As a final stop, our boat with it's very non-Russian, Russian crew (ie smiling & friendly) pulled into port and effectively became a floating hotel for the four days we were going to be in St Petersburg (formerly Leningrad). I don't know if St Petes is the most heavily renovated city in world history but it has to be close. The tragic siege of the city by Nazi Germany during World War II left the place pulverized- it is clear that Hitler's intention w...

When trying to cobble together the logistics for the trip to Russia, I was left with the challenge of connecting two must-see places, Moscow and St Petersburg, and, although there are quite a few options, the one that stood out on Google was a river cruise between the two cities. River cruising seems to be a bit of thing these days but it does appeal to an older crowd so we weren't sure what we were getting into (the company we booked with prided itself on pu...

After being unceremoniously dumped at one of many Moscow train stations, we managed to track down one of the underground Metro stations. DH saw this as another attempt by me to save a couple of dollars by using the Russian metro (which, admittedly, was only a dollar each), but Moscow is famous for it's decorated underground stations which served as both nuclear bomb shelters during the cold war and propaganda vehicles (this underground communist paradise remi...

The Trans Siberian Express has almost the same mythical allure that the Orient Express has/had and like the Orient Express, there are a number of flavours. The one that most tourists take connects Moscow with Beijing via Mongolia but the 'real' Trans Siberian connects Moscow with Vladivostok and is the longest single train ride in the world. We've already been to both China and Mongolia and since we wanted the bragging rights of surviving 7 days and 6...

In conversations with some folks who don't glaze over when we start talking travel, I'm sure we come across as the quintessential masters of complex logistics. In truth, aimlessly wandering the planet is neither difficult (DH is still convinced that the internet is a fad in the same league as platform shoes & bell bottoms, but it has proven to be a magical travel companion), nor is it particularly logical. Our travels through South & Central America were ...