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Vladivostok Blog

We arrived yesterday at about 9:30 am local time, so we had more than an hour of daylight to check out the scenery as we approached the city. To our right we saw hundreds of people ice fishing (our map is not detailed enough to properly identify the body of water). Even before we got off the train, we could tell that Vladivostok was significantly different from the other towns we had seen since Moscow.

The architecture is both older and newer than the Soviet era, so there are not many huge square concrete block Soviet-style buildings, and the rest are quite pleasant to look at. This may be relative compared to what we have seen for the past week and a half.

The economy seems to be booming here. There is construction going on everywhere, including condos on the waterfront. Everyone seems to be driving brand new large 4-wheel-drive Japanese SUVs. More than half of the vehicles are UK style wrong-side drive, and we haven't developed a theory yet as to why that is. The only left-side roads around here are Hong Kong and Malaysia, right?

Also helping our appreciation of this town is the first 4-star hotel we have stayed in on this trip, the Hyundai Hotel. This compares with any Western world 4-star business hotel in rooms, service, and expensive prices; but it is money well spent at this point. They also have a decent American breakfast.

The population here is about 750,000 and the centre is quite compact, so walking around everywhere is easy - and we have walked pretty much everywhere. It is quite a hilly city and some views, with a stretch of the imagination, could look a bit like Monte Carlo in Winter time. Yesterday the temperature was a balmy -10° C, but today it went down to about -17° again.

We have seen most of the tourist attractions: the steam locomotive at the station alongside the end-of-line Trans-Siberian marker, the waterfront, a frozen beach where we walked out on the frozen Pacific to a mermaid statue, inside a WW2 submarine (very cool!) that had sank 10 Japanese ships, the Pacific Fleet museum that was closed (but we took many photos of guns and tanks outside), and a hike up a hill to the lookout. Tomorrow we hope to get on a harbour boat tour, if they run in the Winter, and I may drop into an art gallery which is supposed to be decent.

Last night we met a fellow from California in the hotel bar (top floor, nice view) who has been importing-exporting here for the past ten years. We had a few drinks and he pointed us to a very nice Armenian restaurant for supper tonight. The food was the best so far on the trip and we almost got full. The cappuccino was the best I have had in years, and the bathroom wins the cleanest-bathroom-with-best-toilet-paper in Russia award.

On the way back to the hotel, we found this very cool Iguana Internet café with fast access speed and flat screen monitors, and a bar in the next room.

We leave tomorrow night, actually 2:02 am of the 31st, for Harbin. There has only been one report on the Internet (that I can find) about this journey with a horror story border crossing. It is definitely not a well-travelled leg for foreigners. We'll see what happens.

Eric - from Vladivostok