Day 12: Monday 24th August

It’s eleven days in so I can turn my mattress to give a clean sheet. I’ve brought two mattress covers, home-made on the principles of a pillow-case – that’s forty-four nights and a couple.

But now for St Pete – a highlight of the trip so must prepare carefully. We implement all our security measures – body-belts for the dollars; dummy wallet; dummy passport; wheel clamp; alarm; steering wheel lock. All documentation in hand for registering and changing money. Phrase book, maps, guidebook. Its showery so the cagoule and cap go into the backpack but Jill thinks the umbrella unnecessary. (It showers for the rest of the day…)

We go to the bus stop and wait alongside the wide dual carriageway, soon realising that the traffic is moving fast and it’s not so easy to spot bus numbers far enough away to raise an arm to stop them in time! But we manage it – just! It is pretty full and we pay our fare (R20 – 40p each) and squeeze into seats. It’s comforting to notice a Hymer dealer on the main road as we head into town, a mere 5km from the hotel!

I try to follow the route on our map but the driver is taking rat-runs to bypass heavy congestion and so it isn’t that easy. An enquiry of two women passengers reveals we’re OK and they’re getting off at the same stop. It turns out everyone gets off at the same stop as the metro station, Chernaya Rechka, is a key hub for accessing the city from the north.

We queue at the ticket counter and pay R20 (40p) per person for a token to get into the system – this allows you to travel anywhere on the metro. We are uncertain of routes and destinations but another enquiry and we are pointed in the right direction. We calculate one stop, change, then four stops but one of the stations is closed for major repairs so there is an element of doubt. Luckily the name ‘Nevsky Prospekt’ is easy enough to decipher and to hear in the muffled announcement over the train’s PA system. We come out into rain.

Our compass establishes which direction along Nevsky to head to get to Alliance Travel (on Sovetskaya Ulitsa) where we are to register. Even here the staff member seems a little abrupt (as all shop assistants have been so far) and she asks how much we paid in London to secure this registration service. I show her the invoice from Real Russia that has the service as part of an overall fee (glad we brought all the docs or she might have extracted a further fee for it!) and we are told to return the next day to collect the stamped registration forms.

All this done and it is almost time for, and we are ready for, lunch. Sovetskaya Ulitsa is at the wrong end of Nevsky Prospekt, which is a couple of kilometres long, and with rain now holding off we walk along it and look out for a bank and a café in that order.

We pass a couple of bureaux de change with big hard-sell signs in the windows but the rate offered is not as good as we got at the border so we pass on to a rather conservative looking bank a little way along. Another stroke of luck – the rate is better even than that at the border, she takes all our older dollar notes, refused by the money-changer at the border, and after what now appears to be the routine slowness of getting anything done in Russia (she checks the notes individually and through the machine three times), we are clear to eat.

Luckily again, there’s a decent looking establishment with all the pre-cooked food on show and no need to struggle with Russian menus. The place is empty but the counter assistant presses us to make quick decisions as if there were a hundred queuing behind us. They have their own style, these shop assistants and waitresses in Russia. You are made to feel they are doing you a favour in even considering you worthy of buying their wares. But we make good choices (cheese-topped pork cutlet, wedges and a Russian salad for me) and it is served piping hot presumably after microwaving. It’s worth £20 in anybody’s money but we have to pay only two-thirds of that – and this on the main drag of the premier tourist city in Russia.

The sun is now out and we decide to eat it on the pavement tables outside. Quite the tourists, aren’t we – pavement-dining on Nevsky Prospekt with the stylishly dressed denizens of St Petersburg parading before us. It is only the second time we have eaten out on the whole trip and it’s an excellent introduction to St Petersburg. At the end of our fully satisfactory meal we decide not to finish our Russian beers (though they are fine) but to get on our way. As we leave the dining area, with our half-empty glasses of beer still sitting on the table, a passing itinerant spots the opportunity and empties both glasses down his throat almost without breaking stride!

Dodging showers, we amble down the rest of Nevsky to locate the Hermitage. On the way we are impressed by the size, style and solidity of the buildings lining the street. The rivers and canals cutting across the street, with similar banks of apparently nineteenth-century buildings lining them, create an air of Venetian splendour: canals, style, wealth and resilience. In a recent TV programme David Dimbleby calls all this a ‘confection’, designed by Peter the Great and his successors to outshine Paris, Rome and London. Good for them, I say.

As we knew, the Hermitage is closed for the day and we wander around it taking photos. A teenage girl asks me to take a photo of her and her friends … which I agree to do but her battery is flat. I offer to take photos on my camera and email addresses are exchanged. We are now friends on Facebook! Then two pretty Russian girls approach wearing mock 19th century infantry uniforms and another photo is taken with them – costing a pound but well worth it! After this we then go over the river to see the Aurora battleship (that fired the shot that launched the October revolution). The ship too is closed today and at this point the rain closes in again and after a brief look at the ‘trippery’ on the stalls lining the dock we beat a retreat past the rough-hewn rock memorial to the ‘victims of communism’, through the Peter and Paul fortress, past Peter and Paul cathedral and Peter’s disproportioned bronze statue, back across another bridge to pick up the metro and back to Olgino.