I think it is very quiet at the tourist information desk at Pärnu

Soomaa National Park is famous for its fifth season, also known as The Melt, when the park floods from the rain and melting snow and the forest is explored by canoe.

Every year I’ve wanted to go to Soomaa to experience the fifth season. Every year I’ve missed it.

The fifth season is right now. I have no idea where I will be, financially or physically, by this time next year. I decided to make it happen.

I found a lovely B&B at the national park, right near the main road. And they have a tree house!

But that’s only half the battle. The rural areas of Estonia are not always that well connected on public transport and I was going to have to find my way there from Paldiski. I discovered a bus stop which was just a half-hour walk from the guest house, so that was a good sign. The local buses are all centered around Pärnu, a city on the west coast. From there, I could take the 99 bus, a twice-a-day service, which looked to take about two hours to get to the bus stop near the park.

The complicated pieces of the puzzle were coming together. Now I just needed to get to Pärnu.

Pärnu has good public transport links to Tallinn. From Paldiski, it’s not so great. Every route I looked at seemed like a lot of hassle until I suddenly spotted a fancy coach company with a late-night bus from Tallinn to Pärnu.

On Saturday night, my story-telling group will be performing at Heldeke! in Tallinn. The timing was perfect for me to head to the bus station after the show and then sleep for the two-hour journey to Pärnu. Even better, this meant I could take the 99 bus from Pärnu at 6am and have all of Sunday at the park.

Confident that this was all going to work, I booked a room at the guest house. I couldn’t tell which room was the tree house, so I chose the one that explicitly said that it had no wheelchair access and no toilet, in hopes that it was up a tree.

However, when I looked up the exact route for the 99 bus, I found the instructions to be somewhat confusing. I needed to board the bus at 06:05 at the Pärnu Bus Station and then travel for 40 minutes to Viira School. There, I needed to get off the bus and wait for 42 minutes. Then I should get back on the 99 bus, which was now heading back to Pärnu, and get off eight stops later.

I switched the transport website into Estonian. It said the same thing. I checked with Google Maps. Google Maps agreed that this was the right thing to do.

This was clearly possible, but it seemed somewhat odd. Was I actually getting onto the same bus? Or was this a different bus, 40 minutes later, when I could have stayed on the one that I was on? In fact, either way, didn’t it make sense to just stay on the bus?

After a few minutes of pondering, I decided that I should find someone to ask. The trip is on Sunday and tomorrow is a holiday, so it seemed sensible to phone. After looking around the transport site, I decided I would be more likely to get help if I found the tourist information office for Pärnu. I have found the people at the Visit Estonia and Visit Tallinn websites to be friendly and helpful. Sure enough, there was a Visit Pärnu website with a contact phone number.

That brings us to now.

I phone the number. A woman answers with a quick rush of words in Estonian. You’d think I would have been prepared for this, but no, somehow, I am not. I start to ask if the other person speaks English, but then I realise that I am using the informal form, sina, instead of the formal form, teie. Which actually isn’t all that serious an issue in Estonia but it would be more polite to use the formal form, so I try to fix it while halfway through the sentence and end up making a muddle of the whole thing.

The only saving grace is that the end of the sentence is “the English language” and so it’s pretty obvious what I’m asking, regardless of what actual words I used.

“Yes,” she says.

Followed by “Is this Sylvia?”

OK, it is not the first time that I have messed up when trying to ask if someone speaks English but I’m pretty sure it’s not an identifying trait.

“Um, yes?” I rush back to my computer to see if I called the wrong number. But no, the Visit Pärnu site is up, displaying the number I have just phoned. “Um. Who is this?”

She apologises and says her name, too rapidly for me to catch and she clearly doesn’t expect me to know it anyway. “I work for Visit Pärnu. You called a couple of months ago with a question about the website.”

A couple of months ago.

“I did?” It certainly seems possible. I barely remember what I ate for breakfast, let alone what I did a couple of months ago. Did I really make that much of an impression? I wonder what I asked last time. Instead what comes out is, “And you remembered my name?”

“Well.” She pauses. “I’m just glad it really was you because it would have been really confusing if it wasn’t!”

It was, I confirm, confusing enough already. We both laugh and I ask her about the bus.

“Oh yes,” she says. “You aren’t the first person to wonder about that. The instructions are correct. You could just stay on the bus, but it makes for a very long bus ride. You could use that time to look around the village, maybe have a coffee.”

I don’t want to be negative about this unknown Estonian village. I also know that there’s not a chance anything will be open at 7am. In fact, there is a small café. It opens at eleven, three hours after I would have left again.

“It is very early,” she agrees.

“I think I’ll just stay on the bus.” I pause, not sure what to say to my new-found friend. “Thank you very much, that was very helpful,” I say. And then, because apparently, my brain is only barely functional, I say, “Have a nice trip.”

“Um, thanks,” she says. “You too!”

No wonder she remembers my name. I wonder if she has a newsletter like mine and if she’s telling them about me. “You would not believe this woman called again,” she’d tell them.

So anyway, all this to tell you that I’m going to Soomaa on Sunday and I’m staying on the bus.