journal - there's still 179km between us and our destination, Tartu, a university town in southern Estonia, a stone's throw from the Russian border.

And yes, my calculations of 179km in 2 1/2 hours are correct - this feat of Estonian engineering is chugging along at the lightning speed of approximately 70km/h. Even my 1987 Toyota Corolla could beat this. But considering the Estonian government department responsible for infrastructure seems to have chosen to lay the road with bitumen over a layer of industrial corrugated iron, speeds akin to those on Australian or German highways aren't entirely realistic, or even possible, on this particular road.

I've tuned out the chaos of the rest of the passengers and have quite happily settled in for two and a half hours of iriver music, when one of the army boys' mobile phones rings behind me.

And suddenly I hear the familiar sound of a drummer tapping his drumsticks on some VB bottles, followed by the melodic flute introduction to one of Australia's many unofficial anthems.

Men At Work - Down Under. Random.