Travel Notes

Budget Liner

SkyExpress, Russia’s first budget airline, started operations on January 29, with a $35 roundtrip fare from Moscow’s Vnukovo airport to the southern resort town Sochi – several times cheaper than competing airlines. 

SkyExpress (skyexpress.ru) has two daily flights between the capital and Sochi and  plans to shortly add flights to Perm, Yekaterinburg, Ufa, Anapa, Chelyabinsk, Rostov-on-Don and Murmansk.  

In its first week, the airline sold 3,000 tickets by telephone and online. SkyExpress hopes to carry 600,000 passengers in the first half of 2007, taking 7% of the internal market, according to company director Marina Bukalova. For 2008, Sky-Express’ target is 3.5 million passenger flights.

The company’s principal shareholders are the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the management of Krasno-yarskiye Avialiny.

Ethnic Village 

Kaluga province, southwest from Moscow, has pledged to build an ethnic village, with pavilions representing traditions and lifestyles from 80 countries, Interfax reported. Russia will have 12 of the pavilions. 

Part of the project has already come to fruition, in the form of 22 yurts – nomadic homes, shipped from Tibet, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia and the Tyva republic in Russia. There is also a 11-meter-long khan-yurt, the biggest in Russia, which can house 135 people. 

For now the village offers lodging in yurts, as well as a selection of saunas and spas. When completed, each of the 80 pavilions will boast a cozy mini-hotel, a restaurant offering delicacies from the part of the world represented, and a library with information on the country.

Kaluga authorities expect construction to take about ten years.

Overnight in Piter

Last December, St. Petersburg became the first Russian city to launch a tourism promotion campaign in Europe. The €1,000,000 campaign ran under the slogan, “No bears, just beauties.” Authorities hope the program will help double the number of incoming tourists by 2010, to 5.3 million.

To accommodate these tourists, the city needs more hotels. Two Holiday Inns will open on the city’s major prospects – Moskovsky and Ligovsky – by 2009, Vedomosti reported. The two hotels will add about 600 rooms in the underserved three-star category – about 8,000 rooms short of anticipated need. 

Today a double room in a three-star St. Petersburg hotel costs about R3,300 per night; the same room in a four-star costs about R7,100.

Meanwhile, there has been a spike in the number of luxury hotels, some of which are converted palaces, including the 18th-century Sheremetev Palace (sheremetevpalace.com) and the Eliseev Palace Hotel (eliseevpalacehotel.com). 

Adventure Tourism?

The premier of Russia’s rebel republic of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, wants to develop tourism to that war-torn region, the BBC Russian Service reported.

Kadyrov announced plans for a hotel in Grozny, as well as camping sites in the mountains and near the republic’s major cities. He said he also wants to reconstruct the former Soviet rowing base in Vedeno district, a separatist hot spot. 

“I’m sure the mountains of the Chechen republic are no less attractive than other regions, either in Russia or Europe,” Kadyrov said. He added that, if new tourism facilities were constructed, tourism could bring sizable revenues to the republic.

Though there has been some improvement in the situation in Chechnya in recent years, which many credit to Kadyrov, the republic’s de-facto ruler, explosions and abductions by all sides in the conflict – ncluding forces controlled by Kadyrov – re still regularly reported in the breakaway republic. Since 2000, about 6,000 civilians have gone missing in Chechnya, according to Oleg Orlov, chairman of the Moscow-based rights center Memorial. 

Russian travel companies are skeptical that Chechnya’s sales pitch will fly.

Requiem to Anna

Forty years after Anna Akhmatova’s death, a new monument to the renowned poet was unveiled in December almost exactly where she requested it in the second epilogue to her famous poem, Requiem: in front of St. Petersburg’s Kresty prison. The monument stands across the Neva river from the prison, on Robespierre embankment, with Anna looking forlornly toward the prison (above). 

After her son, Lev Gumilev, was arrested in 1938, Akhmatova spent countless days in line out front of the prison. 

The three-meter bronze monument is the work of sculptor Galina Dodonova and was paid for by donations. St. Petersburg authorities plan to create a public park around the monument. A week after the outdoor monument was unveiled, the plaster-cast model of the monument was installed inside the prison, in the corridor leading to the church.

....And if someday in this country

They decide to erect a monument to me,

I agree to this honor

But only on the condition that it stand

Not by the sea, where I was born:

I have broken all ties with the sea,

Not in the tsar’s garden, near my cherished stump,

Where the inconsolable shade seeks me out,

But here, where I stood for 300 hours

And where they never unbarred the door for me....