About Hakan Şahin

People ask me this more than anything else. Not Thailand, not Portugal, not one of the obvious places where travellers pile up and the Instagram spots are already queued three-deep. Estonia. And every time, I find myself struggling to pick just one reason — because there are quietly several of them.

Start with the practical: Estonia is arguably the most digitally competent country I have ever worked from. Fast fibre in almost every café, e-residency infrastructure that actually functions, coworking spaces tucked into medieval Tallinn courtyards. I once filed paperwork from a coffee shop in Kalamaja faster than I could have done it from my own kitchen at home. That kind of ease matters when you are moving constantly.

But what keeps pulling me back is everything the infrastructure quietly protects. The national parks are almost embarrassingly empty. I have walked for four hours in Lahemaa without seeing another soul — not because it was off-season, but because Estonians treat their forests like a private living room and tourists have not yet discovered the address. Soomaa during the spring floods. Alutaguse at first light. These are not difficult places to reach; they are simply places most people have not thought to look.

Tallinn's café culture deserves its own paragraph, honestly. It is slow and unselfconscious — good single-origin coffee, dark rye bread, a window seat nobody will rush you out of. The city layers its centuries awkwardly and beautifully: a Soviet-era block beside a baroque guild hall beside a new-wave natural wine bar. Nothing pretends to be something it is not.

And travelling here solo? Genuinely simple. Safe streets, legible public transport, locals who are reserved rather than unfriendly — they will help when you need it and leave you alone when you don't. For a solo traveller, that balance is rare and, once you have tasted it, hard to give up.