Tallinn, Estonia stands out as such a place.

In pre-Christmas 2003, while promoting the Finnish translation of my latest novel, I overheard at a bar some Finns griping about the lawless, fledgling democracy of Estonia. An hour later, I was down at a port buying helicopter passage to Estonia's capital, a 20-minute flight across the Baltic.

Inebriated, I arrived to a dockside lined with black Mercedes Benz cars attended by drivers in Hugo Boss suits, a premiere limousine service complete with mini-bars offering aged malts, caviar, and rolled Cuban cigars. A slim blond approached, opened her wrap-around fur coat to reveal a hot pink teddy of luxurious marsupial warmth and left in one of the cars.

A while later, while standing in a garish five-star hotel lobby, I got my first ever Bluetooth solicitations, text messages offering everything from dry-cleaning services to oral sex. Estonia had adopted the economic Darwinism of gangland extortion I'd experienced in St Petersburg, a world steeped in corruption, carnal cravings, and conspicuous consumption.

I found myself staring from my window, and then in the pre-dawn I went running . . .my morning ritual . . . into the ancient city of Tallinn, frosted in an onion-skin mist.

Travel is about displacement. I knew nothing about this country, but as I rose into the winding medieval streets, I heard a whooshing sound. What emerged were grey figures of Soviet-era communism sweeping streets as they had always done, history's ghosts lost in a new Estonia trying to figure out what it wanted to be as it emerged as a nation into the European theatre.

Michael Collins is a Booker short-listed author and extreme athlete who recently won The Sahara Marathon and North Pole Marathon. His latest novel 'The Secret Life of E Robert Pendleton' has just been published