Race To The Bottom
And so onto our final stop - the Hilton Frankfurt Airport. Just for the night on the journey back home from Helsinki. Should be a piece of cake, after all the hotel advertises itself as being attached to and just a short walk from Terminal 1 where we both arrive and depart from. Frankfurt’s airport...
The Happiest Place On Earth
And no....we haven’t taken a wrong turn and ended up in Disneyland! It’s not the Magic Kingdom that’s the Happiest Place on Earth. That title belongs to Finland! Yes it’s true, whichever entity rates “happiness”, has assessed Finland as the world’s happiest country beating out close rivals Denmark f...
Wired....
We leave Kiev and its golden domes behind and courtesy of Polish Airlines fly (across Poland) non-stop to Tallinn, Estonia’s capital on the shores of the Baltic Sea. Tallinn boasts Europe’s largest and best preserved walled mediaeval city ( UNESCO World Heritage listed) which began life in the 13th...
Kyivan Rus
Five days and 600km of the Dnieper River after leaving Odessa, we arrive in Kiev (or Kyiv to give the city its Ukrainian or is it its Russian name.....not sure if there’s a difference?). Counting the time we spend in port in Odessa and Kiev itself, by the time we disembark for the last time, the Vik...
The Ghost of Soviet’s Past
On a suitably cool, gloomy and rainy day, we make the 85 mile (140 km) drive north from Kiev to the doomed city of Chernobyl. For those too young to remember (or who haven’t seen the recent chillingly disturbing TV mini series) Chernobyl was the site of the world’s worst ever nuclear disaster. On th...
Back In The USSR
Well, you can take Ukraine out of Russia (well at least out of the Soviet Union) but it's very apparent that you can't take Russia out of Ukraine! Russia really began life in present day Ukraine with the establishment of "Kyivan Rus" in the 9th century, a Scandinavian settlement in what is now Kiev...
Frozen....
Post-Soviet Russia has provoked unresolved conflicts in several of the former autonomous Soviet republics, claiming that all they’re doing is protecting ethnic Russians and Russian-speaking inhabitants of these areas. There’s Georgia’s South Ossetia and Abkhazia, Azerbaijan’s Nagorno-Karabakh and Mo...
We Need To Talk About Kevin
Moldova, Europe’s poorest and most obscure country wedged between Romanian and Ukraine is not somewhere high on most travelers’ wishlists. Natalya, our very chatty and loquacious guide informs us that the country receives only around 35,000 tourists a year and most of those from the two countries th...
Underground In Odessa
Most of Odessa's pre-Soviet era buildings are constructed from limestone. Not surprising really because the city stands on massive limestone deposits created in the time millions of years ago when large chunks of what is now Ukraine were covered by sea. The 19th century builders of Odessa realizing...
“To Live Like A God In Odessa....”
In historical terms, Odessa is a relatively new city. It was the brainchild of the Russian Empress Catherine the Great and her lover General Grigory Potemkin who in the late 18th Century envisioned a southern version of St Petersburg on the site of a captured Turkish fort. Over the next several deca...