Old St. Petersburg in all its splendor
RUSSIA | Private tour is the way to go -- and joining groups makes it feasible
ST. PETERSBURG, Russia -- Cruise lines like you to think there are two ways to visit this city full of imperial palaces, museums, canals and onion-domed cathedrals: either book some of the ship's excursions or go through the trouble and expense of arranging your own tourist visa.
There's a lesser-known third way, too: Hire an independent tour company.
(Lori Rackl/For the Sun-Times)
Alla Tour, Red October, DenRus -- they all have English-speaking guides happy to pick you up at the dock, right next to the tour buses full of your fellow cruise passengers. You also can pay extra for a private tour -- an indulgence well worth it when there's so much to see in just a few days. A private tour lets you focus on things you want to see (Dostoevsky's apartment?) and skip the stuff you'd rather miss (prehistoric art at the Hermitage?).
Before leaving on our northern European cruise this summer, I made a reservation with Alla Tour (www.alla-tour.com) to share a private guide with another couple on our ship. That couple, Carlos and Scott from California, had posted a message on Alla Tour's Web site looking for like-minded passengers to team up and split the cost of a private tour.
You're rolling the dice by agreeing to spend three days with a couple you've never met, but Carlos and Scott turned out to be friendly, interesting and smart, much like our Alla Tour guide, Catherine Volodina, 35.
She and our driver, Valari, were waiting for us at the dock each morning when we got off the ship and cleared immigration, a very fast -- and usually painless -- process.
"Tour ticket! Tour ticket!" a husky female immigration officer barked as I fumbled through my purse for my Alla Tour pass, which doubled as my tourist visa. (Foreign visitors usually need visas to enter Russia, but exceptions are made for cruise ship passengers if they're using an authorized Russian travel company like Alla or going on a cruise-sponsored excursion.)
Through a series of pre-cruise e-mails among Alla, the California couple and us, we crafted an itinerary that had us on the go from 9 a.m. to about 6 p.m. during our three days in port.
We zipped from palace to church to museum to palace, slowing down our pace when we arrived just west of the city at Peterhof, Peter the Great's complex of gardens and residences on the Gulf of Finland. Peterhof's elaborate landscape and majestic fountains rival Versailles in scope and beauty. I could have lingered here all day, just watching people get soaked when they stepped on the "magic" stone in one of the many trick fountains.
Hitting palace overload is easy in St. Petersburg. Even the museums -- like the world-renowned Hermitage -- are in palaces. It's estimated that it would take years to go through the museum's 2.7 million exhibits and displays. Volodina gave us a thorough CliffsNotes version, leaving us ample time to see other highlights, such as the colorful Church of the Spilled Blood and St. Isaac's Cathedral, whose massive gold dome was pained gray during World War II to throw off German bombers.
Volodina proved indispensable by leapfrogging us to the front of long lines (something you're allowed to do if your group is small enough) and answering our endless questions about Mother Russia. She came in especially handy when we were having trouble getting into one of the city's top sights, Yusupov Palace, scene of Rasputin's murder. As the negotiations heated up between our guide and the stern-faced woman with a clipboard, I was more than happy to let Volodina fight that battle for us.
Another upside to having your own guide is the ability to tweak your schedule on the fly. We asked Volodina to show us a taste of everyday life, so she took us to a local food market.
Even though we had a car, we wanted to take a ride on the subway. The deep underground station showcased a bust of Lenin and lots of hammer and sickle symbols -- leftovers from the country's communist past.
Simple things like watching young Russian brides pose for photos in the park and seeing McDonald's spelled in the Cyrillic alphabet were just as memorable as St. Petersburg's ginormous palaces, whose unabashed opulence helped me understand what made the Bolsheviks revolt in 1917.
The only glitch we had with Alla Tour surfaced when it came time to settle the bill. Wanting to avoid credit card fees, I'd brought enough U.S. dollars to pay in cash. But half of my $100 bills weren't crisp and clean enough for the tour company owner, who apologized repeatedly as she explained that Russian banks wouldn't accept my slightly-less-than-pristine bills. (Crisis averted: the ship let me exchange my Benjamins for some fresh from the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.)
The cost of our customized, three-day tour worked out to $560 a person.
It would have been $800 apiece had we not teamed up with the California couple.
And it would have been a lot more difficult -- not to mention less enjoyable -- had we done it any other way.