Russia Pictures

Encounters Travel is a small-group tour operator running a fun, active, great value Russia Tour: the 9 day Iconic Russia [including St. Petersburg, Moscow and the lovely Golden Ring cities]

Red Square in Moscow, starring St Basil's Cathedral on the left, Russia. Moscow Pictures.

Not exactly a pretty capital city but one of great contrasts and constant change, Moscow contains a collection of stunning, iconic buildings at its heart - a record of Russia's amazing, turbulent history from medieval times through Tsarist excess to communist simplicity and back to excess again.
Moscow's cultural treasures are spectacular, diverse and unique, while the confusing, capitalist chaos and new neon life gives Moscow a potent and exciting dynamic. The metro/subway is sensational, especially if you've had the displeasure of London's dingy system.

Russia Travel Guide | Moscow Travel Guide | St Petersburg Travel Guide | Russia Map | Russia Tours

Not an easy travel option, Russian tourism is hampered by bureaucracy, erratic hotel quality, petty crime and bad press. Nevertheless, these liabilities can be overcome and if you take the trouble this is a fascinating country with a mega-history and massive land offering monster contrasts - glittering excess and neglected poverty, witless, self-important officials and lively, hospitable locals, magnificent gilded churches and concrete apartment blocks, vast mountains and endless plains, Tsar and Stalin, cold war and hot girls, boiling baths and freezing vodka...

Smolny Cathedral. St Petersburg Pictures.

This 'Venice of the North' is a splendid metropolis of grand, baroque buildings laced around with canals and a dynamite joie de vivre.
Colourful, attractive, very walkable and deeply cultured, St Petersburg contains perhaps the world's most spectacular museum - the amazing Hermitage - among many other offerings.
Summer days are very, very long - in fact night hardly falls at all around midsummer - so there's plenty of light-time to waft around the streets in a haze of vodka-fuelled goodwill with your new Russian chums...and chums there will be, for St Petersburg people are very, very sociable.
The city is also artistic, sophisticated and not ridiculously expensive like Moscow.

A house somewhere in Siberia. Siberia Pictures.

Russia's size is intimidating, but the average traveler could start with St Petersburg, the most spectacular traditional option, and follow that with Moscow, doing short trips out of town to experience a very different, ex-urban Russia.

The Trans-Siberian train journey is another popular travel target in Russia, but it should be noted that it's a far better trip if you actually want to get somewhere specific - such as China or Japan - rather than just ride the rails for six days and then get a plane home.

This gallery of Russia pictures presents some of the sights of the two main urban centres, St Petersburg and Moscow, and a few images of what is visible if you catch the Trans-Siberian choo-choo.

Russia Travel Guide | Moscow Travel Guide | St Petersburg Travel Guide | Russia Map | Russia Tours