Cruise Destinations

With apologies for the fact that it's taken a week, here's a handful of pictures from my recent cruise to the Baltic capitals on board P&O's Azura. The ship is berthed at Tallinn, Estonia in the shot above, which also gives an indication of the sort of weather we were lucky to have - apart from one day in St Petersburg when the rain lashed down. You can see how grey it was from the picture of cruiser Aurora (below), which in 1917 fired the first shot in the October Revolution. The warship is now a floating museum on the [...]

Even though the the Little Mermaid's holiday in China has been widely reported, there were still lots of disappointed faces in Copenhagen yesterday among hundreds of people turning up at her rock on the sea shore. There were four cruise ships in port; P&O's Azura was joined by MSC Orchestra, Costa Atlantica, and Iberotour's Grand Mistral. That's an awful lot of passengers in town when, because the Danish nation was celebrating Constitution Day, the local populace was picnicking in the parks and almost all the shops were shut. The Little Mermaid would have been the big attraction - if she [...]

There are three million exhibits in St Petersburg's Hermitage Museum and it is impossible to hope to see more than a fraction of them in any visit, let alone a two-and-a-half hour gallop through a few of the galleries. But we achieved an impressive tally during our morning excursion from Azura, aided by a Russian guide who bore a passing resemblance to Fanny Cradock in appearance and temperament. It was all done at break-neck speed, and after taking our fill of Titians and Tintorettos, Raphaels and Michaelangelos, it was onwards and upwards to the modern collection, where Cezanne and Gauguin [...]