Today we realised we’d completely bypassed a singing beach, apparently 15 km behind us. We didn’t want to risk missing something called a singing beach, so we turned around and went back. As it turns out, the beach only sings on certain days, and today wasn’t one of them.

The beach stretches along the shore of Lake Peipus, a huge lake shared between Estonia and Russia. The sand is super fine, and under the right conditions it apparently hums when you walk on it. It was windy, and the waves were crashing in, so all we heard was the lake doing its best ocean impression. The beach has 30 kms of uninterrupted sandy shore. That is pretty amazing for a lake! We had a quick wander along the beach, then carried on.

The rest of the day we followed something called the Onion Route. It’s named that because they grow a lot of onions in the area (obviously), but also because of the old-believer villages dotted along the lake. Sounds a bit like something from a cult novel, but the old-believers are actually Russian Orthodox Christians who didn’t go along with church reforms back in the 1600s. The lakeside is lined with colourful wooden cottages, which were neat to see.

I was hoping to try an onion or fish pie, since that’s the local specialty, but no luck. So we stopped at a little shop and got some Russian potato chips instead. They were just normal chips but with a bacon flavour. They were okay.

Nothing much else happened today. It feels like we’ve seen the main sights now, so we’ll probably head into Latvia tomorrow. Not sure what we’ll do there, but we’re avoiding the cities, so we’ll see what we see on our way to Poland.

Tonight we found a quiet little forest parking spot to sleep in. It was peaceful, except for one car that drove past around midnight. Otherwise, all good.