Russia by Riverboat

Joan and Morton Heilman in front of the Church of Our Savior on Spilled Blood in St. Petersburg

If you're a seasoned traveler who's been there, done that, try a riverboat cruise. After all, sometimes you just want to take it easy and watch the scenery go by -- with a few leisurely adventures, of course, thrown in along the way.

I've just returned from a cruise in Russia, spending 11 nights aboard the Viking Surkov, a 400-foot, 190-passenger ship, sailing from Moscow up the Volga River, through canals, rivers and about a dozen locks, across lakes and estuaries, all the way to St. Petersburg, one of the most magnificent cities in the world. And I'm here to tell you that this is the way to go.

To begin with, the experience of traveling on a small ship through waters where the land is almost always in plain view is much more intimate than on a huge cruise ship carrying thousands of people. You get to know almost everybody on board and can always manage to find some compatible souls among them. On the Surkov, one of Viking River Cruises' many ships plying waterways all over Europe and Asia, there was just one big dining room and no assigned tables.

That meant we could mix and match our dining companions as we pleased. We could sit wherever we wanted, joining one pair of travelers for breakfast, sitting with a different group at lunch, switching around at dinner, and eventually making friends with some of our fellow travelers, the majority of whom were, as we used to say, "of a certain age." The food, produced by Austrian chefs, was tasty and the young Russian waitresses all spoke English well enough to deal with us.

The most difficult decision we had to make on our entire voyage was whether to choose chicken or fish for dinner. Whenever we stepped foot on shore, we were escorted by well-trained guides who shepherded small groups of us to our destinations of the day. That is especially handy in a place like Russia where there's an alphabet completely different from ours, so you can't read one single solitary word, including the road signs.

Getting to Russia was easy, a flight to Paris, then another to Moscow, but it was one long journey. There are no direct flights from the U.S. to Moscow so I suggest you break it up -- as we did not -- and spend a couple of days in Paris or whatever other city is on your itinerary, just so you'll have your wits about you when you get there. Witless, weary and irritable, we were met at Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport and transported to the Northern River Terminal on the Moskva River to board our ship and settle into our tiny cabins.
I'm talking tiny. Furnished with two narrow beds, a small table between them, a closet, and multiple shelves and drawers, our little cabin turned out to be functional and cozy once we got used to it, but it's most remarkable feature was the bathroom. It contained a toilet and a washbasin. To take a shower, you pulled a shower curtain around the toilet and grasped the faucet from the sink. Attached to a flexible hose, it hooks onto a fixture above, showering you and the entire rest of the room with water that then escapes through a drain in the floor.

Never mind, it works and that's what counts. The ship does have a couple of dozen larger deluxe cabins, and a few even larger suites, all with the kind of showers we know and love.

Next morning, rested up, we climbed into our buses, about 20 of us per bus plus a guide and a driver, to spend the day in Moscow. We started off with a ride on the underground Metro system built in the Soviet days. If you've ever traveled by subway in Queens or the Bronx, you'd be amazed by these beautiful, elegant subway stations with their sculptured pillars, ornate chandeliers, colorful murals, and huge bronze statues of soldiers, farmers, factory workers, and sharpshooters, everything spotlessly clean.

Next was Red Square, a large open space dominated by Lenin's Tomb and the glorious St. Basil's Cathedral immediately recognizable because of its colorful onion domes. Across the street, the famous GUM department store is now an elegant shopping mall filled with upscale boutiques and shops with such steep prices that only nouveau riche Russians can possibly afford. That evening, we all went to a performance of the Moscow Circus to see its incredible jugglers, high-wire artists, and famous animal acts.

Our second day in Moscow, we explored the vast Kremlin, actually a walled city built as a fortification and containing cathedrals, palaces, museums, and government buildings, ringed by 18th-century towers. Its most impressive site is the medieval gold-domed Cathedral of the Assumption, the coronation site for the czars of Russia.

Leaving Moscow that afternoon, we sailed into the Moscow Canal, built by Stalin in the 1930s to connect the city with the Volga River, and passed through our first lock that evening. It was a lovely structure topped by bronze sculptures of old sailing ships. All night and the next morning, we cruised through the countryside, spotting little towns and onion-domed churches along the way and attending an excellent lecture on Gorbachev and the breakup of the Soviet Union.
After lunch, the ship docked at the small village of Uglich to explore the Church of the Transfiguration's baroque icons and to see the "Blood Church" built on the site where Ivan the Terrible's son Dimitri was murdered in the 16th century.

But, before I go any further, let's talk shopping. All of the women (and some of the men) on that ship were over-the-top shoppers and I was no exception, always on the hunt for good deals and ethnic souvenirs. We found them. Wherever we went in Russia, there were stalls lined up one after another, laden with wonderful wares unique to this part of the world and cheap, cheap, cheap.

In Uglich, I bought two shawls, a woven linen tablecloth, and a fanciful glass bird. At our next stop in Kostroma, I invested in three wristwatches with enameled bands ($15 each), a painted wooden bowl, a painted wooden serving spoon, three dolls dressed in Russian outfits, five sets of Russian egg dolls that fit within one within another. Never mind what I bought in St. Petersburg, the last stop on our way, where you can find more cheap treasures but also real works of art with prices to match New York's.

Between shore excursions, we lounged about our ship, chatting, reading, attending fascinating lectures on the history and politics of Russia from the Romanovs to Vladimir Putin. We drank wine while we listened to a pianist playing Chopin in the lounge, attended a vodka tasting and a crew talent show, ate too much food, and spotted villages and gold-domed churches among the linden and birch forests on shore.

At last we arrived at St. Petersburg (once known as Leningrad) on the Gulf of Finland that leads to the Baltic Sea. Built from scratch by thousands of slaves on swampy marshes three centuries ago, this glittering city was conceived by Peter the Great, the half-mad czar of Russia, who loved European culture and created the city as Russia's "window to the West." It has also been called the "Venice of the North" because it spans 42 islands surrounded by canals connected by about 300 bridges.

Besieged and bombarded by the Nazis for 900 days during World War II, its magnificent buildings were badly damaged, many even destroyed, but all were painstakingly restored to their former splendor in time for the city's 300th birthday last year. It's a great walking city, so pack some comfortable shoes.

Among the splendid gold-encrusted palaces you must see in St. Petersburg are Peterhof, the czar's summer palace so ornate as to rival Versailles, where from the marble terrace you can see the Grand Cascade, made up of three waterfalls, 64 fountains, and 37 statues surrounded by gardens; the opulent Hermitage, a vast art museum occupying Peter's former 1,000-room pale-green-and-white winter residence; and Catherine's Palace with its famous Amber Room paneled in slabs of amber as well as plenty of other rooms almost as grand. In the evenings in this fairytale city, we were entertained by a performance of the ballet "Swan Lake," a folklore show, and a canal-boat tour.

After our couple of days here, it was time for a new batch of passengers to take over our cabins for the same voyage in reverse. We packed up our bags, hugged our new friends goodbye, and flew home to extol riverboats as a leisurely, relaxed way to see the world.