St Petersburg to Moscow river cruise

[nyjoecruise]

Hello, I will be taking the Viking Truvor from St Petersburg to Moscow this June and am looking for any advice from anyone who has taken this cruise previously? I can't seem to find any threads on the Russian river cruises.

Thanks!

[Talisker92]

We did this cruise last year with Vantage. The story and pictures are on our website. There is a great post from 4774Papa-just search for his posting.

The traffic in Moscow and St. Petersburg is terrible! I think Viking keeps you on the boat the whole time, so there may be some long travel times to places like Red Square and the Hermitage.

We are always happy to answer any questions.

[franski]

Hello, I will be taking the Viking Truvor from St Petersburg to Moscow this June and am looking for any advice from anyone who has taken this cruise previously? I can't seem to find any threads on the Russian river cruises.

Thanks!

 

 

If you look under the Roll Calls section, there has been a generic roll call for Russia for the last 2 years. We went in 2012 (with Uniworld) - and there was a very active thread the year we went.

 

The traffic in both St. Peterburg & Moscow are horrible - but that is life in the Soviet Union... Not sure what the optionals are with Viking, but we did almost all of them - as we figured we wouldn't be back anytime soon.

 

We booked a private guide in Moscow - and that worked well for us. As mentioned above - happy to answer any questions.

 

Fran

[4774Papa]

We did this cruise last year with Vantage. The story and pictures are on our website. There is a great post from 4774Papa-just search for his posting.

The traffic in Moscow and St. Petersburg is terrible! I think Viking keeps you on the boat the whole time, so there may be some long travel times to places like Red Square and the Hermitage.

We are always happy to answer any questions.

We did the trip in 2011 and loved it. We did it from Moscow to STP.

 

http://boards.cruisecritic.com/showthread.php?t=1478384

[NanciEA]

We did Viking's cruise from St. Petersburg to Moscow last September with three other couples. You can read my review under "Viking Helgi", "Needs Improvement".

[HDS]

We cruised with Viking in 2008. Best thing we did was stay three nights pre and post cruise in Moscow and St Petersburg and explore independently. With a good street map and enough knowledge of the Cyrillic alphabet to decipher place names and street signs it was easy to move around on foot and by metro. We saw much more than on the crowded Viking excursions which spent so much time getting 50 pax on and off buses, in and out of toilets and in souvenir shops.

Beware constantly of pickpockets in the cities, they are brilliant at their work, absolutely world class. Shipmates were targeted even on Viking excursions. Keep wallet, camera etc in inside zippered pockets and stay alert. We were targeted on a platform but my outside pockets held nothing but soggy tissues, festy with the ship's virus. No loss at all.

Edited May 12, 2014 by HDS

[LipBalmAddict]

We are currently on the Viking Helgi on route to St. Petersburg (we started the cruise in Moscow on 20th May). Having sailed with two high end ocean cruise lines before, we weren't sure what to expect of Viking, but we have been completely blown away by how fantastic this trip has been so far.

 

I will write a detailed review when we are back, but I will leave it here by saying that two key things to remember when preparing for the cruise are (1) to bring a range of garments to cover extremes in temperature, and (2) the more of the Russian language you can pick up in advance, the better your experience will be (as you will be able to interact more with the locals), but if you are not very good at picking up foreign languages (as I am not) then you will still be fine, as Viking's amazing guides will take excellent care of you.