How I found bliss cycling along the coast of Estonia

A cycle trip along the country’s coast and through its woods offers the kind of magical wildlife encounters that are no longer possible in the UK

I was barely out of Pärnu on the first morning when it happened. I’d stopped to listen to the reed warblers in a broad belt of roadside wetland. Down at my feet were four types of orchid, and cuckoos were calling. It was the beginning of my trip: I didn’t know that I would be seeing and hearing those things continuously for the next week. But this was no nature reserve, simply an ordinary Estonian country lane, close to the coast and the Lithuanian border.

I got back on the bike and pushed hard to get the pedals moving. I was carrying two heavily laden panniers. That was when the deer, crouched in a ditch a few feet away, decided that concealment was over. It sprang out, eyes wide open, its coat a deep chestnut brown, and leaped. It went over the front wheel, then over the opposite ditch, then over the fence beyond and into a clump of foxgloves, a miraculous Bob Beamon triple jump. The deer’s sudden movement triggered two enormous grey birds, cranes, to start charging across a distant meadow, rising up in the air with great echoing whoops of alarm. Their panic spread to seven herons that launched out of a distant tree. I knew then that my Estonian summer bike ride was going to be special.