St Petersburg our last port adjoined a new motorway bridge similar to the Anzac Bridge and ahydrofoil base where they were refurbishing the 40 year old hydrofoils and putting them back in the water for the tourist season. The refurbished boats do not fly the hammer and sickle flag, now just the red, blue and white striped flag of Russia. Our city tour included many palaces, St Isaac's Cathedral , the Peter and Paul Fortress and the Singer building. This is now a book store where later we had coffee on the first floor overlooking Nevsky Prospekt, the main roadin the city and opposite the Kazan Cathedral. This was built in the 18th century to try and unite the Catholics and Orthodox and was built with a semi circular Roman style colonnaded forecourt. The Church on the Spilt Blood is on the canal near the Summer Gardens and the Smolny Cathedral, built by Elizabeth as a convent but never opened as she decided not to become a nun after meeting a nice "muso", is now used as the university. It has wonderful buildings and grounds.

We travelled out of St Petersburg to visit Tsarskoe Selo (the tsar's village) at Pushkin town. This was a sumptuous palace enlarged greatly by Empress Elizabeth (the party girl who never wore the same dress twice!!) and Catherine the Great and is now referred to as Catherine's Palace. The most outstanding room here is the Amber Room - a room completely lined with amber! It is amazing!, There are over 500 rooms in the palace and all were highly decorated with gold leaf, frescos, mirrors etc - all this while the rest of the country starved! It was severely destroyed during the Second World War but rebuilding was started almost as soon as the war was over and is continuing. At present over $10 million US is being spent on each room as it is restored.

The Hermitage, (Winter Palace) comprises a number of buildings situated on the main river and is said to contain 3 million objects. Many whole collections were purchased by the Tsars from Europe's aristocracy while the masses starved. We had a guided tour of the most important items in the collections and could have spent more time there. but that would take days!

We also took a city canal tour unfortunately only in Russian, however we had seen most of the sights on the bus city tour and had maps. The canal trip was abut ¼ the price of the ship's organized canal tour and so by the end of the cruise many people we opting to do their own thing as the extra tours and pick ups were way overpriced.

St Petersberg's freeway is new and being extended however because there is a "no left hand turn" rule and lack of interchanges our bus often had to go an extra two kilometers to turn round to get back to the boat.

We visited Peterhof, the favourite residence of Peter 1 (the Great) which is on the shores of the Gulf of Finland and is a magnificent collection of buildings and fountains in about 1000 hectares of garden. The highlight is the Grand Cascade, a symmetrical arrangement which features wonderful fountains and a canal that leads to the sea. There are some trick fountains - seats with small water sprays in the stones in front, an umbrella which drips over the edge, trees and flowers which spray water out!

In our free time we visited Pushkin's apartment which was very interesting .Pushkin was Russia's greatest poet and much loved. The tour mainly tell's the story of the duel where Pushkin was mortally wounded and how he was laid out in the apartment - wife and family by his side. It was very interesting to see how the apartment was set out - very comfortable, his study with his writing desk, chair, pipe, books, walking stick and many of his letters and papers all carefully preserved.

The Russian economy since WW2 has spent on Defence - up to 30% of GDP - and into prestige projects such as the underground stations, restoration of palaces and churches destroyed in the war. Millions of $ per room, we have never seen so much gold leaf and painstaking restoration of fabrics, and decorations. Luckily most of the furniture, hangings, paintings, statues and objects were removed to Siberia before the Germans arrived as they destroyed so much. Stalin is believed to have destroyed some palaces also to rob Hitler of their use.

The younger people seemed fairly well dressed and happy; older people more dreary and definitely keep to themselves - looked very dour. Although there is a small Moslem population with a mosque there was no head covering amongst the women and very few coloured or Asian people on the streets - not what you would expect particularly coming from London.