Day 12

I wake up early, for no specific reason, and find that there are breakfast options, which is something of a luxury.  The options are, true to form, completely bizarre, and I end up with something billed as spaghetti bolognese but actually some other pasta dish.  Charlie had option 4 which ended up looking like the best choice, though I can’t actually remember what it was.

Day 11

Breakfast is always an adventure, and today it was meatballs.  We checked out of our hotel in Saint Petersburg, leaving at 10 and heading south on the M10.  The music hadn’t improved.  We were aiming for Novgorod, but our first stop was Pushkin, and the Alexander palace.

Day 10

This morning we left the hotel at 9.10 AM, heading for the palaces and gardens of Peterhof, about 15 miles southwest of Saint Petersburg.

Day 9

We breakfasted at 9.05 AM, looking for potential beetrooters.  Because our two week tour was actually two one week tours, today we’d be getting some new people.  Very exciting.  There didn’t seem to be anyone in the restaurant who looked like a likely candidate, and at 10 when we saw Sasha in the lobby he explained that the newcomers would join the group on the walking tour which Rob and I had done yesterday.  We turned up just long enough to meet the new guys and hitch a ride with them into the city.  There was Charlie, a single brummie in his fifties on a world tour.  Mike And Julia were a middle aged couple from New Zealand, also on a world tour.  Finally there was a trio of flat sharers Matt, Simone and Tanya, also from New Zealand and in their late twenties.

Day 8

On the morning of our first full day in saint Petersburg, we had reached the halfway point of our trip.  Breakfast

was good – we met Sasha, and collected our passports, then did some laundry before we left the hotel.

The metro was busy as we fought our way on, and then took a trolley bus into the centre of town.  This was Sasha’s

Day 7

This morning we left the camp for Saint Petersburg, and faced a 12 hour drive.  With Sasha’s music collection.  We drove along the simple highway through forests and fields, and for a couple of hours ran parallel to a train track.  The only train we saw was towing at least 50 tankers, probably delivering oil to a refinery.  The road deteriorated and at one point we were practically off road, something for which our mini bus was not well designed.

Day 6

Sasha woke me about 10.30 AM. Rob claimed that several previous attempts had been made. Breakfast was porridge and rice pudding, which might once have been hot, but certainly wasn’t by the time I arrived. We went down to the beach, where a fisherman stood angling on an old wreck. We explored the wreck, and sat reading books on the beach in the sunshine.

Day 5

We wake up in time for breakfast at 9.00 AM. The restaurant is in a small dining room, but very grand, with circular leather sofas around the tables. The main dining room next door is like a state banqueting hall, with huge chandeliers. To our delight the restaurant also has a bank of phones by the door that are exactly the ‘hotline’ style that we’ve been looking for. Unfortunately the hotel refuses to sell it to us on the grounds that they need it to talk to the kitchen.

Day 4

This morning we met our driver, Dimitri.  This guy was definitely what we would call a ‘real’ Russian – he spoke no English, chain smoked and looked every bit a KGB agent, not that I have any idea what a KGB agent looks like.  Today was to be spent mostly on the road in another very un-Russian vehicle, a Mercedes mini bus.

Day 3

We left the hotel at 10.10, heading for the space museum, which is located at the base of a big metallic monument to the Glory days of Soviet space exploration. The monument has fantastic images of heroic explorers etched into the side – ‘heroic’ people going about tasks like talking on the radio, fiddling with a radar display, hitting a satelite with a hammer – that sort of thing, along with dates celebrating the fabulous achievements of the Soviet space programme. The monument itself is supposed to resemble a massive, tapering jet blast rising into the sky, with a rocket at its tip.