Travel Log 2016: St. Pete

One thing I love to do is travel. I love going to different places, seeing different landscapes, experiencing (on a superficial, touristy level) different cultures. Of course, that’s true for everyone, I would guess. At least, for most people I know.

And a huge advantage of living in Europe -- even on the far edge of it, as Helsinki is -- is that foreign travel is relatively easy. You don’t have to go far to arrive at some unfamiliar, enticing locale beyond your own borders. From here, the “rest of the world” seems close at hand, sometimes real close. For Helsinki, it’s a mere forty-miles -- to Estonia, just as one example. And Paris is only a three-hour flight. That’s about the same as flying from Atlanta to exotic...Boston. Don’t get me wrong, Boston is a fine place to visit, but c’mon, Paris!

(Okay, to be fair, three hours from Atlanta will also get you to Cancun, which is exotic, but I'm trying to make a point here.)

So, from Helsinki I’ve been lucky enough to make a few foreign trips almost every year, either for work or pleasure. Recently, it has to be said, there have not been so many of those as it the past, but still enough of them to keep my wanderlust mostly in check.

In 2016, we made two such excursions. Looking back, a few memorable moments stand out from both.

The first was a June trip to St. Petersburg, the original St. Petersburg. We went by boat, the M/S Princess Maria, because that way you can skip an especially annoying border formality that always hampers travel to Russia. Unlike Finland’s other neighbors, Russia makes visiting a bit more difficult by requiring a visa. This means filling out paperwork and paying a steep fee. For Americans, such as myself, it’s $160. That alone would cover the airfare to Paris, for example, which one reason we’ve never much considered Russia as destination when planning holidays.

Fortunately, the St. Peter Line, which operates ferry crossings between Helsinki and St. Petersburg offers an attractive loophole, apparently due to an arrangement it has with the Russian government. Passengers can forego the costly visa if their stay in St. Pete is less than 72 hours, which is still plenty of time to get a reasonable taste of the city.

It was the first time I’d penetrated the eastern frontier since a 1984 bus trip my wife and I took to what was then called Leningrad. To say things have changed would be an understatement. For one thing, Lenin's former namesake is, like most everywhere else in the world, a bastion of commercial capitalism. Peter the Great, after all, did envision the city as a "window to the West", and so it seems to be once again. 

Something that hasn’t changed, however, is the grandeur of much of the city's architecture, especially the Neoclassical facades along the Neva riverfront, which are brightly floodlit at night to wonderful effect. Also, what was different this time was that, unlike on the previous trip, we were visiting in high summer, a magical time to experience far northern cities like St. Pete, or Helsinki, for that matter.

Despite a long day walking around the city sightseeing, I had trouble sleeping the first night because, well, my snoring prevented my wife from sleeping and, in turn, her sharp elbow in my ribs prevented me from sleeping. At two o’clock in the morning, I gave up and I decided to go for a walk.

Our hotel, on Vasilyevsky Island in the middle of the Neva Delta, was only two blocks from the wide Bolshaya Neva, the largest branch of the river. As I walked out to the quayside, I could see that the nearest drawbridge, the Annunciation Bridge, was raised, its two middle spans pointed skyward. The Neva is an important waterway for commercial shipping, but in St. Petersburg it is crossed by several busy drawbridges that are opened for ships only briefly in the middle of the night. During the day, you see sea-going vessels moored all along the riverfront, waiting for nightfall and the chance to move upstream.

The bridges are lined with lights along their entire span, so when raised they add a dramatic element to St. Petersburg’s nighttime display -- stretching a couple of miles along the left bank -- of stately, brightly lit buildings rising over the glistening, inky water of the river. It is a truly beautiful sight.

When I reached the Annunciation Bridge, it was already being lowered, so I missed a chance to get a good photo (and anyway, I only had my phone camera with me). But the Palace Bridge, the next one upstream was still raised. It was peaceful night. There was practically no traffic, though there were some cars waiting in line to cross the river once the bridge was down again. And there were a surprising number of people around.

Or, maybe not so surprising, since the “White Nights” are a magical time to be out and about. I walked up the University Embankment, towards the Palace Bridge, which also started to close before I got there. I kept going to the very tip of Vasilyevsky Island, the Split, where quite a few people, mostly young folks, had congregated.

The Split, one of the best-known places in the city, is undoubtedly a natural spot to hang out on a summer’s night, with its vista of the broad, dark river dividing the city, and the spire of the Peter and Paul Cathedral rising into a bright northern sky. From there, I could see at least three more bridges upstream, some still raised.

I strolled back along empty, quiet streets behind the old stock exchange, arriving back at the hotel at 3 o’clock, just as it was getting light enough for the street lamps to automatically switch off. It was an experience well worth losing sleep for.

Our next trip was to Brussels, but will have to wait for another post. 

The Exchange Bridge in St. Petersburg, around 2:30 in the morning.

Russia

I once saw a map in Winterthur, Switzerland, that made a big impression on me. It was in my late sister-in-law’s apartment, a few short blocks from the Hauptbahnhoff, and it covered an entire wall in her sitting room. This was more than just a single map, however. It was several maps, collected together into one over-sized topographical collage of the western Soviet Union.

My sister-in-law’s Swiss husband, Moritz, is a linguist, specializing at the time in Finno-Ugric languages. These include some tongues spoken by small groups of people scattered all over the northern tier of Eurasia – in other words, somewhere in Russia. I suppose that’s why Moritz had assembled this full-wall geographic display of what encompassed the homelands of the Komi, Mari, Mansi, and other isolated groups of people speaking something distantly related to Finnish.

Seeing it scaled up that way, I was amazed how huge and apparently endless the territory of Russia really is, in fact the biggest country on Earth. And I recall thinking, as I studied the map up close, how cool it would be to venture out across that vast country someday, exploring it by car. Of course, such a road trip was impossible then, in Soviet times, and maybe only marginally more feasible now.

My interest in visiting Russia probably peaked not long after that trip to Switzerland, and in some ways, I feel bad about that.

Lately, with Russia again front and center in world affairs, with Vladimir Putin putting on polar-opposite displays of Russian pride in Sochi and Crimea, I find myself thinking it’s too bad I haven’t gotten better acquainted with the big country next door. 

I’m sorry to say that, in all the years of living here, only a couple hours from the Russian border, I’ve traveled across it only once, in 1984, on a weekend bus trip to Leningrad (when it was still called Leningrad). At the time, it felt like quite an adventure – a completely different world behind the Iron Curtain. I somehow even recall selling an old pair of Levis on a street corner, but that is surely a false memory. I did later sell a travel article about the trip. Of that I’m sure.

The Winter Palace, home of the Hermitage Museum. Photo: Dezidor

Since that trip, I haven’t been back. That’s despite the fact that modern St. Petersburg, a city of nearly five million people and monumental cultural landmarks, lays only 385 kilometers (240 miles) away by car.

I did make a quick visit to Estonia soon after it was no longer a Soviet republic. I spent a day in Tallinn in late October 1991, some five months after Estonian citizens had held a referendum on independence from the USSR and just eight weeks after they had faced a possible showdown with Soviet troops during Moscow’s “August Coup”.

(That was the putsch during which Soviet Communist Party hardliners placed Mikhail Gorbachev under house arrest in Crimea and tried to take over the government. It was the beginning of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which apparently haunts some people in Russia, Vladimir Putin not the least among them, to this day.)

From my "archives" of old newspapers.

On that visit to independent Estonia, the recent past still lingered. Soviet authorities still manned passport control in Tallinn’s harbor, and the local currency was still the Soviet ruble. It wasn’t easy to find an open restaurant, and the one I did find was practically deserted. (To be fair, October is way outside the tourist season anywhere this far north, let alone in a country just recently opening up to the free world.)

Still, when it comes to possible travel destinations, I’ve always ignored the giant country that Estonia left behind, Mother Russia. I’m not quite sure why.

It’s not as if I haven’t had the opportunity. Last autumn, a friend of mine on his way to Shanghai tinkered with the idea of a more adventurous alternative to flying to China – taking the Trans-Siberian railway. He asked if I wanted to join him. It sounded exotic, and I was a bit tempted. But, with the prospect of sitting on a train non-stop for the week or so it would take to reach Beijing, I never seriously considered it.

In recent years, my wife – perhaps trying to break us out of our rut of traveling only to the US or central Europe – has been suggesting that for our summer holidays we should think about visiting Russia, especially the more remote areas where those various linguistic kinfolk of the Finns live, somewhere close to the Ural Mountains.

The Komi, distant linguistic cousins to Finns. Photo: Irina Kazanskaya

Maybe I’m not open-minded enough, but I haven’t been keen on the idea. Partly, it’s the thought of visiting a part of the world that looks essentially like Finland, but is even more remote and with even fewer amenities. And, the ethno-folkloric nature of such a destination doesn’t much appeal to me, either. Don’t get me wrong. I like watching folk dancing and shamanistic drumming as much as the next guy. I just haven’t been interested enough to spend precious holiday time seeking it out.

I’m no Ville Haapasalo, you might say. Haapasalo is a burly Finnish actor who is something of a celebrity in Russia due to his appearances in numerous Russian films, in which he apparently often plays the role of “the foreigner”.

Fluent in Russian and obviously a great admirer of the Russian people, Haapasalo has hosted several popular travelogue series for Finnish television, all premised on the idea on spending 30 days in this or that part of Russia.

In the first one, Venäjän halki 30 päivässä (“Across Russia in 30 Days”), Haapasalo travels by train through Siberia from Moscow to Vladivostok (like I might have done last autumn if I were made of stronger stuff).

This was followed by three similar month-long journeys:  Silkkitie 30 päivässä (“The Silk Road in 30 Days”), Suomensukuiset 30 päivässä (“Finnish Kinfolk in 30 Days”), and Jäämeri 30 päivässä (“The Arctic Sea in 30 Days”). In the last two, Haapasalo passes through the forest and tundra homelands of Finland’s various linguistic cousins – just the kind of secluded corners of Russia my wife is pressuring encouraging me to visit. Who knows, maybe someday we’ll follow in Haapasalo’s footsteps. I’ve noticed that the Komi Republic is a jumping off spot for guided packages to the Ural Mountains, so there might be some potential there after all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3GDBnoQ0KQ

One of the drawbacks of traveling to Russia is that they don’t make it easy. Unlike Sweden or Estonia, which Finns can visit on a whim by just hopping on a boat, a plane, or (previously in the case of Tallinn) a helicopter, Russia requires prior notice. And a visa.

The application process can take a couple of weeks and requires a letter of invitation of some sort, even for tourists. In practice, this is provided by the Russian tourist agency arranging your trip (so I understand). Apparently, you must also inform your complete itinerary beforehand. There’s no following your nose.

You also have to shell out some cash. For Finns, the non-refundable application fee is €35 (about $50) for the normal single-entry visa, double that for expediting the process (which means a visa in one to three working days). For Americans, it’s pricier, €106 (€145) for the normal processing time, €190 ($260) for the fast track. And that’s just to enter the country.

It doesn’t exactly lower the barriers to would-be tourists. I have heard, however, that in summer the St. Peter Line offers cruises for one- or three-day visa-free visits to St. Petersburg. I should check it out.

In any case, I should give up on my cartographically inspired daydream of ever being able to make a road trip across the back of Mother Russia as easily as driving from Boston to LA. Not that I didn't also have an opportunity (theoretically) at least to try it.

My friend trying to make his way to Shanghai also invited me to join him on an even more adventurous scheme he briefly considered, that is, going across Russia by car. Again, I was tempted. Well, not really, since I have some idea – from watching “Long Way Around”, the account of actor Ewan McGregor’s motorcycle ride around the world – of how rough Siberian roads can be, where they even exist.

If Russia’s primitive road system almost defeated a young Obi-Wan Kenobi on a BMW all-terrain bike (with a support team), then it’s certainly not something that should be attempted by two "middle-aged" men on their own who don’t speak a word of Russian. Again, that's just too bad. 

More historic headlines from my "archives"

"Congratulations, Dear Comrades!" 
"Under the Banner of Lenin" 
Pravda, November 7, 1982 
(65th anniversary of the October Revolution)