No, I did not get runaway fingers. That is the name of the city. It was named after St. Peter and St. Paul. These were ships that came with Vitus Bering and who founded the city.
This is our only stop in Russia. We thought we were in Siberia, since that is what our travel guide, the person who the cruise line has on board to tell us about the ports, said it was. Our native guide today said Siberia is a 5 hour plane flight from here. I believe her. Anyway, it has been interesting.
The Russian government may not be communist anymore, but they still must have lots of paranoia. When we arrived, at 6 this morning, we boarded 16 or so immigration officials. They spent the entire morning going through every single passport. The passengers who had booked excursions offered by the ship had their passports examined first. When that was complete, the passenger then had to collect their passport, get a tender ticket, (remember, when we cannot dock at a port, we have to take the lifeboats, or tenders, into the port, this is one of those ports) then they had to have their passports checked again while looking at them to make sure the picture matched.
The plan was that all excursion participants had to be cleared and disembarked before non-participants could collect their passports, etc.
We had a trip planned with a guide that Juby had used on a previous trip here. Yes, it does seem that Juby and Tom have been everywhere. We thought we would not be able to take the tour, since the estimated time of departure for us was 11-12am. Not much time left when we had to be ready to return to the ship by 4. Well, Juby was able to get us moved up. Even though I had talked to the ship personnel in charge and gotten nowhere, she talked to the lady who came on board to exchange money, from dollars to rubles. Who knew she would be able to get us expedited. But she did.
We had a lovely lady whose English was pretty good. Turns out this was her first tour. The guide Juby had used before was unable, at the last minute, to take us, so Anna did. She did a wonderful job.
We first went to a view point. This town is surrounded by volcanoes. And, the day is perfect. Clear skies and views were unlimited. Their wasn’t even any wind. It seems that is very unusual. It never got above 38 degrees, but in the sun, it felt warmers. We left our jackets in the van most of the time. The view are great, as you can see.
Russian Orthodox Church that is still under construction. Juby saw it 3 years ago, and it was still under construction.
Next we drove a while and went to a volcanic hot springs. It was lovely, warm, sunny and friendly. We only had about 1/2 hour there, due to our late start. There was a man there, who just kept talking to Arleen. Anna came over to interpret, since he didn’t speak any English. She wasn’t able to help, because he never paused long enough for her to interpret. He must have talked nonstop for 4 minutes. That is a very long time. Time it and see. There was no way Anna could remember all he said in that time. It was quite amusing.
From the hot springs, we drove to a Dacha. A dacha is a summer house. People who live in the cities, even small ones, have summer homes where they have gardens and grow their own veggies. We were greeted warmly by our hosts. They prepared a lovely lunch for us in a small building along side their home. We had 5 kinds of salads, 3 kinds of salmon and caviar to eat along with the most wonderful bread.
This is the view from the back of their house
Then came the soup. They called it borscht, but it was not cold, it was hot. It also had no beets in it. It was, what I would call, a cabbage soup.
Then we had mashed potatoes with shish cabob and tea and cookies. Oh, yeah, on the way to the lunch, we stopped off and bought local beer to have with lunch. It was very good.
By this time, it was time to head back to the ship. We did take a few minutes to look at a local market. With only 10 minutes, all you could do was look. Too bad, though the prices seemed really high. Being as isolated as Petropavlovsk is, everything is expensive. Did I mention that the only way to get here is by plane or ship? No, well that’s true. It is pretty isolated.
Now we are back on the ship, all the tenders are back on board, all the passengers are back on board, and we just had a message from the captain. Just like the procedures we went through this morning, it will be another 3 hours before we will be allowed to leave. So, here we sit until about 8 pm.
I don’t care, the view is beautiful. Hopefully we will see a wonderful sunset over the volcanoes.
Notice the volcano started to steam. It started with one vent, and then went to 2. It didn’t do anything else while we were here. No erupting volcanoes on our sail-out either.
When we leave here, we have 7 days of sea travel. The dates are only 6, but we have Monday, tomorrow, twice. Yup, we pass the date line. We will continue to lose hours, but we gained a day. (ok, since I first wrote this, the captain announced that we do not get a whole day, we only get 23 hours, since we lost an hour as soon as we gain a day……not fair!)
It is kind of sad that this is the last real foreign port. It is hard to count Vancouver as a real foreign port. We are heading home. We will be sailing through the Aleutians on the way and hopefully that will be scenic. But, we are near the end. It is a mixed feeling. On one hand, it will be good to get home. On the other, we will be in one place, we will have to cook and clean for ourselves. All our needs will not be within walking distance. Doesn’t matter. Whether we like it or not, we are on our way home.
