I met up with the Intrepid tour last night (6pm) in Helsinki for the start of my Baltic adventures. There are 8 of us on the tour as well as our tour guide Andy (a girl from NZ). This morning the Interpid tour took us to Estonia. We started off with a nice and relaxed departure time of 10am from the hotel and took a local tram down to the ferry station. The ferry was just like the Cook Strait ferrry, although we did have the added pleasure of having some bingo being played (in Finnish) in the section that we [View Full Entry]

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The person who helped us arrange our visas to St Petersburg (Alexei) picked us up from our hotel and drove us out to Peterhof village. We actually hadn't intended on going to Peterhof, but Alexei told us that us had more time than we thought and that we couldn't actually get into the Catherine Palace until 12:00pm as it is only open to tour groups before then. If anyone wants go to Russia I would totally suggest that you get in touch with Alexei's company - Palladium Travel - as he has been totally amazing. He helped us, free of charge, [View Full Entry]

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This morning we decided to head to the Peter and Paul Fortress. The fortress occupys most of the Zayachyostrov Island which is opposite the winter palace. The fortress was founded in the summer of 1703 as the core structure of Peter the Great's new capital. Peter the Great moved the capital to the new city called St Petersburg as when he was younger, in the then capital of Moscow, he watched a streltsy (coup) take place which was led by his half sister in which many of his relatives and courtiers were hacked to death in front of his eyes. After [View Full Entry]

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Today was a massive day. David joined me yesterday in St Petersburg and we are going to spend the next 3 days looking around this glorious city. We went out for a walk last night up Nevsky Prospect which was very interesting. It was just like being on Oxford Street in London except the buildings were grander. But all the same types of shops were in attendance. This morning we work up rather early and headed out of the hotel at around 7:45am. We were aiming to spend the day in the hermitage but that didn't open until 10:30am so we [View Full Entry]

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Today was a travel day from Helsinki to St Petersburg. I was a little bit dubious about my ability to get to the train station in Helsinki on time so left the hotel nice and early. So early that I arrived at the train station before 7am (when my train was at 7:23). The train journey itself was frightfully uneventful after having ridden on trains in India. In fact there is really nothing at all to report about the journey, except for the fact that it was clean, quiet and comfortable and arrived in St Petersburg on time. From the little [View Full Entry]

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This morning I hopped on a ferry and headed off to the Helsinki Zoo. I have to say that the Zoo here in Helsinki isn't exactly in the top 10 of zoos in the world. It is however on a lovely little island about 10 minutes away from Market Square by ferry. I was really disappointed when I was there as the reindeer exhibit seemed to be shut. In fact a large number of the enclosures seemed to be empty so I think that perhaps the zoo was going through a bit of a refurbishment. One of the highlights of the [View Full Entry]

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Today I set off to take a look at Suomenlinna. Suomenlinna is a sea fortress that was built on one of the islands off the coast of Helsinki in 1748 by King Gustav of Sweden (who was in control of Finland during that point of history). At various points in history it has been in the control of Sweden, Russia and now Finland. To get there you catch a ferry from Market Square and the trip itself takes about 15 minutes. The island is still inhabited today and there are about 850 people leaving on the island today. It was a [View Full Entry]

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Well the great trip has started! I arrived into Helsinki last night and it was a bit of a change from good old Dubai. There was no sand visible......anywhere.....fantastic. The weather is a mite colder as well hovering at around 10 degrees celsius. A bit of a change from the 45 degrees celsius that I left behind in Dubai as well. Helsinki is lovely. The population is a lot smaller than I thought it was going to be. There are only about 500,000 people living in Helsinki and you can really feel it. The city is so lovely and quiet. I [View Full Entry]

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As a final goodbye to Dubai we went to the new Aquaventure water theme park out on the palm Jumeirah to check out the rides. The weather was glorious, sunny skies and about 40 degrees, which made the 30 degrees water temperature feel deliciuosly cool. The park is much bigger than Wild Wadi, but to be honest I don't think it is that much better than Wild Wadi. The rides from the ziggurat are fun but there are only so many things that you can do which water rides. Probably the most fun we had all day was trying to take [View Full Entry]

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Someone has got it really tough haven't they! [View Full Entry]

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