Our Baltic Cruise part 1: The Ports of call

That's our ship in the background
(the big one, not the pink flamingo)

On 7th June 2019 hubby dearest and I set off on our first cruise, a 9-day voyage round the Baltic which included two days in St. Petersburg. Hubby dearest lived there for two years (1992-1994) when he served as a missionary for our church, and loved it, and has been trying to persuade me to visit the city since we got married. Unfortunately he'd also told me some horror stories about Russia (he was there shortly after the end of communism) so I wasn't keen. Cruising there seemed a good option, and it was also his 50th birthday treat.

I'll do other posts about the ship, the food, tips for first-time cruisers, etc. but this one will focus on the ports we called at.

We flew into Copenhagen and took our transfer to the ship without any issues. Unfortunately the transfer arrangements made when we booked didn't allow any time for sightseeing in Copenhagen, and it looked like a lovely city. 

Warnemunde, Rostock, Germany

The official ship's tour from this port is Berlin, but it's quite a distance away and we'd decided beforehand not to bother (especially as the tour cost $500 each). If we want to see Berlin at  a later date we can fly there from our local airport in a little over an hour. Anyway, it turned out to be a good decision, because Warnemunde was lovely, and a great first port-of-call for first-time cruisers.

If you’re reading this because you’re about to do this cruise, my tip is to turn right out of the ship and head towards the station to get to Warnemunde town centre. You have to go under the railway line to get to the town, and we turned left and ending up going the long way round. (Ended the day with 20,000 steps recorded on our Fitbits, though.)

Warnemunde is a delightful town with some beautiful traditional German architecture, and a nice beach. The weather was perfect – warm and sunny but with a light breeze. Roderic went up the lighthouse tower (I’m scared of heights so I passed) and I enjoyed a few of the shops. 

Talinn, Estonia

There were five huge cruise ships in the harbour and it’s easy to see why Tallinn is a popular port. The old town behind its well-preserved medieval walls is within a km of the cruise terminal, and there’s a little souvenir market to pass through to get to it. As we soon discovered is true of every port (including Warnemunde), there were hop-on, hop-off city sightseeing tour buses waiting at the port and these are generally pretty good (with the exception of Helsinki) and much cheaper than the official ship's tours. We paid €25 each to do the hour-long tour on an open-top bus with an interesting commentary. We learned that even the combined colours of the independent Estonian flag had been banned at one point, and that Estonia had the “singing revolution” when people gathered for the traditional singing festival rose up to revolt. The country has a population of only 1.4 million, and only 1 million people speak Estonian – the rest speak Russian.

At the end of the tour Roderic opted to take another one, since two further tours were included in our ticket, and I walked to the old town which was very pretty, and did a bit of shopping.

St. Petersburg, Russia

In order to go to Russia you need a visa. These are quite expensive, but tourists on organised excursions don't need a visa, so we opted for that route. The ship's official tour was prohibitively expensive once again, but we had looked into this in advance and booked a two-day tour with SPB tours. We were late getting off the ship due to Norwegian's somewhat inefficient procedure. We were supposed to meet up with our tour guide at 8.30 but it was over an hour later that we were off the ship and all assembled. This meant we had missed our 10.05 tour time at the Hermitage, and the queues were now all the way around the building. (The Hermitage actually opens at 10.30 so we had special early access.) Our tour guide, Elena, got round this by joining with another SPB tours group near the front of the queue. In other words, we pushed in.

The Hermitage was incredibly busy, but it is also utterly stunning. It was the home of Catherine the Great, built to house her burgeoning art collection, so it's actually a collection of several (very large) buildings, since she built a new section every time she bought up a new collection. She was something of a hermit, or recluse, and wanted somewhere to shut herself away from the rest of the city, hence the name. She had 18,000 dresses, and by the time she died she had almost bankrupted Russia. 

We then visited the Church on the Spilled Blood. It was built on the site where, in March 1881, Tsar Alexander II was fatally wounded. He was much more popular than Catherine the Great, and so a great Russian Orthodox cathedral was erected on the site. The Russian Orthodox church doesn't allow crosses or paintings, which means the only type of decoration left is mosaic, so the whole interior is covered with mosaics.

Following lunch at an Italian restaurant, we went to Hare Island (St. Petersburg was originally 42 islands, and has over 300 bridges) and the Peter and Paul Fortress. This was originally intended to be the city, and strong walls were built, but by the time they were complete the city had already grown outside them, so instead the fort became a prison. It now houses the mint and another Russian Orthodox church where the Tsars and their families are buried. We saw the memorials to Tsar Nicholas II and his family - his wife, four daughters (including Anastasia on whom the Disney film is based) and his son. They were killed on the orders of Lenin in 1918 and their remains were found and identified 90 years later and brought to the church where their ancestors  were buried.

The second day in St. Petersburg started with a boat trip on the Neva river, and then a  visit to St. Petersburg's underground, the Metro. It's the deepest in the world (because St. Petersburg is built on a swamp) and is also very ornate. When it was built by the communists, they wanted to make each Metro station a "palace for the people" to rival the great palaces of the Tsars, so each Metro station has ornate columns and mosaics.

We then went to Peterhof, a palace built by Peter the Great to rival Versailles. We only did the exquisite gardens, but I now have no need at all to see Versailles. 

After lunch our final visit was to Catherine's palace in Pushkin, the summer residence of Catherine I where the famous Amber Room was located until it was stolen by the Nazis. Like many of the other places we'd been to, what we were seeing was the restoration of the original - half of the Amber Room had been recreated. Much of St. Petersburg was bombed during the war, and some restoration work is still going on, so some rooms were plain,  and others had already been plastered in gold leaf. Realising just how much of the city wasn't the original but a restoration was quite heartening in light of the Notre Dame Cathedral fire.

Helsinki, Finland

After St. Petersburg, anything was going to be something of a damp squib. We again took the city sightseeing bus tour, but it was quite expensive (€40) and was very dull. Fifteen minutes in we'd seen nothing more interesting that the biggest department store in Finland. We got off at the Rock Church (a church blasted out of a rock) but there wasn't very much to see there either so we got back on the bus to return to the ship. It seemed part of the problem was that the cruise terminal was actually halfway round the bus route. The official route started in the Market Square, and the interesting sites and commentary were from that point on. So if you're someone doing this cruise, bear in mind that the tour gets better. There's not much to see in the mile from the cruise terminal, but later there are  some really pretty art deco streets.

Nynasham, Sweden

Our final stop was supposed to be Stockholm, but the ship was diverted to the next port along, Nynasham. This can sometimes happen when ports are too busy, and the cruise line isn't legally obliged to compensate us for the missed stop. Because of the distance to Stockhold the city sightseeing buses were too expensive ($65 each) and we didn't have much time - the ship was leaving at 4.30, so we decided just to look round the town of Nynasham. We saw some pretty typical Swedish houses, but not much else, so headed back to our ship where the view from our balcony, of some of the islands off the coast, was beautiful.

It was the warmest day we'd had on the entire cruise, and everyone else had gone off to Stockholm, so we took advantage and spent the afternoon in the pool, hot tubs and waterpark, which we had to ourselves.

We concluded that the great thing about cruising it that you get  a "taster" of lots of places. Apart from two "at sea" days we woke up in a different place each morning, and had a day to explore.That's not long enough for many places (especially St. Petersburg) but it helps you get a feel for a place and figure where you need to return to. We're already planning to fly to Copenhagen for a long weekend, and take a train to Stockholm from there - it's only about £26 for the return journey.