If you go to Russia and someone tells you to visit Peterhof to see the Summer Palace do yourself a favour and don’t bother. An estimated 7000 tourists trying to be squeezed through the human equivalent of a cattle crush is not a pleasant experience. Short tempered guides and aggressive, stony faced babushkas barking “next room, next room” is to use Garry’s description “purgatory”. As lovely as the place is forget the inside and explore the incredible gardens. The way to visit Peterfof is to catch the Hydrofoil from St. Petersburg, step straight into the garden, admire the grounds, architecture and fountains, forget the inside you will see very little and queue forever. If you think you can queue jump on an organised tour, forget that also, it seems everyone is on an organised tour so you just queue in groups.

Enough complaining, pictures.

The reason the queues are so long at Peterhof is the total absence of logical organisation. In the interests of transparency and for the good of all concerned I am publishing a very good likeness of the responsible entity.

By the way, back in town and on the way to the dreaded gift shop, we chanced upon a Russian Gaz Volga ( that’s a car by the way) this is the model car the Sabur family gifted to the Estonian relatives and precipitated this whole excursion. The car was parked in front of a “hand made” shoe shop (that’s the shoes not the shop, though the shop was probably hand made also) so we stopped for photos, to cut a long story short we were soon driving around St. Petersburg in an early 1960’s Gas Volga, windows down, radio playing god knows what kind of “latest funky tunes”. Our gracious driver spoke no English and we spoke no Russian so we communicated by “car”, I showed him a picture of our MG he showed me a picture of his Mustang then it went Landcruiser, Jaguar, Mustang and so forth followed by much backslapping and laughing. Much better than queuing at palaces.

The Volga.

Our new friend lets call him “Boris”, that’s a friendly name.

Boris and Volga.

After four days…..Jen finally managed a tour bus/tourist free Nicholas One Statue picture.