St. Petersburg was the main reason we took the Baltic cruise. All of the other places we visited could have been seen buy land. It's a place that's not easy to visit as we (Canadians) need a special tourist visa (thanks Harper - ya bum!). This involves sending your passport away to the Russian embassy in Toronto and then hoping to get it back. So many things can go wrong we just decided to do the cruise and use the ships "blanket visa" that covers all the ship's passengers. Definitely a more expensive way but foolproof.
When you get to St. Petersburg you have to purchase excursions setup by the ship (Seabourn) and a local Russian tour company (Arctur) - and you just know that somebody's getting rich here because the tours are frightfully expensive. There's no easy option though.
Here's a few shots taken as we came into St. Petersburg. There are literally hundreds of the ship cranes. Big ones, small ones.
A shot of St. Petersburg taken from our ship mid afternoon.
And the same shot taken after dark.
We opted for three days with a private driver and private tour guide - horribly expensive but as it was a one-time thing we decided to get the most out of our visit. We ended up with a nice young gal named Irine (pronounced ee-reena) and a driver named Yuri. He had a fairly new Mercedes sedan so it was quite comfortable.
Streets in St. Petersburg are reasonably wide but there are no lines painted on most of them. The cars wander back and forth between the lanes and often there'll be three cars turning into a one lane turn. How they figure it out is beyond me but we never saw any accidents.
We started off our first day with a tour to the PeterHof Palace. Click here for Day 1.
Next day we visited The Hermitage.
The Hermitage is a world class museum but it was once the winter palace of the Russian rulers. It is huge and boggles the mind how those people could live like that. Click here for Day 2.
Our third and final day we first visited the palace of Catherine the Great. After that we went underground on the St. Petersburg Metro. Our guide Irine then took us to a market where "real" Russians shop for their groceries and finally a visit to the Peter and Paul Fortress. Click here for Day 3.
So that was it for St. Petersburg.
Some shots of the seaway as we exit.
