As is always the case, these blog entries are a personal record of one of our trips. And just to make it very clear, neither of us have any association with Viking or anyone other company and in fact, they have no idea that we are writing a blog and we will not be telling them that we have done so. Having been on only two cruises in our travelling years (The Akademik Ioffe to Antarctica and The Minerva around the Lesser Antilles), we are not cruise experts and so we do not really know what to expect, all we know is that we want to enjoy ourselves.
This time we are taking one of the standard Viking canal cruises from St Petersburg to Moscow. We did a lot of consumer research before deciding both to book and to choose which direction to go in. Amongst the blogs and articles we read were this one here; this one here and this one here. Practically all of the reviews we read were positive but at the time of writing this blog entry, we have not started our trip so it will be interesting to see if our view at the end is also positive.
We chose to go in the Saint Petersburg to Moscow direction partly because the dates suited us better and partly because we thought we would prefer to start with The Hermitage and to see what Saint Petersburg had to offer and then to end with the traffic jams of Moscow. We booked some while ago responding to a “£1000" off offer in the press. Monitoring sale prices over the following few months showed us that the offer was reintroduced in various guises quite regularly over the following months. By booking early however we did get our first choice of cabin and as of today, it appears that the ship is nearly full.
Some three months before the trip, our flight details arrived. We are flying from and back to London on scheduled British Airways flights at sensible times (neither early in the morning nor late at night). The peculiarities of BA mean that no free food is on offer on the flight out to St Petersburg (which according to BA is a European destination) but free food and drink is on offer on the way back because Moscow is a World destination. Our insurance company however regards all of Russia west of the Urals as being in Europe.
We decided to spend the night before the outbound flight at a hotel near Heathrow and also to buy a "stay and park" package. As is often the case, if you hunt around on the internet you can get a really good deal. Using the BAA website we got 12 nights parking in Terminal 5 Long Stay plus a night at the nearby Hyatt for £129 which was £4 cheaper than the cost of parking alone had we only purchased parking at T5 Long Stay.
The process of applying for a Russian visa is long and complex. Whilst 2018 World Cup Football fans seem to have been offered a short route to getting a visa, this is not available to the ordinary tourist. We chose to use the services of Viking's preferred visa partner (Prima) because there were too many questions on the visa application form which we did not understand. Over twenty pages of instructions arrived from them in one document and four in another and the resultant completed and printed visa application was six pages long. "List all of the countries you have visited in the past ten years including dates and reasons for travel” caused us some problem as did “give the number and validity dates of your previous passports” and “give the number and validity dates of your children's passport”.
For those who are facing this ordeal, I can advise that it took me around two hours to complete the first application and one hour for the second, a process not helped by the fact that the guidance notes referred to an earlier version of the passport application process (apparently it had been simplified).
Visa applicants also have to go to one of three UK centres to have their biometric measurements (finger prints) taken. So on the appointed day, at the appointed time, we presented ourselves at the visa processing centre in London to have our fingerprints taken. The staff there were very helpful and because one of us was in a wheelchair, they immediately took us into a side room (bypassing the queue), took our fingerprints and we were out five minutes after arriving.
Until this application, we thought that the India Visa Application Process was the hardest and most expensive we had experienced - we now know that the process for Russia is much harder by a long way. It is also the most expensive visa we have ever had to buy at a total cost of £233.20 each, a figure which includes the cost of the visa, a letter of invitation from our tour company to go to Russia and Prima's fees (for checking our papers, meeting us at the visa office to hand back our papers, and collecting our passports when the visas are ready. Posting them back to us then adds an additional fee !) On top of this we also had to add the cost of new photographs, postage and travel to London.
Using the Viking website, we had to select which of the included and which of the "extra cost’ trips we wanted to take. All of the “extra cost” trips are quite expensive but since we do not see ourselves going to Russia again, we accepted that it was pay and do it now or never ever do it. And about two weeks before we left, a long list of “additional shore excursions” arrived for us to choose from if there was space in our already planned itinerary.
