I love a boat trip. I nearly froze to death out on the river in Rīga in November two years ago, I went on three different boats in Malta earlier in the year, I did the canal boat in Amsterdam last year (another case of nearly freezing to death) and by the time you read this, hopefully I’ll have been on a bateau mouche trip through Paris. Now I was going to get a bit sunburnt on a St Petersburg boat trip.
It seemed like a good place to go out on the water where the Neva River is so important to the city. The idea had caught me on my first morning when I saw Russian-language boat tours outside the Peter & Paul Fortress but it took until late on my second day to find a boat I could actually get on.
I ambled down to the riverside from St Isaac’s Cathedral, past the Bronze Horseman statue and found a pier. Buying the ticket was a little bit more difficult – you buy from someone who doesn’t speak English through a glass slot the size of a letterbox, which is fine, but there was a couple in front of me who literally took more than fifteen minutes to buy two tickets. After five minutes, I concluded that it wasn’t a ticket slot after all and gave up, only for them to eventually step away with tickets.
I got a ticket for the Northern Islands cruise. It goes around the big clump of island that forms the majority of the centre of St Petersburg, Petrogradsky District. The route looks something like this:
It was hot. I sat outside, up on the top deck, on top of a box of emergency equipment, which is a really good place to sit when there isn’t an emergency going on, and there was no emergency that afternoon. The boat provides blankets in case it gets cold and although people were wearing them, I found I was really hot and quite concerned about sunburn. I have a strong suspicion that although I was probably still applying suncream at this point (gave that up when I moved to Murmansk and never picked it up again), I might not have been wearing my sunhat. Admittedly, it did get cold towards the end but it was such a long trip that the sun was visibly setting by the time we got back to the boat stop by the Horseman. The map I copied mine from says there are six stops on the route. I definitely remember stopping a few hundred yards up, directly outside the Winter Palace and I definitely remember stopping right up at the northernmost point of the islands but I don’t remember the two a little bit north of where I boarded.
The map I was given gave me the impression we’d be doing this circuit of the northern islands anti-clockwise so it was quite a surprise when we did a very sharp u-turn outside the Peter & Paul Fortress and headed off in the clockwise direction instead.
The first part was good – Hermitage on the right, Peter & Paul Fortress on the left, riverside beach very visible. I thought I’d seen the beach but all I’d seen was patches of dust where the grass had worn away. There’s an actual bit of golden beach below the fortress walls, on the actual edge of the river. St Petersburg from the water. Excellent. Ten out of ten.
But then we turned into the Little Neva River and this really isn’t one of the more decorative parts of the city. That didn’t come until we popped out the end, into the Neva Bay, which is the easternmost part of the Baltic Sea, separated by an island with a dam connecting each side to the mainland. To all intents and purposes, you’re on the Baltic. We went round a stadium that looked like it was designed by the people who brought you Disney’s Discoveryland. We passed a bit of beach that looked every bit as natural as the one on the fortress.
And then we started our journey back along the north side of this mass of islands. This was much prettier. Mostly it was green, parkland almost. The sort of places you might imagine city-dwellers go to at the weekend to pretend they’re not in a city. Had the boats been a bit easier to hop on & off, I might have hopped off to appreciate it all a bit more but there’s only one stop on that entire stretch so I stayed.
There were plenty of jetskiers on the river, to my surprise. Jetskiing is not the leisure activity of choice that I might have associated with St Petersburg.
For all the sun, the day was getting on as we approached the cruiser Aurora and it was beginning to feel chilly on the water. Aurora is, in large part, the reason I was in Russia at all. When we came in 2002, my friend Martyn asked, in almost reverential tones, “Sir, is this the gun?” Having dropped history four years earlier, I knew nothing whatsoever of the Russian Revolution and “the gun” was meaningless to me. I wanted to go back as an adult, see it all properly, understand it all properly. (A guidebook is a surprisingly useful tool for helping achieve this.) What he means is that Aurora fired the opening shots of the October Revolution, to signal the start of the assault on the Winter Palace, wherein the Provisional Government were arrested in the Malachite Room – which you’ll meet soon.
Back to the boat trip. The last hour was pretty cold. The sun was visibly lower but it was still early September, still summer, still probably ridiculously hot in the streets. I was beginning to be hungry and quite glad when St Isaac’s Golden Dome appeared above the trees.
If I’d had the time, I’d have taken the hydrofoil out to Peterhof. That looked both fun and really weird. But there’s never time to do everything and my last full day in St Petersburg was saved for the Hermitage. But the next blog isn’t on that, it’s on the two big churches in St Petersburg.