Sunday September 29th, 2013 Yalta, Ukraine

Having crossed the Black Sea, this morning the ship docked in the port of Yalta which is on the Crimean Peninsula in Ukraine; this was our first visit to Ukraine, so we get to check another one off the country list. The weather was overcast, and it had rained during the night, but we were still able to stand on the balcony as the ship made its final approach to the dock.

For this port we had purchased a Cunard shore excursion to visit several of the famous palaces in the area and since these locations were quite a few miles from the port, this was a convenient way to see them in a relatively short amount of time. The downside of shore excursions is being herded like cattle and having to stick to someone else's schedule. At the assigned time we headed to the Theater on the ship to await our turn to disembark; for this stop we were required to take our passports ashore, something we've never had to do in any other port. We followed our escort off the ship and waltzed through the passport control offices in the terminal building which were completely unoccupied - so much for needing the passport.

On board the bus we met our Ukrainian guide, Juri, who spoke good English but with a very heavy Russian accent and would occasionally take a while to search for the right word to complete a sentence. Initial impressions as the bus pulled away from the dock were that this was an old town with a lot of history trying to get modern but just not quite knowing how to do it. The streets in Yalta are very narrow and there are lots of parked cars and overhanging trees making for an exciting bus ride. 

Yalta sits in a large natural bay backed by a high mountain range, the Crimean Mountains. There is a long pedestrian embankment along about half of the bay called the Lenin Embankment; in places the embankment gives way to small beaches. Houses, hotels, and businesses face the waterfront and progress back up the hillside away from the bay. The whole area is covered with trees which in parts are quite dense.

After about 20 minutes we reached our first destination, the Lavadia Palace; famous as the site of the Yalta Conference, a meeting between Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill in 1945 where they discussed the fate of Europe after the end of the war. The palace was originally owned by the Romanov Tzars until the outbreak of WW1 and was then, of course, put to other uses after the revolution in 1917 - in fact the Bolsheviks turned the palace into retreat for peasants.

Lavadia was finally turned into a museum with an exhibit focused on the Yalta conference; then in the 1980s when Gorbachev visited, he ordered that the museum also exhibit the history of the Romanovs. The result is that now the Yalta conference is shown on the ground floor and the Romanov exhibit is upstairs.

The Yalta exhibit is a bit sparse; with the exception of the original conference table and chairs (which are excellent), the exhibit consists mostly of photographs and documents in display cases. Getting to stand with my hand on by Churchill's chair was a real treat.

Of course "Uncle Joe" had his seat with the back to the wall due to his extreme paranoia. Other rooms on the ground floor were also impressive.

Upstairs we got to see and hear about the life of the Romanovs - the displays had a lot of photos and documents but also a lot more furniture and artifacts. Two things strike me when you see and how the Tzars lived in comparison to the rest of the country; the extreme state of luxury in which they existed, and second, how could they not see what was coming?

Back on the bus and off to the Swallows Nest castle - a small pad built on a rock outcrop by a German industrialist for his mistress back in 1912. Swallows Nest has become a famous Crimean landmark. This was a 20-minute quick fire stop; the bus pulled over near a cafe overlooking the castle and we all piled out to try and get a shot of the castle off in the distance, about half a mile away. There were also "5 star" bathrooms at this location at a cost of half a Euro per person - it also turned out that some of the best photo angles were on the way down the steps to the bathroom.

The last stop on our tour was at the Vorontsov Palace; Count Vorontsov rose to fame in the Russian army during the Napoleonic wars in 1812 and was rewarded by being made governor of new Southern Russia by the Tzar. The count had grown up in London where his father was the Russian ambassador and so he became a bit of an anglophile - he also became extraordinarily wealthy from his land holdings in Russian and from the wine business he established (much of the Crimea is planted with grape vines). 

Vorontsov Palace is in the town of Alupka, about 11 miles from Yalta - note that the count also had a palace in Odessa, and maybe more. The palace is now a museum and sits in a 40-hectare (apologies to our American friends) park that was the former grounds. If you visit this palace on a bus tour, get ready for some pretty hairy moments as the bus navigates the tiny roads that are at times lined with cars and other buses. There is also a 600M walk from where the bus stops to the palace; this being a Sunday the park was full of young families out with their children for a morning stroll. 

Wanting to recapture some of his English upbringing, the count employed the same guy who extended Buckingham Palace, when it came time to build his palace in the Crimea. 

 We crammed into the entry lobby where our guide ensured that we were OK for entry and announced that photo taking inside was only allowed if you purchased a permit, and that he would buy them for anyone who wanted one using his local currency - and then we could pay him the 1/2 Euro equivalent - at which point he promptly turned around and left the room instructing us to follow, no one got to buy a photo permit! By the time we got to the second room most people had started to take photos anyway, the "guards" did not seem to care - maybe our guide knew this all along. 

During the Yalta conference of 1945, Churchill used the Vorontsov Palace as his base, along with his entourage of 300 - some sleeping 8 to a room (the palace is not that big), there are also only 3 bathrooms in the place. We found many of the palace room to be too small for the size of our tour group, invariably we could not hear what the guide was saying. The interior is in decent shape but there is not much left from the week that Churchill spent here.

The palace is guarded by a crack group of ex-spatnez special forces soldiers from the legendary Sleeping Brigade...

The bus dropped us off back at the ship and we noticed that the dock was very close to the previously mentioned Lenin Embankment, and so we decided to take a little walk before re-boarding the ship. On the way to the embankment we passed some of the older buildings in Yalta.

The area then opened up into a wide plaza that anchored one end of the embankment. There was a carnival / fairground feel to the whole place; with kids rides, music playing, food vendors and lots of locals out for a Sunday afternoon walk. One of the few signs left over from the old Soviet era is the large statue of Lenin that is set back just a little from the embankment. Perhaps the biggest signal that the old regime is long gone was a group of teenagers using the base of the Lenin statue as a mini skateboard park, and not being sent to Siberia for exhibiting such anti-social behavior.

Even though we were able to use Euros at the trinket shops by the palaces, we found that the businesses along the embankment would only take the local Ukrainian currency - of which we had precisely zero, so no coffee and cake for us! In addition most of the locals spoke very little, if any, English - but it's amazing how much you can convey by pointing and gesturing. 

Strolling on for about half a mile we observed many families having lots of fun - this does seem to be a very popular spot with the locals on a Sunday. Eventually we reversed course and headed back to the ship.

We managed to talk the Ukrainian port guard into posing for pictures - after her initial resistance we couldn't get her to stop!